Father's Day AR - 2015

I had the pleasure of racing a 6 hour race with my daughter Anna Eaglin in the Father's Day race on June 21. It was a 6 hour race, meaning I was not too worried about prep and distance, but Anna had not raced with me in a while and I was not sure how she (or I) would handle the extreme heat.We got going on the elite course which would start with a 4 checkpoint orienteering run to TA1 - a remote TA where the boats were staged. We walked most of it as it was quite hot - but I did get this video of some running.

Here is a little video of the top teams hitting CP4 and heading to the TA

Once we got to the boats (second team in just seconds behind the first team) - we would have to portage the boats about a half mile from the Barr Street parking area to the river. Anna is pretty strong and we moved very fast through the portage into the water.

The paddle was a lot of fun and the nice thing is it was not a leg where we had to worry about overheating.We were the 3rd team off the river - just minutes behind the top 2 teams and a 4th team close on our tail. We decided to get CP12 on foot - I've also got a little video of that.

Once we got back we quickly prepared bikes and headed off and swam this across the river. We felt good going out, but shortly after the swim with our bikes - the bike leg started to take its toll. Both of us were beginning to hurt and we bailed after only 4 controls. At least the swim back across the river was nice and gave us a chance to cool off. I knew we had one final trek leg - and I also knew that we could navigate through it quickly.

Some of the terrain was tough - we methodically worked through the controls - Anna staying close and just trusting my navigation - with some pretty thick brush and terrain.

As we came towards the finish we ran into one of the teams we started out with at the first few legs. We pushed it in strong (as best we could) and finished 3rd overall, 1st coed - with only minutes separating the teams.

A great and HOT time was had by all, thanks for Dave Brault - his courses are always the right combination of challenging and FUN.