Pangea BOAR Adventure Race

About a week after the Sea to Sea Dave Brault called me and asked if i wanted to do the BOAR, since I had a pretty much free Saturday - I was definitely game. This race seems to always be on a weekend that is cold and extremely windy and this year was no exception.

 Trek 1


The race instructions were kind of confusing at first, but we figured them out and decided that we would trek first and then head to the paddle. The one control that gave most people trouble was CP - it was a bit off the trail with a very subtle attack point. We actually attacked from the bend in the road just west of the Orange blaze trail. Once in the woods - we used the clue that it was on a wetland to help us narrow in on the control. The map showed the wetland as being relatively open with a different vegetation type- we were a bit north on our attack - but were able to spot the actual wetland and zoom right in on it. Here is our track for CP4.

Important to be able to spot areas of different vegetation and understand what vegetation types look like in the woods.

We got back to the foot TA with one team - and I think only Nature Calls was before us. We biked to the boats and were in them very quickly taking a counter clockwise route to get the very challenging paddle controls.

we made very quick work of the first few paddle controls and you can see in our track above where we used 2 strategic portages to shorten the actual paddle. Portage 1 was quite easy with shallow mud, portage 2 was a bit more challenging, here is a little video of Portage 2 it tells it all.

We were doing well, and my strategy for CP17 and CP18 were to try to do most of the travel for them on foot. This did not work out so well. We were forced to go far east of CP18 by the terrain, though we were able to run most of this as it was wide open to the east. CP17 was a disaster. I failed to take a good bearing from where we put the boat (directly across from where we attacked CP18) and we spent over 20 minutes looking on the wrong peninsula. I finally called to bail - and that we would paddle to CP17 - wich took us all of about 6 minutes, a much faster option, but we had already wasted the 20 minutes in our fruitless foot effort. Still it could have been worse and it is always a good idea to know when to bail on a plan and move to the alternative plan (in this case paddling to the CP).

The rest of the paddle was uneventful at least in the navigation. Of course the intense headwind made getting back to the TA a struggle. In one section we faced a strong headwind and thick sea lettuce. We resorted to poling the boat through this section which was preferable to the other option of portaging through the thick grass on the side of the channel. If you do not know how to execute poling technique ask me, I will help you out. It is useful in these situations.

Bike 1 and Bike 2

A little bike ride and we were back at the TA. In the end the foot/boat took us 3:37 - which was just a little off of the best clearing time by Nature Calls of 3:22. Of course I would love to have the 20 minutes we wasted on CP17 back - but that is adventure racing and Rule #4 of AR is "Anything Can Happen". I have 5 rules of AR that help me - they are spread out through these blogs. Rule #1 "Race Your Race", Rule #2 "If you don't have it. you don't need it", Rule #3 "Know when to bail", Rule #5 "Race as a team"

We switched to bike shoes and did 2 back to back bike legs. I rode hard and by the end of the second ride I was cramping in pretty much every major leg muscle. I had to use stretching and full extension to keep the cramps from slowing me down - and I think we did pretty well. We did bike 1 in 56:00 and bike 2 in 41:00, second fastest time in bike 1 behind Nature Calls (43:00), and tied for fastest time in bike 2 with Nature Calls. Pretty impressive time for NC on Bike 1, especially through the cow pastures.

Final Trek

We new we had 45 minutes to complete the final trek and I also knew that we could do it, if our navigation was good. Unfortunately it was not, on the second control I made a stupid mistake and took us in too early. I realized the mistake and took us back to the trail to re-attack - but not until we had lost 7 precious minutes.

We could still make it - but I made 2 more minor mistakes that cost another 3-4 minutes and then as we headed to CP22 (middle of cypress dome) I simply ran out of steam and had to move to a faast walk to prevent the cramps that were pretty much continuous now.

At CP23 we took a bearing 293 degrees, 60 meters. When I paced at 60 there was no control. Dave had the CP descriptions so I had him read the out loud. When I get very tired I like to have someone on the team (me if I have them) read the instructions out loud. 133 degrees at 60 meters. Oops - I am not even sure where the 293 degrees came from. Just another dumb mistake.

As we left CP23 - I made a strategic decision. I knew we could get CP21 and CP22 - but we would likely go over time. We could also skip those 2 and head back immediately with no penalty, but we would be skipping 2 CP's. This did pay off as we got 2 control points and finished 4 minutes over for one penalty point. More important to me is we did clear the course. This was at least a good decision and it did land us in 2nd place. Final congratulations to Nature Calls for running a great race, and it was also nice to see Canyoneros on the podium.

 Final note: Greg - I love the new shirts, great fabric.
This race was both challenging due to the course and the weather (mostly).
Nice to see some folks forgo obstacle courses (I like them too) for a real challenge!
Results at http://pangeaadventureracing.com/event-details/events/2013-boar-ar 

Here is my track - if you click it, it will also let you animate our course.