Starsky
and Hutch do Epic Shit! by Kevin Minton
Commentary by Captain Ahab
Commentary by Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab and myself
aren’t known to half ass much, especially when it comes to drinking and writing
blogs. So, sit back and enjoy the drunken ramblings of an adventure
racer reflecting on the epic race that was 361 adventures LBL CHALLENGE 2018!
Friday,
I can’t remember the date, but it was before the race:
Captain Ahab and myself had
decided we would leave at around noon to head to Kentucky Lake and a resort
that I can’t remember. At about 2:00 pm we head out from STL
and are headed to the resort, discussing how the flooding of the lakes was
going to affect the race. As it stood Friday, the Coast Guard had
cancelled the paddle due to safety concerns over the water levels in the lake,
which was fine by me as I do not really like the long paddles, but Captain Ahab
was beside himself in anger. Before you judge Captain Ahab, keep in mind that I
think he cares very little for his own safety and well-being. I’ve heard
stories of this dude sailing a boat into a tornado…… typing that makes me
wonder why I even want to race with this dude? Umm...my wife warned you when she first met you. Anyway, we were not in a
big hurry to get there as the pre-race meeting was not until Saturday
morning and we would receive maps at that time. I would be lying if I
told you I wasn’t worried about this as I was going to navigate, but I
played it cool for Captain Ahab. After a pre-race, too much margarita dinner with
Team BOR's Amy Crews and Dave Beattie and a team name that I cannot remember
that had our friends Super Kate and Regular Mickey we headed back to the resort
to prep gear and get some sleep.
 |
| Tanks are awesome! |
Race Day, ungodly hour:
Woke up to alarms blaring before the sun was
up. Lame. COLD Captain Ahab and I loaded up the truck and proceeded to drive
off to the race HQ located by the nature center off Hematite Lake. At
this point we got the quick welcome speech from 361 and were given maps, UTM
coordinates and clue sheets with instructions to be ready by 10:30am for the
start. Captain Ahab and I setup on a piece of sidewalk in the sun to stay warm
and begin plotting all 31 points (including bike drops) on our two maps.
At this point it became clear to us what we were going to be up against.
The first leg was 10 CPs around Hematite Lake on foot and then back to
the Start/Finish/TA1. Once there we had decisions to make. There
are four bike drops scattered around the area, and at each bike drop was a foot
orienteering section. BD1 was south of TA1 with 4 points around
it, BD 3 was south east with two points, BD
4 east with 3 points and BD 2 was north with the largest section with
seven points. Captain Ahab and I figured we would be better served to hit BD2
first with its large number of CPs and hopefully finish by dark, then bike
to BD4, BD3, BD1, then back to the finish. As these bike drops had less
CPs much closer to the bike drop we figured we could locate them easier in the
dark.
Race Day, 10:30
am: CP 1 - 10
GO! As all the teams
tore off down the hill to the lake, I immediately regretted volunteering to
navigate this race. I realized I had up to 18 hours of serious mental
exhaustion in my future
and the responsibility really started closing in about
how difficult this nav was going to be. This really hit home when Captain Ahab
and I were the first team to branch off the pack because we had decided to do
the first section in reverse. My heart was instantly in my chest as I
realized that we were alone in this decision. Did we miscalculate?
Have I already taken a wrong turn? Will Captain Ahab murder me in the
woods and assume my identity after I get him lost? I quickly put most of
those thoughts to bed and started focusing on the maps. We were quickly
caught by our Friends Larry and Jay and that eased some of my fears heading to
CP10. I slightly bobbled the nav here by jumping into the wrong
re-entrant, but a quick recovery got us right were we needed to be, boosting my
confidence. The next few CPs we leap frogged with Larry and Jay by taking
slightly different routes. I can’t remember much else from this section
other than getting a few points right and a few others wrong. I think we only backtracked on CP8. I think this was the same CP other teams were having issues with. I do
remember going from CP6 to CP5 I dropped my left foot in a hole while
going downhill and immediately felt a sharp pain in that knee. As my
weight shifted forward and my leg didn’t move, and the knee started to hyper
extend. Immediately I jumped in the air to take the pressure off my knee,
but then fell on the landing and rolled slightly down a hill. Begin
knee swelling that would continue to hurt for around a
week. I thought you were seriously hurt for a few seconds. At this point we started running into all the racers that had
done the section in numerical order and got to see how the field was looking.
Captain Ahab and I figured we were not doing too bad and put ourselves roughly
mid pack based on where we encountered everyone. This was great for our
morale as we had no idea where we were relative to the rest of the pack.
Fairly smooth sailing from here as Captain Ahab and I were able to knock out all
the remaining CPs on this leg without too much trouble. As I later told
Captain Ahab, I was very impressed with how accurate the vegetation was on the maps
and that really helped with some of our navigation on this leg. We reach
TA1 and do our gear check, then hop on bikes to ride to BD2.
BD2: CP 11 – 17
Super Kate had
mentioned over dinner the previous night how bad all the roads were up here, so
Captain Ahab and I had told ourselves to budget extra time on all the bike legs for
hike-a-bike and impassable road section. I was paying close attention to
our time on this section because I was going to use it as a baseline for
how long the rest of our rides should take us. There is so
much crap a navigator must keep track of in their
head like estimated times and bailout routes while keeping involved
enough in the surroundings to know when the next turn is going to be.
Doing this for 18 hours was going to be brutal. Back on the bike ride
things were going smoothly for us, a few creek crossings here and there until
we hit a very flooded creek. There was no staying dry here, so we got
wet. There is a video of my caring the bike across this creek, and to say
to was cold is a huge understatement. Balls In Racing!
I think the air temperature was only just over
50 and the water felt even colder. Thankfully the instant numbing that
came with that helped me forget about my swelling knee from earlier and we
carried on uneventfully to the BD. Roads on this section were way better
than described…… I hoped the rest of the race would continue like this.
Once we got to the bike drop. Captain Ahab and I decided our best bet was
to take this section 15-17-14-13-11-12-16. Looking back, it would have
made more sense to do 15-17-14-13-12-11-16, but I will get to that.
We left the bike drop on foot after
finding an inspirational message and candy (mmm Taffy, but my bad tooth hurt so freaking bad!)left by the race directors (thank
you!) and trekked up the road to 15. It was an easy find down a
re-entrant and then we made our way to 17. On the way I got us slightly
confused on what re-entrant we were in, but we did end up finding Kate and
Mickey in the same re-entrant, and together decided we had messed up, finding
the CP in a re-entrant to the east.
I think this was the CP we looked for the longest. We parted ways and both
teams took differing routes to CP14. Kate and Mickey up into the woods
and Captain Ahab and myself taking the trail to the road. About a half mile down
the trail, Kate and Mickey pop out and turn towards us. Mickey talks a
little trash but both teams continue in opposite directions. This really
got in my head. Was I going the right way? I must have done
a map and compass check 20 times in the next 2 minutes until Captain Ahab
told me to put it away and trust my gut. I knew you were correct. So, we continued until
we came to the road. I was right! Mini victory dance on the road, and it
was glorious. Bagged 14 and continued to 13. We came down a nice
spur that took us right up to a powerline cut. I remarked again, how good
the vegetation on the map was because it was clear for what seemed like miles in
either direction on that cut, so I made a mental note of that for
later. We got in some nasty thorns on the way into 13 but found
it easily. Then came the what can only be described as the kilometer
from hell. Understatement. I decided to keep us low and go straight west back to the
powerline cut. This would involve us pushing through some thorns
but would get us to that nice powerline cut and we would use that to get
us to the road. In my head it was easy, clean and bloodless. The
reality of this though, was dirty, explicative filled and had us swimming for
about 300 yards. Once we fought our way to the powerline, we
encountered walls of some of the worst thorns I have ever encountered.
The bushes were as tall as I am and so thick we found ourselves crawling
on the ground following small game trails trying to get through. After
what seemed like an eternity, I could see there was a gap in the thorns ahead
perpendicular to the direction we were traveling. Finally, we would
intersect the road and be out of this hell hole. Except it wasn’t a road,
it was a flooded creek that could almost be called a river at this point.
The opposite bank was nothing but thorns,
behind us was nothing but
thorns and everywhere that wasn’t water was nothing but thorns.
So as the road was about 300 yards up the creek we decided to swim it.
We jumped in the freezing cold water, and immediately regretted the
decision when we discovered it was over our heads for most of the way. I wasn't going back the way we came, the swim was so much better, but if there was room to prepare, which there wasn't, we could have better prepared ourselves by dry bagging our gear and clothes and removing our shoes. It also got deep so fast that I still had my camera in my hand, which made swimming more fun. Too bad there is no video of our breathing and cussing as that's all I could hear. It sucked watching Mickey and Kate walk by on the road as I swam. When we finally reached the road, my extremities were so cold that
pulling myself up on the road was a challenge, but I was so happy to see that
fucking road… At this point we knew where we were and where we had to get to, so
we easily navigated to CP11 laughing at our stupid selves for the swim we had
to do. After finding 11 Captain Ahab had a grim realization: we were wet
and cold, and we didn’t have much sun left. It was mid 50s during the day
on the race, but projected lows were in the low 30’s. This was not good.
Everything we were wearing was wet and everything we had in our packs we
didn’t put in dry bags. We ended up putting on all our wet gear
on the way to CP12 and decided all we could do was run from here on out to try
and dry our clothes out before it got really cold. We pass Mickey and
Kate again, make quick mention that we may die of hypothermia
and continue. It was good we stopped to wring out our clothes. We take a round about way to CP16, so that we can run
on roads for as long as possible and avoid crossing anymore creeks. We
run across Dave and Amy who had been having mechanical problems on the way to
BD2 and had just recently arrived, making an already long race even
longer. Captain Ahab and I grab CP16 and head back to BD2 and get
there sometime between 6 and 6:30. We barely did it, but we
completed this section before sundown. Both of us though had some major
issues to deal with. I couldn’t use my fingers well enough to plug
my main bike light in or to refold my maps. I didn’t want to tell Captain Ahab
how bad off I was, so I went to Mickey who was just about to leave the bike
drop and asked him to refold my map. I think he knew how bad off
I was, and he wasn’t his typical asshole self and just did it.
I knew if we got on the bikes I would heat up and I had stashed spare,
dry gloves for the ride. Captain Ahab and I didn’t talk much the first part of
the ride, both probably fighting internal demons and wondering if the actual
risk of hypothermia was as real as we thought, but eventually we warmed up. Wet gloves sucked. This was thankfully on of the longer bike legs, with some decent hills
and the only single track of the race. We arrived at BD4.
BD4: CP 18-20
Our route
18-20-19. My first real night nav section! I wasn’t really that
excited about it at the time. I knew we had 9 more CPs to go and every
single one of them was going to be in the dark. I have never done a night
nav before, but I figured if we didn’t have to swim again I was going to call
it a victory. Captain Ahab and I changed over to trek shoes, shut down bike
lights and set off to CP 18. Oh, I forgot another inspirational message
and candy at the bike drop! Taffy Tooth Pain! Mickey and Kate were there as well and headed off
in an odd direction from here. 18 was down the road some ways
and off a small side road that did not appear on the map. The
road was headed the right direction, in the right spot I needed to jump down
the spur, so I followed it and it led us right to the CP. We trekked back
out and passed Mickey and Kate headed into 18. Captain Ahab and I were really
confused about their tactics here. We finally assumed that they had
corrected the earlier mistake and were making good time. NO; I kept saying there was no way they got the CPs! We had to go
about 1.5k past the bike drop to get to our attack point for CP20. Once
we got there we decided pace count and holding a bearing was the only way we
could do this one in the dark. So, I gave Captain Ahab a bearing and we
calculated a distance and away we went. While he let me know every time
we did 100 meters, I was making sure to compare the topo I could see and feel
with the map. 100 meters at the bottom, 200 on side of spur etc.
When we hit out distance, we didn’t see the CP. However, because we
had worked so well together I knew we were on a hilltop and were within 50 ft
of the CP. Boom, easy score. We then got a bearing and distance and
walked within 50 ft of CP19 as well. Captain Ahabs pace counting and bearing
holding really saved us on these two CPs. We then shot a bearing due
south and marched to the road and then back to BD4. When we got back
there was a surprising lack of bikes. Most notably the bikes of Kate and
Mickey. I'll take this time to fill you in on why I mention them so much.
I wanted to beat Mickey. I wanted to beat him badly. Me too! While
Mickey is my teammate he tends to talk a lot of trash and the only way to silence
him, if only briefly, is to out perform him. It is also just friendly
competition, but in a race situation its serious stuff! We had been leap
frogging all day and I could not figure out how they got so far ahead of us in
this section. Did he find a secret line? Did they unlock
teleportation? HOW ARE THEY DOING THIS TO ME!?! Captain Ahab and I loaded
up on our bikes and headed to BD3 bewildered. This should have
been a nice easy single-track ride with no places to make errors for a good
long time. So, I was getting excited to drop the map and enjoy some
single-track bliss. I was worried though, based on how flooded the
lakes were that some places would be flooded nightmares, but figured we'd
deal with that if/when we got there. When we got to where the trail
dropped off from the road we encountered a trail closed sign. Crap.
Thankfully there wasn’t much back tracking to get to were we needed to be to
follow the road the very long way around to BD3. This road had us riding
in some low areas for most of the ride and very rutted and muddy road filled
with low water and creek crossings as well as giant man eater holes. I
knew the only confusing part of this nav was going to be in the last 1K where
there were some very tough intersections all lined up one after another.
I got us a little turned around in here, half due to inexperience and
half to needing to eat something. Thankfully every time the map started
to look foreign to me Captain Ahab was able to help me get it sorted back out.
BD3: CP21 and 22
Just two CPs, we can
bang this thing out in like an hour! Reality is that didn’t happen quite
as fast as we had liked. We decided to take these in the easy routes and
do CP22 first then come back and get CP21. We walked right up on
CP22, raising spirits. As we came back through the bike drop we made our
turn for CP21. This one threw not only us, but another two-man co-ed
we were battling back and forth with for a loop. It took us at
least 3 tries on this one before we finally found it. The area was
very congested with re-entrants and we just kept getting in the wrong ones.
We had to be within 100ft of that CP for most of the time, but
the placement of the CP was such that you couldn’t see it unless you approached
from the east, and we kept approaching from the west until we finally stumbled
on it. Also, the clue had us perplexed. As we headed out to the BD. From here we had a decently long
ride to BD1. It was 12:00am and we had until 4:30am to be back at the
finish, or risk losing CPs. While Captain Ahab got ready I started doing some
math and figured if we could make it to the last BD by 1:00 am we would have
time to try for 3 of the 4 CPs before we needed to decide on our bailout route.
We geared up and rode towards BD1, for what seemed like an eternity.
We eventually arrived at BD1 as frost was starting to settle in and I was
so glad that we had warmed up.
BD1: CP 23-27
We got to this BD at around 12:30am, 15 minutes
ahead of plan. I will come to regret that push later though. We
change into trek gear while I put a plan together for us that is 24-23-27-25?
25 was my possible point to drop. Somewhere along this we had seen Mickey and Kate and they informed us that they had dropped two points in BD4,
so I knew that we didn’t need 25, but I really wanted to clear the course if
time allowed. We ventured out on foot for the trek to CP24. Located
it right where it should be but there was something different about this one.
It was HUGE.
After a good laugh, we trekked on to CP23. Had to battle a couple thorns on this one but was an easy find and we went back to the road. My plan to get CP 25 had us going right past the bikes to follow the pipeline cut down into a creek and then the creek for about a half k to the CP. We found this one after a little looking around. Now, it was 2:15am. We had just gotten enough CPs to secure victory over Mickey and Captain Ahab was tired. My cracked tooth was really killing me. I was trying to eat and drink, but it was so painful. I also was worried about running out of water so I was conserving some for the last push. Looking back I wish I would have drank it all no matter the pain. The cold had really started to settle in and I honestly had no idea what the roads were like on the way back. Kate’s description of the roads last year had me worried about making it back and I knew I didn’t want to push any harder than we needed as that had drained Captain Ahab when I did that on the way to BD1. So, we made the decision to leave CP25 out there and head back to the bikes. With the information we had at the time, I think we made the right call. I was doing great on the treks, but the bike was killing me. I also didn't want to re-visit my Fig experience of coming in super late and losing all our CPs. We loaded up on bikes, took some candy from the BD and hit the road to the finish. As we were riding I saw some tail lights ahead of us. Thinking these were Kate and Mickey I began ratcheting up the pace, kind of forgetting about Captain Ahab. As we caught the team that sadly wasn’t who I thought it was, I heard a small “can we slow down” from behind me. Oh Shit…. I killed Captain Ahab. He was flying! I thought we were road biking! Thankfully he dug deep inside himself and we could power through to the finish at 3:09am.
I would have liked to
have gone for that extra point looking back on it, but I don’t regret leaving
it out there. I wish we would have cleared too, but looking at the results it would have made no difference to our standings. Kevin's nav was solid! Captain Ahab and I raced a good race, nav was about 80% (a
learning experience for me) clean and we fought through almost getting
hypothermia with a positive attitude. All in all, it was a great
race put on by 361 Adventures and I am glad to have finally gotten to race the
LBL and race with my friend Captain Ahab again. Waited a long time to get that race in...well worth it! Also, so worth it getting that tooth pulled two days later.
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