Not wanting to break my streak of attending every edition of MSAR so far, this race, only 1.5 hours from home, was a obvious addition to the race schedule. Back when MSAR was a little baby 8-hour race, it was Reed's first AR, at age 14. I guess they've grown together (to 24 hours and 19.5 years, respectively). Pam (wife) and Eliza (daughter) were doing the 3-hour version of the race.
I always watch the weather forecast for these summer races with trepidation. Adventure racing is tough enough without the added unpleasantness of hot weather. Last year we had some nice rain to keep us cool. This year we would have no such luck. Temps would be warm to hot, with some humidity, but, thankfully not nearly the heat wave that would ensue the following week.
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| Pre-race meeting ALL PHOTOS BY RANDY ERICKSEN |
We began with an orienteering prologue on foot around the agricultural and wooded outskirts of the Pineland Farms campus, which was a great way to spread out the teams. You could receive up to 2 CPs of credit for spelling up to 2 words out of a possible list (each CP was assigned a letter). After checking the map, we decided to spell KAYAK and FAST, meaning that we needed to find CPs K, A, Y, F, S and T. It seemed like a lot of the other teams had this same idea.
As we set off, I waved to Pam and Eliza and distractedly stepped into a soggy roadside swale, soaking my shoe/sock. The weird thing is: that was the only time Reed or I got wet feet for the entire race! Including the paddle! Unheard of!
We grabbed the first 2 without issue (apart from a minor encounter with stinging nettle) and headed off to seemingly straightforward CP F. I got mixed up with a parallel bridge feature and began to look too early in the wrong place. Eventually I found it by re-attacking using the posted trail maps but I wasted a lot of time on this fairly minor task. I bobbled a couple other of the points on this leg as well, so we were one of the last teams done with the prologue - no big deal, still plenty of race left!
We next headed out on bikes for a western road ride approaching several lakes. After 8 or 9 miles we hit CP1 at the base of Sabbathday Lake. In my hasty pre-race mapping, I mistook this for a lake quite a bit further away, where we needed to turn north. So, after punching, I directed us on a U-turn to head north. After a few miles, I didn't like how the road wasn't matching my expectations and stopped to check on things, only to discover my error. I corrected this by turning us back around and then hurriedly blowing by the correct road. After 30 bonus minutes of riding including 3 U-turns, I had us back on track and headed toward the actual lake of interest, Crescent Lake, which we reached after another 9 miles.
Just east of the lake, we stopped at the Raymond Community Forest. Here we could split up to each get 2 CPs (2 on foot, 2 on bike). Reed picked the trek, so I did the bike. I had to find 2 CPs near 2 connected trail loops. I found them fairly easily, biking along with a member of a French-speaking team. The technical rocky terrain made it hard to keep an eye on map and compass but it was doable. I finished before Reed had come back from the trek, so I walked our bikes over to where he would be finishing and had 5 minutes to sit and scope out the upcoming maps. Reed had adeptly found the 2 trek CPs and we were quickly off to nearby TA1.
Our smooth handling of this split-up section had us back among other teams but still pretty far behind in the race. So, when we reached TA1 to begin the kayak section, all of the good boats were gone. We were stuck with 10' beach rental bathtub style kayaks, while nearly everyone else had scored a sleek sea kayak. Ugh. We also had to each paddle in a one-man kayak (rather than a tandem) and, oh yeah, the stiff headwind blowing at us. There were 7 possible CPs to obtain from the Crescent Lake/Panther Pond kayak. One was about 3km away, there were another three which were another 2-3 km away and then there were 3 even more distant points. Taking our slow boats into account and doing some quick math, it didn't make a ton of sense to go after any of these CPs - we would be lucky to get 4 CPs in 3 hours. My plan to get us back in the race was to spend as much time as possible grabbing CPs on the final trek, Morgan Meadow. However, with this being the only chance to get off of our feet for the race and in the spirit of upholding the tradition of the 3 primary AR disciplines, we set off anyway.
The paddle was as expected, sort of a grind/slog. The lazy river section between the two lakes was cool. We had already paddled it, funnily, a few years ago on a family vacation, staying at the very same Crescent Lake. We found the 4 CPs easily but it took about 3.5 hours. We had a strong tailwind for the return trip, which helped, but we were very ready to be done with this stage.
We gobbled food, refilled water, fiddled with maps and set off again for the bike leg which was dubbed "the adventure bike" by a smirking RD Kate at the pre-race meeting. Based on this description we weren't sure how much of this bike to bite off. I was trying to strategically skip parts of the course in order the spend time where I had deemed the most CP-lucrative stage (Morgan Meadow trek), so I had us short-cut the first 1/3 of the adventure bike on paved road. However, I had hatched a sneaky, clever plan to make a quick side trip and steal 2 of the CPs from that skipped portion, the closely spaced CPs 16 and 17. We would drop bikes at the base of the hill they were on (Quaker Hill), scurry up, punch the 2 CPs and resume the rest of the adventure bike. Atop Quaker Hill, we allowed ourselves 30 seconds to sit on a bench and enjoy a lovely western view. Apparently, my plan here was not all that sneaky or clever because, while snatching these CPs, we crossed paths with a bunch of other teams with the same idea. Okay fine.
Anyway, soon we were back on the trail with our bikes, riding ATV/doubletrack stuff that was not bad except for a few sections of loose baby heads. CPs 18, 19 and 20 came quickly and we were pumped to continue this CP-rich bike section - there we 6 more possible CPs to attack in the upcoming trail network. As we approached them, however, our hopes for a speedy sweep of these CPs began to dim. The speedy packed dirt we had been on had abruptly turned into long stretches of deep, dry fine sand. Riding on this varied from slow/laborious to impossible. As the sandy surface continued to predominate in this region, any hope of regaining terra firma in this area evaporated. Based on this new info, we decided on a smaller loop which would give us 3 of the 6 CPs and reduce our time in the sandbox. We got these without too much trouble (one wrong turn) and found a few of the trails to be actually moderately fast where the sand had been dispersed by motorized vehicle use.
Now well past sunset, we left the trail system and rode a few miles on roads. We passed Dadmun Dr., which was funny because Mun is nickname for Reed in our family. Dadmun seemed like a good team name, and, obviously, the universe was totally cheering us on by delivering this road sign to our reality. Entering a busier road, we made a quick stop at a surprisingly busy gas station mart and split a Mountain Dew. We ran into race photographer Randy Ericksen and another team here and chatted briefly before continuing down busy Rt. 11 and then even busier Rt. 302 into Naples, Maine. It was almost 11 PM by now and there was a steady steam of traffic whizzing by us (a recurring theme). We hadn't realized that this relatively rural part of Maine had such a bumping nightlife, but apparently on summer Saturday nights it does. As we rode down 302 toward Naples, we passed full restaurants, bars and live music. But, we soon turned onto a side street and resumed the familiar AR experience of riding through peoples' dark, quiet rural neighborhoods in the middle of the night.
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| Mountain Dew exuding its natural bioluminescence |
We needed to cover another 6-7 hilly bike miles to reach the next section at TA2 in Tiger Hill Community Forest. Pavement became dirt became rough trail as we made our way there, picking up one CP along the way (28). As we neared the TA, we began to see the headlamps of teams out on the trek. One of whom (Girls Will Survive) kindly directed us to the TA location. Based on my map analysis, this was not the place to quickly scoop up a bunch of CPs and I had considered skipping it entirely and biking straight to Morgan Meadow. Reed was experiencing a lot of bike saddle chafing at this point, however, and he could really use a break from the bike, so we decided to head out on a hilly loop (lollipop actually) that would give us 4 CPs.
We picked up CP33 in an old family cemetery and then continued uphill to 1100 ft to nab hilltop CP34, before using trail and an off-trail ridge traverse to get CP36. We then turned around back the way we came, to work toward off-trail CP35. On the map, this seemed like a simple trail hike followed by an off-trail stream descent. As we approached the expected intersection with our next trail, however, the correlation between the trails we were seeing and trails that were mapped started to unravel. We tried a few trails, hoping they'd eventually turn to the desired direction but they never did. We went back and forth over the same trail half a dozen times but our trail never appeared. This was very frustrating because I actually had a good idea where we were but just couldn't click with the next move. I spent way too much time trying to figure this out instead of doing what we eventually did - just bushwhack to the CP. This wasted an hour of precious clock. So by the time we returned to the TA, we had spent 4 hours getting 4 CPs - not a disaster but definitely not an optimal way to move ahead in the race.
Upon our return to the TA, someone (Starker White, I believe) cooked me up a Cup O'Noodles and I (belatedly) remembered that we had a stick of Body Glide in the gear bin, and that this was our last access to to the gear bin. So, Reed generously applied the lube before we headed off on bikes again, which provided a bit of relief for the 34 miles of bike riding which still lay ahead.
As day gradually broke, we headed west, back in the rough direction which we had come from, finally on the return loop of the course. This consisted of 2 road bike rides interrupted by the Morgan Meadow trek which I have been referencing. This really would have been a good spot to scoop up a bunch of CPs if we had several hours to spare there, but, as it turned out, we had only one hour. So we hurriedly transitioned to trek mode, grabbed the map and headed out to get 3 checkpoints that were close to the TA. We did this without much difficulty. For the last one, a ways off the trail, I was bushwhacking to/from it in a somewhat maniacal manner, which is how I sometimes get at the end of a race when I'm panicking about going overtime (unreasonably panicking in this case). This was followed by another quick transition to bike mode and we headed off, along with several other teams, for the 10 mile ride back to Pineland Farms. Although it was only 10 miles, I wanted to allow 1.5 hours for this in case the one remaining CP gave us any trouble or a bike problem arose (my rear tire had refused to stay above 10 psi for the whole race). This leg included a lot of downhill, the one (easy) CP and one tough climb that we finally surrendered to and hike-a-biked the final bit.
Neither of us had eaten much over the last 4 hours of the race because we were hot, dehydrated and, though we had food left, we had no food that we desired or thought we could really stomach. Along the way, we each took a couple forced bites of a fried potato-beef ball (aka a Puerto Rican arancino) but couldn't manage any more than that and threw it in the bushes. It seems Reed has inherited my inability to eat during the last hour of a race. So...we were incredibly hungry during the last bike. We were so happy to finally be done and so eager to get our blood glucose back into the normal, non-starvation range. Luckily there were plenty of ways to do that in the Pineland Farms café. Then we crashed for a quick nap, caught the end of the awards and headed back home.
As always, thanks so much to Cliff and Kate, the volunteers, sponsors and other racers. This is a weird, wonderful thing we do together and I'm thankful that you all are there to make it possible.
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