Eaglin Adventure Racing: Resolution Adventure Race 2013

It's time for a new adventure racing season and we love to start the races off with the resolution. First it is an 8 hour race which is a good distance to start the season, long enough to really test the teams and without the insanity of speed that you have it shorter distances. Lake Louisa is a great venue - and finally Manny Otero produces a great design that combines the best mixture of challenging terrain and navigation.

We planned to have to 3 person teams racing together; Florida Xtreme/Honey Stinger (Ron Eaglin, Jim Gorton, and Wanda Timmons) and Florida Xtreme/Darn Tough (Junos Read, Melissa Watson, and Chris Xiste). This is itself provides a logistics challenge as you have to keep 6 people healthy and on the same pace. On the other side having 2 sets of maps and eyes on what you are doing. Melissa and I have worked as a team at multiple national championships and it was great to be able to race with her again. The race started with 2 short prologs - first a 3 checkpoint run.

Run 1

We moved through this run very quicky. The real challenge was getting to CP1 which required a swamp crossing. The route from the map would be to find Waypoint 1 and take a bearing from the Waypoint. This might have been a good route - though I do not know, we opted to go south through the light green area on the map. Unfortunately this was still extremely thick and as we approached CP1 from the south I could see Good'Nuff and air force leaving the control with already a 3-4 minute lead. The rest of this run was uneventful and we cam in at 35 minutes which was a full 8 minute behind Endeavor who flew through this at 27 minutes.

Bike 1

We hopped onto the bikes and were off to get complete CP4 - CP7. We had passed CP4 on the run and had no trouble nailing it quickly. The only one that was any trouble was CP7 simply because I wanted to attack from the west instead of the obvious attack from the south - though we correct quickly and did not lose much time.Florida Xtreme/USAF was the fastest on this section at 34 minutes (we were 42 minutes).

Paddle

The paddle was what defined the race for most of the teams. We arrived at the paddle TA and got the instructions and the bearing to the first control. Once we had the control number at that point it allowed us to look up a bearing and distance to the next control. We started bad - At the first control (which was correct) we headed to the wrong CP which in turn took us across the lake to CP53 which told us to go to the finish. We knew this was unlikely - but paddled back across the lake to the main TA where we were told that all the CP's would have to be done before we finished. We also noticed that there was a CP very close to the main dock. Manny had suggested that we plot the controls using the bearing and distance - so I made a quick scale and using my compass plotted the 2 points I knew the bearings and distance for.

Using the bearing and more important the distance I determined that the CP near the dock was the correct CP2 and we headed to it and got the bearing and distance to CP3. This was a challenging one - I plotted it and we did head directly to it, however I could see a second CP on the same bearing a bit further on. The first was CP61, the second was 87. We were pretty sure 61 was correct, but my scale marker had the CP about halfway between the intersection of the line and the shoreline for each control. We paddled to the other CP and read the bearing and distance and determined that it would take us to 70 that we had visited and knew would lead us to the final CP, we paddled back to 61, took the bearing - I mapped it and it took us to 34. From that point all the controls and bearings made sense and I was able to plot them all to ensure we were doing this correctly. One challenge is trying to plot a bearing AND a distance (yes I measured distance too) on a bouncing boat. Once we finished we had Manny check our cards and we knew we had done the paddle correctly. We also learned that only one other team had done it correctly - but we did not know what team that was (we thought it was FLX/USAF). We exited the water shortly after CP Bound.

In the end we spent 1:58 on the paddle. Good'Nuff - 1:25, CP Bound 1:50, FLX/USAF 1:40, Endeavor 2:15. Here is my marked map from the paddle.

Trek 2

We headed south on the road for this trek. Basically it was long. The navigation was easy and the terrain was both bad and good. Bad stretches of Caesar Weed, tall grass, and deep sand were mixed with sections of packed trail and open woods. We were behind CP Bound for the majority of this and were able to stay close to them up to CP24. Around CP24 (heading to CP26) Jim pulled a muscle and we were slowed to a walk and also survival mode. The plan was to get Jim to the bikes where we would be able to at least tow him through the bike course. If you look at the times for all the teams for this trek you will find that except for FLX/USAF (1:49) we were inside of 10 minutes of each other - with Good'Nuff (1:59) and FLX/USAF (1:49) being fast and the rest being a bit slower. We were 2:09 which I considered pretty good considering we had to walk the last 2 miles.

Bike 2

Back at the TA as we were transitioning we also learned that CP Bound was the team that had done the paddle correctly and we were in 2nd. They were roughly 10 minutes ahead of us out of the TA. At the same time we had one racer on a tow (Chris would be towing Jim) and Wanda was feeling a bit weak on the bike. I chose to do a northern loop CP32, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, and 37 and then a southern loop CP27, 28, 29, 30. One reason there was better terrain in the northern section and more controls. I knew that we would likely have to skip some controls and the controls to the south were much easier to bail, especially CP28 which was a long sandy out and back. This strategy proved very effective - CP Bound headed south and used up a lot of time on those 4 controls.

After leaving CP27 and pushing bikes down the long sandy road south - skipping CP28 was an easy decision. Most of the ride from the intersection south of the small lake to CP29 was grassy and relatively easy riding. Had we had 5 more minutes we could have gotten CP30, but I had to skip it on the side of caution. Chris was towing Jim, Melissa was towing Wanda and Junos and I were navigation and punching.

In the end we got all but those 2 controls and 1st and 2nd place - though we would not know this until they got done scoring. Junos and I felt great through the entire race which is important as we had been training really hard for the Sea to Sea. Melissa and I fell right back into the rhythm we had as team-mates from all those years ago and decided we would race some 30 hour races (our favorite distance) together this year.

Manny had set a truly challenging course and we had come out and thrown ourselves against it hard - great day, great race! Also congratulations to CP Bound which earned a spot on the podium and likely would have been on top if they had chosen the northern loop on the bike leg.