Scout AR

Scout Adventure Race 2007

This year I decided to team up with Nick and take on two first time racers as a four person team at the last minute. We had pretty good training lead-up to the race with regular workouts a few times a week. In addition, I was able to meet up and train with Corey and Angela before the race to gauge compatability and temperment before spending 10 hours under hot racing conditions with them. They were A-OK in my book. As you may know, putting together a team is hard, getting along under pressure is a greater task.

I had been monitoring the weather 2 weeks prior to the race, but in July there was no getting around the heat and I knew we were going to have to deal with 90+ degree temperatures with no shade. Crap, this would have been my 3rd or 4th race in a row with 95+ degree temps. The saving grace was a 3:30 a.m. start time, but this also meant no sleep the night before. The Friday night before consisted of receiving maps and vague instructions at about 9pm. We decided to head to Wendy's to grab a bite to eat and go over Navigation because the boat couldn't be dropped til 10:30 p.m. By the time Corey and I dropped off the boat, I headed back home and was in bed by 12:30.a.m - gads, only two hour sleep I would attempt to get (I ended up tossing and turning for those two hours). The race was in a Rogaine format, meaning we would try to grab as many differently weighted checkpoints (CPs) as we could in under 10 hours. "Great" I think to myself "I only have to suffer for a max of 10 hours"(instead of 12 or 14).

3:30 a.m. race started of with a three or four mile run to grab 4 CP's also meant to spread the teams out. All the running Nick and I did in training paid off. We were back at TA by 4:30 off to get some more maps and instructions.

The next 10 checkpoints were another 13 miles of steep elevetion gain on foot which took four hours. I was certainly the weak link in this section, and was lagging back behind the other team while they prodded up to the check points. Our navigation was spot on and we got every checkpoint on foot, with the exception of 2.
About 3 of them we stumbled on by luck.

Back to the TA to grab our bikes and the temps hit 99 a this point. We proceeded to blackstar canyon (which nick and I were familiar with). About 3 miles into the ride, we realized we had forgotten the map case back at the TA. This cost us about 45 minutes. Nick and Corey went back for it and met us part way up the trail. We grabbed another three checkpoints where we were all struggling with the heat and decided to go to the kayaks to cool off and finish the race. The short cut route we tried to take didn't pay off and we ended up dead-end climbing to far east of the kayak drop point. We decided to go back to the TA, finish a rope section and try not get penalized for being late. We finished in about 9.5 hrs cramped, tired and hot, but we finished... Turns 22 place out of 44 teams. Right in the middle.

In hind-sight (which is always 20/20) a couple things we might have done differently.

After mandatory trek CP2, we should have probably gone to get the bikes and got the Mandatory 3 (at the cross) on bike by way of the paved road. When we reached the bottom of the Canyon, we werent that far from TA. That would have saved some energy and time on foot because of the distance covered to get to mandatory 3.

We may have gone to the kayaks via paved road. When Corey and I went to pick up the kayak, it was 5 miles each way (10 paved miles total - still along blacktop grind) from blackstar entrance. I also found out later that the kayak section only took 20-30 minutes to complete. In addition, Corey and I were trying to spot where we were when we took the shortcut over the fence, and we weren't even close to where we needed to be at the lake without some more up and down fire road.

Middle of the pack is not bad at all, given the first timers and the 99 deg temps.

Some race photos: