NYARA The Longest Day, Southern Catskill Mountains, NY 5/14/22

We got an email 2 months out from this race stating that the initial course in Connecticut had to be scrapped because of logging and permitting issues.  Race organizers NYARA informed us that they were moving the race to their home terrain of the Catskill mountains of NY. I have nothing against Connecticut. We had a very nice edition of The Longest Day there in 2016.  But, having done a few great NYARA races (if you include 2012 Nationals) in the greater Catskills area, I was not unhappy about this change in venue.  The only downside was the short deadline for NYARA RDs Aaron and Austin to engineer a fully-fledged course for us. SPOILER ALERT: They succeeded.

Reed has been working his way up to bigger and bigger races, from his 8-hour debut at age 13 to last year, when he did his first 24 hour race at age 18. This season (to his dad's great happiness) he signed on to do two 24 hour races plus a 12-hour. This would be the first of those.

We drove the 4.5 hours to Pine Hill, NY, the location of race HQ, Belleayre ski mountain.  I like the relaxed, rural feel of this area with its Woodstockian eclectic streak visible in the vintage tiny towns dotting the valleys.  We checked into the cozy Wheelhouse Inn (which would soon fill with other racers), fiddled with some gear, grabbed a great dinner at Peekamoose Tavern and hit the sack early to be ready for the unfortunate 5:00 AM alarm. This race didn't start until 9:00 but there were the usual pre-race logistics plus a 1.5 hr bus ride to the race start in New Paltz. The bus ride was notable for the fact that our (funny and likeable) bus driver played The Black Crowes the whole way. In case you're wondering, 1.5 hours of the Black Crowes means all of their hits twice plus plenty of deep cuts. I think I am all set with the Black Crowes for a couple decades now.

Okay, okay, the race. 

We had been informed weeks ago that the first stage would be the packraft stage. We now knew that this would consist of a 1-mile trek on a jogging trail and road to a put-in on the bank of the Wallkill River. The water looked to be completely still but, based on our speed, it was nudging us steadily downstream. There were no CPs on the paddle. It was just a morning trudge up to TA1. As misfortune would have it, our cool spring weather in the northeast decided to become Florida weather just in time for this race, and we would suffer a bit extra on account of this heat and humidity throughout most of the race. 

Since there was no strategizing of land vs water CPs and there was easy vehicle access to the put-in and take-out locations, there was no reason for us to be in slow, uncomfortable packrafts for this leg.  With the abbreviated window for planning race logistics, though, I'm sure the BYOB approach really streamlined things for our RDs and allowed them to concentrate their efforts on other race elements. I think packrafts can be cool when employed in an "organic" way in AR (i.e., on vehicle-inaccessible backcountry water) but I am worried that this trend could become the new AR default boat in order to avoid the logistical headaches of sourcing and moving canoes/kayaks. Incorporating packrafts may also help keep registration fees down by shifting boat costs from the race organization to the racers but, personally, I would rather pay more and comfortably paddle a canoe/kayak unless cool backcountry water locations favor packrafting.

Okay, okay, back to the race.

We grabbed our bikes here at TA1 after 8.5 miles on the river. We finished about mid-pack, moving up maybe 10 spots during the paddle and being passed by 2 or 3 teams in faster craft (any inflatable was allowed). Our bikes were inside a cute covered bridge. We transitioned quicky and were soon off on the bike leg, happy to be out of the rafts. We followed easy roads and rail trails for 12 miles until we got to a point where we had to decide whether to do a long bike around a hilly area or try to finagle a bikewhack short cut by connecting dead end roads. We chose the latter and soon found ourselves on a tough long road climb on Eagle's Nest Rd. A local stopped to make sure we knew "there's only private property up there." and soon after that team Erect came zooming down the hill reporting that it was all NO TRESPASSING signs up on top. After these interactions, we sadly gave up on our short cut and cruised back down the needless ascent.  Feeling beat, we began the long way around, eventually arriving at Bluestone Wild Forest trails after another 10 miles and some decent climbing/descending. Almost every roadside wooded area we passed along the way was posted with NO TRESSPASSING signs. I thought New Hampshire was bad about this, but this area was the most aggressively posted area I've ever seen. Why so many Americans won't allow people to walk through their remote forest land is a mystery to me.

Nice view from rail trail bridge

At the trail system, which held some really nice singletrack, we had 3 mandatory CPs and up to 6 optional CPs available.  2 of the optionals were near the mandatories, so I elected to just grab those 5 total CPs and move on to the rest of the race, leaving the 4 more distant optionals behind. It really seemed like there was a LOT of race left after this bike leg and I wanted to make sure we had time for the whole course. 

After continuously sweating profusely, we finished the trail riding dehydrated and out of water. Leaving the forest, we had to cross Route 28, and I was hopeful that there would be a place to grab drinks there. Luck had it that that there was a trashy convenience store/smoke shop there where we eagerly glugged some gatorades, refilled water and ate bananas.

With the fear of a terminal bonk behind us, we followed a few roads to the Ashokan rail trail.  We spent about 10 easy but speedy miles on the pleasant well-maintained rail trail before riding a couple road miles to TA2 - the end of the "big bike" and beginning of the "big trek." Our little buttcracks were feeling quite tender after 44 sweaty miles on our bike saddles, as tends to happen.

After skipping the bike trail CPs, we were one of the first teams to reach TA2.  We were greeted by the whole RD crew and had another chance to fill up water - which we again had depleted. The cutoff to continue from here onto the big trek was 7:30 PM, we were here at 5:30, so I liked our chances to finish the full course, barring any major problems. Other than saddle sores and being constantly somewhat dehydrated, we were doing okay physically to begin this beast of a trek.

Raiding the gear bin at TA2 for food for the big trek           Photo: NYARA

The trek was unquestionably the crux of the race, encompassing 12 miles of Catskill mountains with 5k+ feet of climbing. The first couple miles were the harshest - straight uphill and off trail.  This was also the biggest navigational challenge - hours off trail before and after sunset. As we ascended and sweated, we would encounter little sections of old road and trail that we could follow for short periods before they diverged from our desired compass bearing. We needed to climb about 800 ft like this before reaching the first CP.  We had begun to pass through patches of mountain laurel as we neared the CP. Mountain laurel strikes fear into the heart of anyone who's had to torturously push through it. When we got to the CP, we sadly found it to be stuck in the middle of several acres of dense chest-high laurel. We were passed here by Vert Racing, who went on to win the race in a dominant performance. From here, we laboriously worked through more laurel and dense evergreens on a ridge, to gain another 700 ft up to Samuel's Knob, as the sunlight gradually faded. From here, the challenge was to navigate in dense woods at night, stay on the ridge, and eventually work toward the location of a trail about a mile away. 

Sweaty selfie after Reed noticed the nice view behind us

More climbing. At least it's in nice open woods here.

As we neared the expected location of the trail, we found a well-established, well-used campsite with an official camping sign nailed to a nearby tree.  Finally we had found the trail - no more bushwhacking! We cracked a celebratory Starbucks and sat on the benches around the firepit for a minute. Okay then, time to hit that trail...the...uh...the...trail. We orbited the campsite several times and found a lot of well-trodden ground but no trail.  We were incredulous - this popular, signed campsite has no trail to it??  The answer to that was evidently "yes". I'm still puzzled by this.

There were lots of wildflowers around. Red trillium here.

So...we continued bushwhacking toward the direction the trail would have to be, hoping is was a major-enough trail that we would not cross over it without noticing. A hooting barred owl led our way for a while. Fortunately, maps and compasses rarely lie, and we found the trail after another half mile or so. After 4.5 hours, we were happy to have the big bushwhack behind us. I say this because it's easier to trek on a trail and we were sick of pushing through branches, bushes and over logs and rocks at that point. The fact that this race featured navigating a big, rugged off-trail trek is AWESOME, however. You don't get that in every race, and it really adds the "Adventure" to adventure racing.

Although we were on trail now, the hard part of the trek was nowhere near over. We spent the next 5.5 hours climbing and descending 3 peaks in Catskill park, the highest being Slide Mountain at 4170 ft. We had a light rain for most of this, which was pleasant and cooling. These trails covered a large amount of technical terrain - we found ourselves scrambling, and nearly bouldering, up steep rocky inclines frequently during the ascents. The descents were no picnic either, with technical terrain really limiting the ground speed. 

Lots of scrambly trail sections like this

As we had skipped several bike orienteering points early on in order to arrive at the trek early, I was expecting some faster teams who had found those to start catching up to us during this 10 hour trek. Reed and I were moving steadily forward but, with the heat and hills, we were not going all that fast. But, we never saw another team after the first CP, and trekked alone for the remaining 8 hours. "Where were they?" I wondered.  It turns out that the heat and the looming trek were causing a lot of problems behind us. Teams arrived at TA2 spent - some needed rest at the TA, some decided to drop the trek, some turned around after suffering on the initial bushwhack and some abandoned the race at this point. We finally met a couple teams at the end (TA3) including our Strong Machine friends, who had suffered some heat-related maladies.

RD Aaron prepped some ramen for the arriving teams, while we switched into bike mode for the next leg - a fairly short road section that would bring us to the final leg of race which was...a sizeable trek with lots of ascent! I had a small nav SNAFU on the bike, as we were flying so fast downhill that I lost us on the map. Soon enough though, we were back on track and rolling into TA4 to start the final trek. 

It was now dawn (5:30) and we transitioned quickly back into trek mode in order to tackle our first challenge - ascending 1800 ft on trail to the next CP - yikes. Reed was finally feeling the accumulated exhaustion but we still made decent time on this slog, arriving at the high point of the trek in 90 minutes or so. This high point was labeled with a "Lookout Tower" on the map.  Reed and I each convincingly "saw" a (hallucinated) tower through the trees as we approached the top, after being awake for 26 hours. At this point we had 2 hours until the race finish and just a couple downhill miles to go; we were good on time. There were a couple optional CPs available near here, so we aimed at the first of these, but it eluded me. We didn't really have the desire/energy to dig out a CP at this point so we just moved on toward the next possible CP as we neared the finish. Again, I whiffed on the CP, looking in 2 or 3 wrong locations before giving up and heading in. We had really run a nice race, being one of the minority of teams that stayed full-course and my navigation had been relatively solid. Now though, I had a bad taste in my mouth, going 0 for 2 on the final CPs. But, once we had the finish line visible as a fixed landmark, it became obvious where the last CP was and, with Reed's permission, we turned back up the hill to it. While I punched the CP, he sat down and found a deer antler. 

Belleayre Ski area - almost done

The finish was just what we needed - a chair to sit in and piles of delicious warm real food. Not too shabby. Reed and I ended up second in the 2-person male division and 9th overall, which I am quite proud of.

We'd like to give big "thank you!" to the NYARA team who put such a cool course together on such short notice. I must say that The Longest Day is one of the most consistently well-run and well-designed 24-hour races you will find. We will definitely be back for any future edition.