Sunday, January 29, 2012

Pangea Treasure Coast Adventure Race

This is really a tale of three teams; Good'Nuff, Primal Instinct, and Florida Xtreme 2. I like to recap the times for each of the legs when I analyze the course. This time I had my Forerunner in my pack tracking the route - which is really cool and then I produced this animation of the route our team took. If you want to relive some of the course through our eyes - or see how we approached the course, this shows our exact course.


Initial Trek
14:00 Good'Nuff
16:00 Florida Xtreme 2
16:00 Primal Instinct

Paddle
1:20 Good'Nuff
1:23 Florida Xtreme 2
1:23 Primal Instinct
the next fastest time here was 1:31

On the next 2 legs, we biked first and then trekked. Primal and Good'Nuff trekked first and then biked.

Bike
(fastest was 1:58 Club Scrub) 
2:05 Primal Instinct
2:07 Florida Xtreme 2
2:16 Good'Nuff

Run
(these were the 3 fastest times)
0:58 Good'Nuff
1:04 Primal Instinct
1:04 Florida Xtreme 2 (I was really hurting at this point, Wanda even towed me for a while and Erik carried my pack the last half of the run)

As you can see the times for each of the legs were very close. Since the top three places were decided by a spread of less than 2 minutes - any mistake or slowing down was enough to bump you way back.

Here is a little bonus - for those who have not paddle on the Loxahatchee River, here is us leaving CP12 and heading back to the main channel.


I really like races like this that are close. The friendly competition among the teams makes these races a lot of fun. The weather, especially at the finish with all the teams eating and sitting around made for a fantastic atmosphere.

Misty and Sara (Good'Nuff) will be moving into triathlon season again so we probably won't see them at the next few races, and we'll miss them. It was great to See Kyle Tallent joining forces with Primal Instinct, he is a great veteran of the early races. I also see a lot of teams are moving up from Sport to Elite in the upcoming races - that is also a great thing.

Another wonderful race for Pangea - I'll see everyone out at BOAR even though I will likely not be recovered enough from Patagonia http://www.patagonianexpeditionrace.com/ to actually race (it usually take 3-4 weeks to recover from an expedition race).

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Resolution 2012 - Lake Louisa State Park

http://pangeaadventureracing.com/event-details/events/2012-resolution

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 

Sunday, January 08, 2012

Orienteering at Wekiva 1-7-2012

The orienteering at Wekiva turned out to be a beautiful day. The blue course got cut a bit short as the park service had a controlled burn going on the day before the event. Still the blue course was challenging - we just ended up with a mile long run on a sandy road up to one area (for 2 controls) and then a run back. Here is a map of my route (from my Garmin Forerunner);




Even a little bit of video of the course - not much but a few clips.