This was a cold race - especially for Florida. The temp at the start was around 40 degrees - but Florida 40 degrees is the coldest 40 degrees anywhere. We were racing as Florida Xtreme 2, an inside joke is the team name of Rainbows and Unicorns - that has to do with the fact that no matter how good or bad we race its all "rainbows and unicorns" out there. Jennifer Moos (our 4th) was sick so it would just be me, Erik, and Marghi racing. Jen picked a great time to be sick as if you weren't sick the cold and wet of this race would get you there.
We started with a short (3 mile) run. Of course after starting out just fine, after punching CP3 and crossing the road we headed off down the wring trail - realized our mistake and had to completely backtrack. It was just me getting cocky and not looking at the compass to realize we were headed the wrong direction. Of course a few teams followed us - though they also followed us backwards after we headed back. The run took us 39 minutes - pretty slow considering Good 'Nuff completed it in 25 minutes. Next we headed out on bikes to the boats with 2 CP's along the route. We decided to skip an obvious bushwack and bike around it, we thing that saved us time as we completed the bike in 27 minutes (compared to 33 and 36 for Good'Nuff and Florida Xtreme 1).
The Paddle
This paddle deserves it own section on the blog. We were a solid 15 minutes behind Good'Nuff and were the 3rd team into the water. Platypussinboots and Good'Nuff were ahead of us. They seemed to be taking a route along the shore of the lake. This made sense as we had 2-3 foot waves with whitecaps and icy cold water - with a 20 mph crosswind. The safe route was along the shore - but it was too shallow to paddle - so they were towing boats and running. Since Marghi and I are both experienced paddlers in open water (read as high surf) we decided to go ahead and paddle it. Paddling across surf is tricky - for one it is counter-intuitive to lean away from waves - which you must do to keep from swamping the boat. Also you have to time the direction you steer the boat (from the back) to allow it to move through the water without being pushed backwards. We did this and paddled straight across the heavy surf making up some serious time on the 2 teams. We had one control we did walk - since it was simply too shallow to paddle - but we fought the waves and wind on the other ones.
Gear alert: During the paddle I was using some Pogies - they were awesome. While most folks hands were freezing mine were actually sweating. http://www.amazon.com/Stohlquist-Glove-Pogie-Black-Silver/dp/B004H3DIE6/ref=sr_1_6?s=sporting-goods&ie=UTF8&qid=1326659864&sr=1-6
By the time we reached the CP on the far north side of the lake we had caught up to platypussinboots and were about 4 minutes behind Good'Nuff. The paddle back was simply surfing the boat and making sure we kept in going the correct direction. We hit the shore minutes behind Good'Nuff. Our feet were pretty frozen and we took a little extra time in the transition to get some food and both Marghi and Erik changed shoes and socks. I stuffed some socks in my pack to change later after my shoes dried out (I never used them).
The Trek
It looked like we would have pretty straightforward navigation on the trek and it was. We did cut across a lot of the angles at trail intersections since the terrain was mostly open. The most interesting point was CP16 - which led into a bearing course from CP16 to CP22. These were all pretty easy, until we decided to bushwhack over to CP23 straight from CP22. This was interesting - and we went across three wetlands, only 2 of which were mapped. This was a bit slower than the trail route - but was a lot of fun. I was feeling pretty sluggish on all the runs - but we kept a solid if slow running pace throughout the run back to the bikes.
Trek times
Platypussinboots 1:17
Good'Nuff at 1:25
Florida Xtreme 2 1:52
Rub Some Dirt on it 1:59
The Bike
When we got to the bikes there were still a few left there, and it was just before 1 PM - so we knew we had plenty of time to complete the course. We only had one bad route choice, taking the first road at the north side of Hammond Lake - this put us on a pretty nasty north-south road through a pretty area - but the softest sand we had seen the entire course and some pretty big hills. From CP32 we bushwhacked straight to the intersection to the southwest of the control - this was fast - but I ended up getting a flat and we had to stop to repair it. Usually this takes 5 minutes - but for some reason we were slow and spent nearly 10 minutes on this. The entire south area of the park had very interesting terrain, hilly and open. Also most of the riding was a lot more solid than the northern trails. We passed a few teams taking a breather at the trail intersection just northwest of CP33.
We were starting to fatigue a bit as we crossed the finish line. We had about an hour to spare, and had not seen too many elite teams on course.We were the third team across the finish line - Team Platypussinboots however had gotten a gear penalty which pushed them back to 4th place.
Bike Times
Good 'Nuff 1:41
Rub Some Dirt on it 2:02
Florida Xtreme 2 2:04
Playtpussinboots 2:07
I had my forerunner in my pack recording our route (and beeping strangely) - here is the route recorded.
To see the race from the viewpoint of the Canyoneeros see http://canyoneros-ar.blogspot.com/2012/01/pangea-resolution-ar-elite-8hr.html
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