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After working 48 hrs, or back to back shifts, I had a little free time. So went to Patapsco Park for 4 hrs, albeit, a little sleep deprived.
Currently, the trails are in phenomenal shape.
ARMD, adventure racers of maryland, are doing a trail ride at 6pm on Tuesdays, meeting at the I-95 ParknRide.
This is Jure Robic, winner of RAAM. Up close, this guy had more veins on his legs than I've seen anywhere. He had calves larger than his quads, or maybe more swollen? He apparently had no close competitor this year since his toughest competitor crashed early in the race. So he enjoyed a more leisurely pace and more sleep than last year, according to someone on his team. Here he is remounting his bike for the final 2 miles to the finish in downtown Annapolis. It took him a understandable few fumbles to clip in and every minute or so, he was riding out of the saddle. I imagine he was a bit fatigued and his butt was a wee bit tender after 3000 some miles. This is his 2nd bike, from what I can tell. He had one road geometry frame that I saw, and this TT bike set up with cosmic carbone wheels/clinchers and his seat looked to be a standard san marco or profile design triathlon seat (with the bigger nose cushion). The frame was a Scott carbon tri frame. Nothing entirely exotic about anything on the bike, except the man riding it.
So I was driving home from work tonight, and saw a RAAM bicycle support vehicle. Dong, it hit me, they might already be finishing! I must still be in a fog from AR racing.
Why I thought it was so cool is that RAAM is on my list of things to do. (Which is unfortunately too long for this lifetime, although RAAM is fairly low in the list, below Primal Quest AR, Yukon River Quest paddle race, Solo Around the World Sailboat race, and climbing K2, in that order). You got to dream if you work the hours that I do.
More importantly for RAAM, the final 5 mile route comes by my house. Actually about 150 meters away. Kinda cool I thought. Although it may not stay that way, since the location changes.
Anyhow, after running home and telling my wife I just had to go check it out, of course getting the look, "what are you up to now", I went down to watch the first team finish, a fixed gear 2-person group. The finish area is a strange location. They apparently want to give the solo racers all the attention, so the fixies weren't allowed to finish downtown till tomorrow. They actually had them finish a few miles away at a Mall location.
The lead solo riders are expected in the early hours of tomorrow. Since I'm recovering, I will likely be asleep.
Anyhow, those riders make a 50hr adventure race seem like child's play. Spending a week in the saddle and sleep deprived seems abit foolish, but the more I think about it, I want to experience that.
Just like the around the world sailboat racers, sleep cycles and sleep deprivation are an important part of the strategy.
As important as having RAAM come to town and bringing in tourist dollars, it unfortunately isn't gaining anywhere near the attention that the Volvo Ocean Race gets when they finish a stage in Annapolis. Nearly 5000 boats show up to support the sailors on their Around the World race. Just the postrace party alone has 4000+ attendees. Although Annapolis has a lot of cyclists and runners, it is still a sailing town in heart.
The bottom picture is Tamela on the trail leading up to the ropes site. We hiked it a few times. We hung out here for a few hrs (2:45 since cp at echo lake) until the ropes director told us it was unlikely we would make the cutoff time. In so many races, I recall only one where we were a team racing just to make a cutoff for a short course. However, back at the tail end, the views become more noticeable and nature tends to envelope you. At the ropes site, up on my perch, I had an unobstructed view over the Notch. So I grabbed my blackberry and started taking pictures to fill the time. Even after 2 days of racing, I wasn't sleepy enough to catch a nap, although we had the luxury of getting some sleep during this race. When I turned on the phone, I got two phone calls immediately. One was from our teammate Joe, who didn't make Untamed. He's sort of logistics coordinator at a race, so at that point, I was actually thinking how badly I missed him, and then his name came up on Caller ID. Strange. Him calling made me realize the ingredient we were missing, a logistics coordinator.
Let's just say we didn't have a perfect race. The dreaded curse of the Black Pearl. At Untamed, we were strong physically, but missing a few things. We were thinking of signing up for Odyssey AR 101, and I'm going back to nav school for dumbies and the sleep deprived. Missing passport, missing gps device, missing climbing harness, missing food, 2 broken plotting pens, maps packed away in bin on a Uhaul truck. The list goes on. Part of our set backs were attributed to getting stuck near the end of the line at the ropes checkin, leaving me not enough time to finish reading the race instructions. At 15 minutes before race start, I just said "oh well" and went to the bathroom after holding it for 3 hrs and rinsed off in the shower, thinking then and there, this is gonna be a b#%@#. Certainly, the top teams were smart enough to be at the front of that line. Team A-list and us were near the back, both teams barely getting passed go.
We did the first 3 cp without a map, just grabbing a peak at teams who were nice enough to let us look. Things got better, but I barely knew when the gear bins would be visited, or the layout of events. It was certainly a sure fire way to put a damper on our moral. We went from DFL up to the top 5 teams, but we were pressured and missing things along the way. By day 2, we had our feet underneath us again, only 18 min off 3rd place. Then, the clincher was reattacking cp1 on 2nd 0-course over and over again in some brutal vegetation at midnight within meters of cp1 of the 2nd o-course. We knew on the skirts of the 800 m hilltop, but never really knowing until after the race and confirming with the gps tracking. Won't forget that one pesky cp. As a navigator, it's clear as day what went wrong, after the fact. Partly in that our altimeters were playing a cruel game with us. But, it was a beginner mistake.
When we took the nap up there, going with the theory that maybe a few minutes rest would help, I was all bundled up under a hat and neck cover. In between the sounds of light snoring and one lone mosquito trying to pester to me, I kept hearing some strange voices that sounded close, but no other team showed up. After the race, we found that they were likely the voices of Team EMS and some volunteers manning the cp. Ugh! Our previous effort at obtaining the other higher time value bonus cp's, were lost. We were getting too close to missing the next 4am cutoff time so headed back to the TA. We got in around 3:50am. I went from thinking a top 3 finish, despite our troubles, to scrambling just to make a cut off time. Every team has those at some point. They say it makes you stronger........... Who knows. All I can say is, argh! My teammates were awesome, somehow taking all our setbacks in stride. Trust me, we had a lifetime of setbacks this race.
The race was very well put on. Among the best I have ever done, period.
I finally cleared 50 AR race, not that anyone cares, (If my foggy recollection over the yrs has even been even remotely accurate), and give this race high praise, maybe the highest. Untamed Adventure has likely made a name for itself beyond the Midatlantic area, despite the heavy packs we carried around. My bruised feet and butt will surely protest for sometime, although my feet were bruised prerace from a long bike ride in poorly fitting shoes.
Every AR race has some fault somewhere, but I'm hard pressed to find any at the Untamed New England. I even imagine there was a good reason for the ropes course after the dark zone and resultant bottle neck, but it certainly buggered us the most since we lost our mojo and got there behind many teams. We really just wanted to get in some rope work, since I even spent time going over it with Tamela and Bo prerace, practicing ascending up the side of Tamela's log home. So far, a good number of experienced participants and emails hint that this raced ecclipsed all others.
I can't blame our result on anyone but myself. Alot of people think i"m crazy to take the blame, given it was a long race, and I was the only navigator. But, it just hasn't been coming together lately
Strangely though, it was still a fulfilling race. Weather couldn't have been better. After stopping racing, we enjoyed one more nice downhill ride thru the town of Fanconia to the finish and enjoyed a few beers with other folks hanging out at the finish. We stayed around as long as the post tiredness would allow, and got to see Jeff, Chris, and Sarah from Summit Achievement crossing the line in a well deserved first place. Running Ahead pushed them on and off the last day, but they had worked out a 15+ min margin at least when we finished packing up and heading home. Two of the Canadian teams were there. It was interesting, since apparently those teams had done PQ, but they gave up PQ to do Untamed. They seemed very happy with that decision.
Shawn, Tamela's husband, cooked us up an awesome dinner back at their house, ending a fabulous few days.
hiking to rappel site
Some beautiful terrain. We didn't see any moose or bear though.
