Vermont is a great state for adventure racing - green forested hills and scenic historic and agricultural landscapes abound. GMARA has been organizing races here for over 20 years and their flagship summer race is the 12-hour Bitter Pill. NH Trail Vets cut our teeth doing GMARA races starting back in 2010. This would be my 15th GMARA race, not including their awesome Nationals in 2023.
This year the race was based out of the MTB mecca of East Burke, the preferred bike playground of Nick, who had plenty of local knowledge. Nick would be racing with Rob and I was racing with Reed under the team name Holland Asses. We would be funnily going head-to-head with NH Trail Vets (Nick and Rob) in the 2-male division. Also in the division were our friends, first time adventure racers and locals Tim and Ben (Snow Patrol).
After nice dinner together, we went our separate ways for a very early bedtime. We needed to be at the race HQ at 4:15 AM to board buses to the start of the race. We were told virtually nothing - maps and race info would be dispersed at the end of the bus ride to ????
The next morning, we plowed down some pre-race calories and coffee. Nick's wife Alison kindly delivered some fresh-cooked pre-dawn egg sandwiches to us before we boarded the buses. The bus ride was concerningly lengthy - taking us well away from race HQ (location of the finish line) including many speedy highway miles, as the sun gradually brightened the landscape outside the bus windows. When we finally arrived at our mystery destination, we were in New Hampshire, on the southern shore of the Moore Reservoir - a dammed section of the Connecticut River.
Here we were finally told about the format of the race and, in old-school GMARA fashion, given the maps as the clock started. You could take as long as you wanted poring over the maps but that left you less time to reach the finish before the 12 hour time limit elapsed.
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| Bitter Pill planning session 2025 |
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| Flashback to the 2012 Bitter Pill planning session |
Reed and I elected to draw up a quick approach to the first leg and then head out. The first leg consisted of a smallish orienteering section and moderate-sized paddle with a few strategic decisions to be made to optimize efficiency. We were out of the gates a few minutes before the Trail Vets but they soon closed the gap. The first 2 CPs did not go very well, especially CP3 - in an old cellar hole. Some of the woods here were very dense and brushy. You could be standing 20 feet from the flag and not see it, in many cases. This resulted in a bit of an easter egg hunt scenario at several CPs in this leg - and added an element of luck. We eventually found these but things were running pretty slow to start the race. We found 2 more CPs on this leg without problem and contemplated attacking CP1 from land (you could also paddle to it) before discovering that the forest was all shitty post-logging regrowth in this area - full of raspberries and other slow, dense flora. Paddle was the call.
We hustled back downhill to the start area, grabbing a CP using what is a mandatory thing for an adventure race in New England - a beaver themed CP clue, in this case a beaver pond. There would be a beaver dam CP as well, later in the race.
We were a near the rear of the race when we finally landed back at the start area to start the paddle. We chowed pizza, tanked up on water and headed out onto the reservoir on our tubby tandem kayak.
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| Pizza paddle |
We first paddled to CP1, a 20-minute round trip, before attacking the rest of the paddle CPs in counter-clockwise fashion. There was still a bit of fog on the water (and wildfire smoke haze) and temps were still mercifully cool. This was a nice comfortable stage.
At one point, we had the opportunity to split up and both get CPs. Reed came up with the idea of dropping me off on the shore to grab 2 CPs on a lakeside trail while he grabbed a paddle point solo in the kayak. We then paddled into the TA, on the Vermont shore of the reservoir to begin the big bike section. We got all the CPs on this section and had had a few nav delays, so we were one of the last teams off of the water. We knew that we would have to keep an eye on the clock and maps to stay on track for the finish cutoff time of 6:10PM.
We transitioned quickly and devised a quick bike route on the maps that would direct us eventually to a few CPs along rural VT roads on our way back toward Burke. But the first job was to grab a number of CPs in the area via several roads/trails. These ranged from asphalt to cleared logging paths now knee-high in weeds. One upside of being near the back of the race was that these knee-high weedy roads had already been transformed into beaten-down singletrack by the teams ahead of us, which sped things up a bit. We got all of the local mountain bike CPs without much trouble but we were still pretty far back, having spent time finding every CP so far.
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| Riding under power lines in the warm sun to begin the second leg |
Although we wanted to keep up our speed, the full heat of the day was now upon us as we cruised north up long hills and (briefly) down them. We were plowing through our water supplies and trying to find any shade under the noon sun in order to stay somewhat cool. This long road section was navigationally straightforward, mainly just slogging north for 21 miles, generally uphill. We took a couple quick breaks to fill water or eat along the way.
At the end of the bike was TA2 - the location of the big trek, in Victory, Vermont. For us, this would actually be quite a small trek because we had used a lot of clock finding all the CPs so far. Now it was time to strategically drop some things. It was 2:30 and the race instructions suggested that you wouldn't want to leave this trek much after 3:00 - sooooo, not much time to trek. After checking into the TA and receiving a freeze-pop each (heaven!) from the merciful folks at GMARA, we were off for a very abbreviated trek.
I hatched a plan to grab 4 CPs in a short circuit near the TA. We accomplished this without any significant delays, nabbing 4 CPs (including the beaver dam one) in about an hour - nice. We knew that the race clock was dwindling and kept the gas on for this trek. Soon enough, we were back on bike for the final leg - the bike to the finish.
We headed out on wooded trails before winding up back on pavement after a few miles. I was having trouble following us on the map through this section, so I just kept us headed in the approximate right direction. This worked out fairly well but we did overshoot a turn significantly and had a few moments of hesitation as we switched from one trail to another, finding a few CPs along we way. We raced with our friends Strong Machine for a while before they outpaced us on the climbs to the finish.
Like I said, for a lot of this section I didn't have a great idea exactly where we were or what lay between us and the finish line. The strategy was basically full gas to the finish at this point.
The final CP was just a bit off the trail with the clue "roof of cliff band". I directed us to the location of the CP and then we began searching the tops of all the local cliff formations (there were a lot), several of which had convincing roof-like stuff atop them. We wasted a good 20-25 minutes here looking at all kinds of "roofs" on cliffs. We found no flag and ran out of time and headed back to the bikes, which were parked adjacent to a ground-level rock cave. This, we incredulously noticed, contained the CP flag.
From here, it was really full gas to the finish. I didn't have a good idea what was ahead but we now needed to get through all of it in about 25 minutes. We were glad to find out that much of this was downhill. We rode this with gradually building panic until we arrived on the hotel grounds with just enough time left. We hit the finish line with 4 minutes of clock time left - whew!
Although "only" 12 hours long, this race was quite a butt-kicker, between the hills, heat and harried sprint to the finish. We traded some stories with friends at the finish line and rehydrated on some Shrubbly sodas that really hit the spot. At the post race dinner, we found out that Nick and Rob edged us by 13 minutes for the final podium spot in the 2M division - good for 8th overall, and we squeaked in at 11th overall out of 45 teams, covering about 48 miles and climbing 5200 feet.
We'd like to give a big thanks to team GMARA and first time RD, Taylor, and especially all the volunteers and sponsors as well. We'll be looking forward to our next trip to VT!
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