Maine Summer Adventure Race, New Gloucester ME, 6/22/19

Our friends Kate and Cliff White, the nucleus of Strong Machine Adventure Racing, have grown this race from an 8 hour affair in 2016 to a full 24 hours of coastal Maine exploration. Last year's 24 hour version saw Rob and Mason turn in a decent but ultimately lackluster result, beset by heat, exhaustion and, at times, an insect horde. Looking to add a new element to the team this year, we convinced Pennsylvanian Glen Lewis to join forces with us. We knew Glen from many prior races in the northeast and were sure he'd make a great addition. As luck would have it, Nick was willing and available to join as well, as a late addition. Hopefully he'd be willing to sandbag it a little on bike legs so the rest of us could keep up.

We debated about how to format our 4-man squad. Should we race as two 2-man teams, stay together, and reap the benefits of 2 sets of maps and a navigational consensus? This has been a moderately controversial but generally accepted tactic in AR over recent years. As the race date approached, however, we learned that 2-man teams would paddle in 2 single kayaks while 4-man teams would paddle in 2 tandem kayaks.  Tandem kayaks are faster (with 2 human engines) and a longer boat would be more suited for the ocean paddling planned for us. So, after a few texts, we opted to race as one 4-man team.

The race was HQ'd at the Pineland Farms campus in New Gloucester, Maine. Plenty of close parking, room to gear up and work on the maps, and a pleasant store-cafe interior made this a comfortable base of operations. We learned that this year's course would take us from our current inland location through the trails and roads of Bradbury Mtn SP, North Yarmouth, Falmouth and Portland before heading back north and ending back up at Pineland Farms. Our approach to Portland, the midpoint of the race, would be via the Presumpscot River, followed by as much Casco Bay paddling as we dared take on.

The weather was sunny, breezy to windy, warm but not excessively hot, with medium humidity: no complaints here. As a result of our cool, rainy spring, the deer flies were not out yet and mosquito pressure was mild. The ticks were very bad but they are the least irritating of these 3 defenders of the northern woods.

Parking lot gear up, pre-race. "Whatchu lookin' at?"

The race began with foot navigation at Pineland Farms using legitimate orienteering maps. As a team of 4, we would have to complete 4 short O courses. We were allowed to split up, so we each grabbed a map and set off on our individual tasks at 8:05 AM.  My course was moderately difficult, but after 2 miles and ~40 minutes of bushwhacking and running, I was back at HQ and we could begin the big bike leg.

This leg would be predominantly off-road riding, including a lot of singletrack. We started off downhill on some pretty cool trails in West Pownal, which led to a long stretch on soggy powerline trails, picking up a few on-trail CPs along the way. Following this, we made our way through the Mt. Tryon area to the somewhat rideable backside of Bradbury Mountain State Park, eventually reaching the Bradbury Mtn summit vista. At multiple times during the day, but most obviously at Bradbury, we'd see the wind raise a big hazy cloud of pollen off the trees.

Singletrack CP scene. 

Glen's thrilled to join the team! Just look at that genuine smile.

Bradbury Mtn summit vista

Then it was off to the lower, eastern part of Bradbury for a bunch more singletrack riding, with Glen accurately guiding us through the trail network. We were often crossing paths and bantering with the Rootstock Racing team in this section.  Eventually we emerged back onto road in Pownal and then into a long trail network toward Falmouth. Along the way, we hit up a friendly homeowner for a water refill at the hose. I was impressed by the amount of (mostly) rideable trail in the area and the race organizers' nifty linking of it. In the NH seacoast, there is some trail riding but it's typically knotted in small islands of undeveloped land, whereas here, you could really cover distance in a point-to-point fashion. The downside of this section, due to the rainy spring, was the frequency of muddy/boggy sections which kept interrupting the flow of the trails. There is also the fact that, despite being fun, technical singletrack just takes a lot more of a toll on you physically than, say, riding dirt roads. After many more miles of trail riding and many more CPs, we popped out of the woods in Falmouth for a short ride to the kayak put-in at TA2 on the Presumpscot River. We had covered about 31 miles on the leg in a little over 5 hours and were just behind the race-leading Rootstock team.

After getting geared up to kayak the river and ocean and after strategizing our approach to the section, we lowered the boats into the Presumpscot. We had received a few, somewhat conflicting reports about this section. There were 2 issues here. 1) It was a windy day, especially on the coast and therefore the Bay was pretty rough and maybe not suitable for the inexperienced. 2) The course was running just a titch slow and there was a lot of paddling to do in the Bay, if you were so inclined. Going after all the CPs on the islands in the Bay would likely take too long and prevent you from finishing the end of the course, where the CPs were more densely placed. So how much of the paddle should you tackle? Strategic decisions like this often decide the outcome of a race and are what make AR more fun and interesting compared to the more popular, marked-course endurance events (ultramarathons, Iron men, etc.).

Ultimately we decided to postpone the decision until we got to the first CP, no too far from the mouth of the river, in a more sheltered part of the Bay, after reassessing time/speed and water conditions. The initial mile on the paddle was a ridiculous exercise in incompetent steering, at least by me. The kayak spun like a top in the river current unless you were active working the rudder. Without the rudder deployed, our boat tracked like a kiddie pool. We soon worked through this issue after portaging laboriously around the Presumpscot Falls and adjusting the foot pegs. We sped down the river, with the current and a strong tailwind, past groups of local folks enjoying the good weather. After 6 miles, we were out of the river mouth and grabbing the first paddle CP, under the bridge to Mackworth Island.

Looking out into Casco Bay, there was some chop and whitecaps but it didn't look that dangerous. We decided to head out to one of the islands (Fort Gorges) which had 2 CPs, to get the most bang for our buck (more literally, the most CPs for our time). We would have a cranking tailwind for the 2-mile trip to the Fort and an equivalent headwind for the 1-mile trip to the TA on shore in Portland.

As we expected, the water was rougher than it looked from afar, I'd estimate up to 2-3 foot chop, but mostly in the 1-2 feet range. We vigilantly tried to stay perpendicular to the waves, and were mostly successful other a couple cold ocean splashes. With baseline adrenaline levels high, we reached the beach of the Fort's island and pulled ashore.

I had actually paddled to Fort Gorges before, with my wife on a guided anniversary outing a couple years ago. It's a cool spot - a big granite fortress in the middle of the Bay overgrown with wall-top vegetation. Completed in 1864, it was never used because forts basically became obsolete with the development of exploding (i.e., fort-breaking) artillery around this time.

Inside view of Fort Gorges

We climbed in cool granite darkness up to the top of the east and west ramparts of the Fort and punched both flags before returning to the kayaks. Heading back out onto the windy, choppy Bay was a little intimidating, especially when Glen and I took 2 tries to enter the water, after being knocked sideways by the surf on our initial attempt. Once we got going, it really wasn't bad. We kept the bow pointed into the oncoming waves and after 10 minutes or so the wind had diminished significantly. We paddled fairly easily back to the take-out on East End Beach, the site of TA3.

Team photo at TA3 by Kate White

After chatting with Kate and volunteer Tom Rycroft and switching out of paddle gear, we were off onto the next leg - finding several Q&A checkpoints in downtown Portland. As Portland is the best city around for eating, drinking and all around coolness (sorry Boston), it was a little sad to cruise past all the inviting spots in town on a lovely Saturday evening as we made quick work of this pleasant and interesting leg. We love being in the forest but variety is nice too - good race design.

Portland urban trek, 'scuse me, pardon me.

More urban trekking scenes nearing Western Promenade of Portland

Peaceful urban shortcut

Soon we were checking into TA4, under the far side of the Casco Bay Bridge, to pick up our bikes and pedal along the South Portland water's edge out of town as the sun set. We were the first team out of the TA. Rootstock had decided to stay out on the paddle to get more CPs. Therefore if they could clear the rest of the course before time expired, there would be no way we could win, having fewer CPs. All we could do was keep grinding and hope they had a major mistake - not likely.

This was a pleasant ride: non-technical flat trails, scenic and cool evening weather. We cruised past shore, salt marsh, railways and patchy forest before emerging onto pavement on the periphery of the city.

Pleasant ride out of town

We continued north out of town without issue, stopping briefly to refuel at a second rate convenience store. After about 10 miles of easy road night riding on roads, we reached the Blackstrap trail system in North Yarmouth. Race staff passed us a couple miles before we got to the TA, so fortunately it was staffed on arrival. We quickly switched to trek mode for a lengthy forest night nav adventure on, and sometimes, off trail, gathering 14 CPs over about 11 miles and 6 hours. The forest in this area varied from pretty easy and open to brushy and marshy. We only saw one other team out there - Naughty by Nature, a husband and wife team on their first AR, for 24 hours - impressive. Glen's solid nav kept us on track the majority of the time and we emerged tired but successful into TA6 at 4:30 AM, still at the front of the race.

Nocturnal forest friend - flying squirrel

We transitioned quickly back to the bike for a road ride back to Pineland Farms about 20 km away. This started off well enough, but about halfway there, we had a mismatch of mapped roads and actual roads which sent us on a non-optimal route. After puzzling out our unexpected location, our best course of action was to ride back through the previously-visited Knight's Pond trail area. Once through, we were back on easy roads to HQ and the final TA in early morning sun. The final stage was more Pineland orienteering - with a new twist. There was a 4 CP bike-O map and a 4 CP foot-O map. To get credit for any CP (say, CP A on the bike-O map) you had to also find the corresponding one on the other map (CP A on foot-O map), i.e., you could only get them in pairs. We had a little over 2 hours to get this done, before the 8:05 AM time cutoff. We knocked out the 4 bike CPs in about 45 minutes but the distances, slower terrain and trickier nav of the foot-O map was taking substantially longer. By the time we had found our 3rd foot CP, we only had 15 minutes left and had to bust it to the finish line, arriving with only 2 minutes to spare.

24 hour races are tough, but I was feeling especially spent at the end of this one. Not sure if this was a result of the lengthy singletrack sections, the fact that Glen's more efficient nav resulted in more constant movement or some other factor but I was super ready to done. After getting changed (ahhh...flip flops) and checking into our cars, we were provided a filling tasty breakfast by the Pineland Farms cafe and enjoyed some seated time, chatting with other racers and race staff. We were only bested by the combined forces of Rootstock and our buddy Dave Lamb and were happy to receive our divisional award.

This was a terrific, varied and interesting course designed by the Whites. A huge thanks to them and the volunteers and sponsors for making this race happens. We'll certainly be back.