Dixie Conquest 2014

Here is the writeup of the Dixie Conquest that I raced with Jim Gorton and Courtney Spratt. The race was held in Bayard Conservation area near Green Cove Springs. The weather was perfect.

Prolog - We started with Jeff leininger putting us all in a little circle marked with tape and we had to start the race by finding 4 plastic Easter eggs hidden in the bushes. We were pretty fast in finding the eggs and were quickly on to the initial orienteering run. A large group of teams headed out to CP1, due to some really good initial mapping of the bearing and distance on CP4 - we had the lead leaving CP4, but lost it due to missing the trail leading to CP5 - though that only cost us about 30 seconds. We thought we had regained the lead as teams took a wrong turn just after CP6. We did not see them, but Endeavor and Team Jax put a 3 minute lead on us and we were the 3rd team into the TA. 

Paddle 1 - We were in great spirits as we left the TA on bikes and headed for the boats. The first few points were easy and fun and because of the out and back nature we could easily discern the 3 minute lead of both Jax and Endeavor. We also were able to tell where the teams behind us were. None of the lead teams hit 12 before jumping out of the boats to go after the 3 inland controls (13, 14, and 15). We pulled up due east of CP13 and headed west - unfortunately not finding it quickly - so I bailed and we grabbed CP14 and CP15 to the south on foot. Coming back to CP13 we found it easily the second time (not sure how we missed it the first time) - and headed back to the boats. The miss on CP13 cost us more time than I had though, probably 15 minutes total and we were about 15 minutes behind Endeavor and Jax as we got back to the main TA.

Orienteering - We headed out on bikes, our plan was to get CP16 on the way to the orienteering section and then get the remaining bike CP's on the way back. This allowed us to toss our bike shoes in our packs and use trek shoes for the first part of the bike, only switching shoes once after we finished the trek. CP16 was easy - but did require travel on some very wet and unrideable trails. At the Bayard TA - we headed out on foot. It took me a few minutes to realize the north on the map was not the typical straight up - but that did not cost us much time. I think we had the fastest time on this leg, and we really had no issues finding any of the controls, though some of them did require swimming and bushwhacking. If anyone is interested in our approach - let me know. The order of CP's for our team was CP27-28-29-31-32-34-35-33-30. Because CP30 was a bearing and distance I measured it out, found it took us to the edge of the marsh west of CP30 and we headed straight for it. We left CP30 via the road which gave me the chance to plot the bike course on our run back to the TA.

Bike - I had planned the bike course and even done preliminary measurements to find the CP's. We quickly found as we hit CP17 that the scale was not completely accurate. This cost us a few minutes on CP17 and about 10 minutes on CP18, though after CP18 I pretty much had the scale down. We got CP17-18-19 and headed to the east entrance to head to CP21. The trail to CP25 was completely flooded so we bailed to the railroad tracks and rode along the the tracks - bushwhacking back in near CP25. The trail was still under a LOT of water, but got better towards CP22. We continued on to CP22-23-24 and overshot 24 by quite a bit (or it was placed too far north). CP26 was another quick find. Courtney requested that we "hammer" the ride back so we let her set a 23-24 mph pace and simply hung on to the finish line (no real navigation required). We ended up edging out AR Militia, they had left Bayard TA before we passed it - but took a slightly shorter but harder bike route back to the main TA. Dash had led Team Jax to a solid performance to take first.



The results and more write-ups are at

http://www.pangeaadventureracing.com/event-details/events/2014-dixie-conquest-ar

Myakka Mud Slide - 2014

This one took me a while to get up, but here is a short description of the race. I raced with Jim Gorton and we had a great race. We raced as Tequila on Tuesday

Prolog Map

Prolog - We started with a Prolog Orienteering Course using the map above. We quickly got (in this order) 4, 2, 3, and 5 and completed it in 19 minutes who started out with control 6 which would definitely have been shorter. We did, however get trail for almost the entire prolog so it was  nice warmup run.

We then had about a mile run to the boats, we chose not to get any controls on the way as did the other teams in the lead as they made a lot more sense to get on the return trip.

Paddle Map

Paddle - We put a lot of effort into the paddle leg including a portage from CP14 back to the river that saved us a couple of minutes. We caught up with Endeavor and Endeavor, SWIM, and our team came out of the water within minutes of each other and started on the trek back to the start/finish. We did come out of the water at the Power TA. SWIM and our team tied for fastest paddle times at 1:23.

To/From Paddle

Trek to S/F - Some trail running and a solid bushwack to CP17 and from CP17 to CP18 but us into the TA within seconds of Endeavor. We both ran this in 35 minutes. SWIM took a longer route to CP18, coming in from the north that cost them about 7 minutes.

Bike Leg

Bike Leg- We went full hammer on the bike leg. Some bike troubles slowed Endeavor early and they took a slightly different route choice. We took the exact highlighted route on the map. (also here is a trace of the route) We finished this in 1:33, which the fastest time).

Orienteering - Coming in off the bike first gave us some comfort on attacking the last orienteering leg. I figured it would take us roughly an hour - but we attacked every control conservative taking a counter clockwise route starting with CP6. At first the map scale threw me - but I quickly recovered and we finished this in under an hour to complete the course in just under 5 hours.

Results and Pictures are at http://pangeaadventureracing.com/event-details/events/2014-mud-slide-ar

 

Pangea Sea 2 Sea 2014

I'll cut right to the chase on this blog posting - and all adventure racers know these situations.

The first legs of the race were tough, but we were still strong and had hit every CP as we trekked into the Alexander Springs TA. The highlights to this point were incredible; the paddle on Rainbow River, the short trek through the Rainbow River Park, The muddy and cold early trek into Silver Springs, the night single track in Santos, What the heck is a Vent (oh that!), all incredible highlights of the race. Everyone who raced know these, for those who did not here is a short synopsis;

Our times on each section are in hours:minutes
* Paddle (2:17)- Moved to Inglis Locks when the initial paddle had conditions that were too windy. Paddle from the locks to the US41 bridge and back.

* Trek (0:56) - Short trek to visit CP's in the park south of Inglis Locks

* Transition to bike (0:10)
* Bike (no time) - Straightforward road ride to KP hole on the Rainbow River
* Transition to paddle (0:09)
* Paddle (0:29 to Rainbow, 0:37 in Rainbow Springs, 1:09 to blue hole) - Beautiful Paddle up to Rainbow River with a short orienteering at Rainbow River State Park, with a huge waterfall! Then back in boats and south to Blue hole south of SR40.

* Transition to bike (0:08)
* Bike (0:20) - Short bike to Pruitt Trailhead
* Transition to trek (0:13)
* Trek (2:26) - Start of the real part of racing and starting to get dark, some details of CP's are below This was from Pruitt to Ross and had some excellent orienteering
* Transition to bike (0:21)
* Bike (9:11) - Ross Prarie trailhead is where we started the first long bike leg - the full single track of Santos, then all the way through Marshall Swamp to the Marshall Swamp trailhead. Very challenging navigation.
Transition to trek(0:38)
Trek (2:46) - From Marshall Swamp an in initially very wet trek through swamp, but ending up beautiful as we hit Silver River early on morning 2
Transition to paddle (0:14 )
Paddle (3:59) - Paddle down Silver River then south on Oklawaha River to Oklawaha prairie.
Transition to bike (0:49 - got new maps)
Bike (5:31) - Tough bike leg through Ocala National Forest finishing up at Farles just east of the Avon Park bombing range, some incredibly sandy trails!
Transition to trek (0:22)
Trek (3:38) - A trek from Farles, primarily along the Florida Trail to CR445 and Alexander Springs.

So here we were arriving into the Alexander Springs TA around 11 PM on night 2. We had some physical challenges up to this point. Junos was having some serious tendonitis in his Achilles tendon and was not able to keep any food down. Joe had some serious swelling in his left wrist that looked like he had broken something. It had been terribly cold the previous evening and it was really cold now. I got the tents that Greg had stashed away for racers and set up the big family tent. Once set up teams that were cold, tired, and sleep deprived started migrating to the tent. I hopped in and got a solid hour of sleep until my own shivering (I had a sleeping bag but no ground pad). I also had done  pretty bad job of setting the tent up delirious and at night.

Some side suggestions at this TA for Pangea - they did a great job, these would have simply made the race a little easier for some of the teams (mostly mid-pack)
(1) Allow teams to choose to do the paddle or trek first. - As cold as it was during the evening sections, getting out on the boats was inviting hypothermia or misery, the ability to trek when it was that cold would be nice
(2) Have a tent set up and ready to go for teams that need rest. - I had a bivvy in my gear bin so setting up for me to sleep was easy. The U-hauls were another sleep option, but their metal floors will have you hypothermic in minutes. Since there is not enough room in most gear bins a tent at the TA is just a nice thing. Luckily they did have one and I really did not mind setting it up, it was just hard to do cold and tired. I slept in it and then gave my sleeping back to another team when we went out on trek.

A really good thing was they had some warm pasta here and that helped us quite a bit.

We opted to completely skip the paddle, which had seemed to be allowing Junos tendonitis to flare up and we headed out on the orienteering. This started out great, we nailed the first 5 controls, but as we approached CP6 on the trek - Junos had to stop (completely). We set him down and allowed him to sleep for a couple of hours at the trail intersection near 6- meanwhile I gave Julie an orienteering lesson so she would understand what I was doing on each control. I think she got a new appreciation for the navigation challenges, especially with the high level of map uncertainty - we spend near 2 hours going over how to get CP6 which was not even 100 yards from where Junos was laying. At this stage it appeared the race was over for us, and it was doubtful we would be able to finish. I felt Junos would be able to bike even though Junos did not.

For any Florida teams that would like navigation lessons, especially in dealing with map uncertainty - let Greg or me know and I will be happy to set up a little training session.

After a couple of hours we were able to get Junos walking and we limped back to the TA (we were able to visit 7 of 20 controls) and started to work out a plan that would get us to the finish line (intact and as a team) - this was going to be pretty tough, Junos could barely walk, and was only able to use on leg for biking. That would be enough and Greg presented an option that would get us home. We skipped the bike to the final paddle and headed straight to the finish line (still 75K away). Along the route we decided that we would go ahead and head to the Highbridge TA - we ran across Mia's Misfits along this section at the Kangaroo at US17 and SR40 they were hurting, but would make it to the finish line.

We headed to High Bridge (a pretty ride) and were passed by Rev3 about 1/4 mile from the TA. We headed down the beach and were passed by Checkpoint Zero about 30 minutes later. 

Here are some orienteering highlights;

We took the limerock road from 484 and attacked this on foot. I used the trail bend dimple on the north blue trail to drop the bikes and attack, I used the trail bend on the southern blue trail to finalize my attack and took a bearing and went to it. Joe had followed another team to it when I spotted it, but he was already there.

This one was incredibly challenging. The southern trail bend and the northern trail bend were both subtle - meaning any measurement off them to create an attack would be challenging. The control was 75m off the trail and the forest had a lot of tall pines and was thick - thus making a dead-on attack crucial. This control took us a solid 30 extra minutes.

This control will be infamous - The plowshare. I first mistakenly took the spot where the trails crossed the road to be the underpass and used this as an attack. However the mapped trail here was NOT what the trail did, and we figured this out after wasting 45 minutes. At this point many teams were giving up on this one - eventually I found it by (1) going out to paved road, (2) using the contours along the road, (3) finding the "old" trail crossing at the road - which I knew was real as there were old signs along it, (4) shooting a bearing from this crossing. The team had been arguing here and I was extremely frustrated at this point - but we did find it.

None of the remaining controls gave us much trouble, we did have a short challenge at CP22 - though once we figured the line thickness of the trail lines obscured some of the detail - we found the vent and solved this.

I had no issues on any other CP's so if anyone wants my strategy on any of the other controls - just post a comment and I'll give my strategy.

Pangea sets another incredible and challenging course - and I truly enjoyed each section - thanks much!

There it is - the entire set of maps for the 2014 Pangea Sea to Sea.

Overview Courtesy of We Blame Pangea

We blame Pangea blog - http://canyoneros-ar.blogspot.com/2014/02/pangea-sea-to-sea-ar-72hr-expedition_3276.html

Gear Check

I was testing some new gear for this race and have some great recommendations - I have other things I do not recommend, but I love testing gear that works!;

1. Lights - I finally settled in the SecurtiyIng 3800 lumen Cree. Customers have complained about the lack of instructions in the packaging (none) so here it is - charge battery, plug into light, turn it on. This light is just the right bright and runs all night on the battery in #2 here

2. Batteries - I have now tried and tested about 8 battery sets - and here is the one you want sold on Amazon

6600 mAh Replacement Bike Light Battery

These kept my first 3800 lumen light going for 10 solid hours. It does not give you a lot of warning before it goes out, though the LED in the back of the light will turn from green to red about 15 minutes before it dies, though that does not do you much good if it is on your head.

Before a race run them through a few cycles to get a feel for their time with your lights.

3. Bike Map Holder - They finally got it right - just read the Amazon reviews I agree, this is by far the best map holder for navigating on a bike (from AR Navigation Supplies)

Also here is a picture of my pack, left water bottle held Perpetuem, the right one Gatorade, and the bladder held water - I stayed very hydrated which also kept me warm.

  Maps