Untamed New England: A Rookie’s Tale

Untamed New England

60 Hour Unsupported Adventure Race

Franconia New Hampshire  June 12-15

www.untamedne.com

Team Breathemag.ca  : Sally Heath, Joel Perella, Pete Dobos and Marcus Olson

This race review is brought to you by the collective madness that is Marcus and Sally!!

A couple of months back Joel Perella, editor of Breathe Magazine  (www.breathemag.ca) came to us with a proposal. Some would say indecent, some would say awesome. As it turned out, it was a bit of both. Joel had been given an entry into the Untamed New England 60 hour adventure race being held in New Hampshire and Vermont June 12 through to June 15th.  As someone who has been racing pretty hard over the past couple years and posting some promising results in the sprint-type races I was pretty stoked about the opportunity to train and push myself physically to prepare for and complete my first multi-day AR. I was in.  I brought the opportunity to our RF kick off meeting and was immediately contacted by Sally Heath, superstar racer and all around cool person. The team was starting to come together. Joe Gabor hopped aboard as our 4th member and the team was set….or so we thought. Unfortunately, Joe had to back out because of a work conflict (NHL Awards…..pretty good excuse) so we searched high and low for a 4th member. The only criteria….be the team navigator. No pressure. Lucky for us, we had a lead. Pete Dobos. We hit him up on e-mail and telephone and were relentless in our pursuit and as luck would have it he jumped on as our head navigator and “experienced guy”. The team was set.  As the race approached we trained our butts off, worked through a cool ropes training day, spent an inordinate amount of time drinking beers at the Kelseys in Milton and prepared ourselves for our epic. As race day drew near, our team was feeling good!  We were ready to make our way to NH and attack the course.  So how did it go? Were we successful? Did we survive? Are we all still friends?    Read on:

Part 1: The Drive

Joel, Sally and I crammed all of our gear into the back of Joel’s truck and headed off around 10:45 am on Wednesday June 11th. With Sally “Snackypants” Heath in charge of food, Marcus “Molson” Olson in charge of the good times and Joel “Where do I turn?” Perella in charge of driving/navigation we were all set. That is until we hit the Quebec border and made our way into Montreal. Now before I rip into “La Belle Provance” I should mention that I was born just outside of Montreal and my family and I vacation in Mont Tremblant Parc every year so I am a huge fan of Quebec. That being said….whoever is the city planner for Montreal should be taken out into the streets and have bad things happen to him/her because the way that city’s roadways are organized…….wow……..pretty bad.  After what seemed like hours stuck in traffic, we finally made our way to the border.

So funny story. I’m sure you know that there are certain items that you cannot take over the border into the USA. Guns, drugs, cars with great gas mileage but you are also not allowed to bring any citrus fruit. So pulling up to the border while unwrapping a clementine was not our drivers best moment but as it turns out we were only delayed for a couple of minutes as the nice officers let Joel finish his fruit and let us through.  We hit an Italian restaurant in Littleton NH and as we pulled into the Franconia Inn (race homebase), the clock struck 10:00pm. We were able to get all of our gear into the room quickly and after a quick hello to Pete (yep, met face to face 12 hours before race start!!), we were off to bed.

Part 2: Pre-Race

Wow. So much more goes into a multi-day AR pre-race than a sprint race. Up at the crack of dawn, our team spent the first hour of our morning organizing our gear and prepping our food. Next, we headed down to race HQ to complete our gear checks, get our SPOT trackers (very cool), go through the ropes test, get our picture taken and, finally, we picked up our maps.   For the next 2 hours Pete found a happy place in the inn, got his Nav. gear together and got to setting our course that we would try to follow over the next 60 hours. The rest of the team made sure that we had all of the gear in our bins that we needed and prepped ourselves for what lay ahead.

Note on bins: Each team member was allowed one personal bin and each team was allowed one “Paddle” bin. We would see these bins on course but we were told that it would not happen often.

As the final minutes ticked away, all teams gathered on the airfield across from the inn that would serve as the start/finish. We were able to wish Team Running Free (Harper, Denise, John and) good luck and before we knew it….the race was on.

 Part 3: Race Day 1

5 minutes in and we were already a wet muddy mess as we tore across the airfield, hit the trailhead and were immediately met with mud and water. We made good time as we hit our first CP and continued on along the trail and then out to the open field and onto the road on our way to our next CP’s. We bagged a couple of CP’s with a quick river crossing and a short hike up the trail and then we settled onto the bike .  We soon discovered that New Hamshire has a lot more hills than Ontario does, but managed to keep a fairly steady pace as we headed to the first of two conservation projects that all racers were required to participate in.  The first involved each team moving 50 pieces of firewood per teammate, which meant 200 pieces for us.  Since it was still early in the race, everyone was fired up and we hauled that firewood as fast as we could, working up a good sweat and getting many splinters in the process.  As soon as we were done, we got back on our bikes and continued to the first trekking section, which, of course, involved more big hills!  Pete, our navigator, did not let us down with excellent route choices up and down the first peak on which the CP was located.  The end of this trekking section lead us to our boats where we picked up the one mandatory and one optional CP, which was worth a three-hour time credit at the end of the race.

When we dropped our boats it was nearing dusk, and the next order of business was a bike ride-and-tie, in which only one bike was allowed per team. We quickly worked out an efficient system in which one teammate would ride ahead 200 m and drop the bike, which was then picked up by the last person running.  We had some difficulty locating the CP that we were heading for, but eventually found it and ran / rode back to the canoe drop off, where the rest of us were able to pick up our bikes and head back out.

We biked through the first part of the evening, arriving at the next trekking section somewhere around 11:00pm or 12:00 am.  After swapping bike shoes for trekking shoes, and spending the first five minutes gingerly trying not to get our feet wet (yeah, right), we settled into a routine that involved yelling quotes from the movie Anchorman at each other – a novelty that had yet to wear off three days later.  Once again, Pete did an excellent job navigating us to each of the trekking CPs, and although one proved elusive for a short while, a quick recheck of the maps gave us some clues as to where we had went wrong.  On route to our last trekking CP of this section, we ran across a team of two young guys who were participating in their first adventure race ever – we definitely had to give them kudos for that!  We trekked through the night, watched the sun rise and got back to our bikes around 7:00 am.  At this point, we were still on the pro course but realizing that the two cut offs later in the day might be hard to make.  We took a bit more time getting ourselves organized, then hopped back on our bikes to ride up and down a pile more hills.

 Race Day 2

We arrived at CP16 around 10:00 on Day 2.  This was the first chance that we’d had to see our gear bins in 22 hours, and we were thrilled to be able to change into dry clothes and get a good feed on.  The next pro course cut off meant having to leave the TA by 10:30 am, and we decided at that point that it made more sense to take our time, rest a little, and head out on our own terms.  By the time we got back on our bikes, it was just after 12:00. Okay, so it wasn ‘t the most efficient transition, but it gave Joel time for a little rest, all of us time to change clothes and repack. 

We headed back out on our bikes for a long road ride to the next two orienteering legs.  It was super hot out and all the roads seemed to be going uphill (turns out, they were, as we discovered on the fast downhill home about 12 hours later).  We got some reprieve by stopping at a village general store for some ice cream and cold drinks.  After all, what’s an expedition race without ice cream?  We also managed to garner many looks and jeers from some drunken onlookers (yes, drunken, you read that right) who couldn’ t really understand why we were doing what we were.  Refreshed from our delightful snack, we kept on biking to the next O course.

The second orienteering course promised to be much shorter and gentler than the first one had been.  We dropped our bikes, took some extra gear out of our packs and headed out – uphill, of course.  After an hour or so of trekking we got the area in which the CP we were looking for was located, but were having more trouble than we should have in finding it.  After 30 minutes or so of searching, we rechecked our UTM and realized it was off by about 400 m.  Hey, even prostars like Pete Dobos (whom we were now referring to as Los Dobos) can make mistakes.  We started looking in the correct location and found that CP, and the next few, with relative ease to complete Orienteering Course #2.  Had we arrived back to the bike drop a few hours earlier, we would have headed out on a bike orienteering course, but alas, our dawdling, ice cream eating and conversations with the locals had put us past the cutoff time.  So instead we started another orienteering course from the same location. There was only one mandatory checkpoint on this course, and we decided that we would go and get that one, then head back to the TA on our bikes for a few hours of rest.  We trekked off into the dusk to find a CP, which was located, that’s right, you guessed it, on the highest point of a mountain.  By the time we climbed to the what we thought was the highest point, it was pitch black.  We searched fruitlessly for some time before coming upon another team, who also thought that the CP was where we were looking. Soon after, we were joined by a third team and we all scratched our heads and tried to figure things out.  Unfortunately, when you’ve been up for over 40 hours, things aren’t quite as clear as they should be.  The other two teams headed off in a direction that we’d already searched, while we sat down to try and figure out our own game plan.  Our navigator kept falling asleep, which provided us with considerable entertainment.  After some discussion, we were utterly convinced that we were in the right location and that the CP wasn’t there, so we headed back down the mountain.  This, it turns out, was a mistake.  The CP was right where it was supposed to be, just yonder (aka a few more climbs) from where we were. This was a particularly frustrating moment for us as a team, as we thought it would mean that we were unranked.  As we were climbing back down the mountain, we came upon another team who confirmed that the CP was indeed up there, and that it was hard to miss, as there was a campfire and people there! More than a little disheartened, we got back to the bike drop and started biking back to the TA.  Although we were all pooched and ready for a nap, we all got a second (third? fourth?) wind on the bike ride back.   Sally got her first taste of the sleepmonsters and had an exciting ride back due to all the animals she kept seeing.

Race Day 3 

When we arrived the TA, we saw a sea of bivvy sacks and tarps, as there was a mandatory dark zone at the TA until 4:30 am.  We got out our tarps and bivvy sacks, threw down our gear, and set our alarm for 6:00 am.  The couple of hours of rest that we got made a huge difference for everyone’s spirits in the morning, and we got onto the water just before 7:00 am the next morning.  Unfortunately we (Marcus and Sally) picked a canoe that had a strong affection for veering right, constantly, which made the 6 hour paddle a wee bit frustrating.  However, it was nice to be off our bikes for a change and we all felt great knowing that this was our last day of racing.  We were also thrilled to find out that missing the CP the night before did not disqualify us, but just moved us onto another alternate course.

After the paddle, we got back on our bikes once again to ride the few hills that we hadn’t yet found earlier on the course.  The last hill before we hit the next bike drop took us about an hour to climb. To add insult to injury, when we got to the ropes course at 5:00 pm, an hour before the cut off time, we were told that there was too long of a back log and that no more teams were going to be able to do the ropes.  We had spent an entire day the week before the race practicing our ascending and rapelling, and we were all pretty bummed not to be able to do the course.  Having the ropes course close to a mandatory dark zone was perhaps a poor course design choice, as it meant that everyone was arriving at the ropes pretty close together.  The last section of the course was a 5-8 hour trek up and over several ski hills in the area.  At this point, both Joel and Pete were having some knee problems and were unsure if they’d be able to make it through this section.  So, when we were given the option of doing the trek or biking back, with the lure of the finish line just a few kilometres away, we got on our bikes one last time and rode down to the finish line.  Despite the fact that we had been short-coursed several times, finishing this race ranked, which was our original race goal, still felt like a tremendous accomplishment.  Once we snapped a few photos, we sampled some delicious Long Trail before packing up our stuff and heading back to our motel.

For a great deal of the race, we talked about what we’d love to eat when we were done the race.  We found a fabulous restaurant right beside our motel where all our meal dreams came true.  Not only did this restaurant have more beer, but the motel also had a hot tub.  By 10:00 pm, however, we were all pretty exhausted and clambered into bed for a well-deserved rest.

The next morning, we headed over to the post-race breakfast (after pulling a tick out of Sally’s arm) where we engulfed many, many pieces of bacon and pancakes.  We were thrilled to find out that our Ontario cohorts, Running Free had finished second overall in the race.  As rookie expedition racers, we have a lot to learn from these guys and were stoked to even be competing at the same race as them.  After breakfast, we visited a couple of the local shops that had sponsored the race, then began the long drive home, fueled with snacks from a general store that boasted the world’s longest candy counter.   These snacks, and the fact that we still weren’t tired of Anchorman quotes, made getting stuck in Montreal a little easier to handle.  We arrived back in the GTA late Sunday evening, happy to be home, but sad that our adventure was over.

Our team went into this race with the goal of finishing our first multi-day adventure race as a ranked team.  We acheived that goal, as well as our personal goals of discovering more about our own limits as athletes.  We had an awesome time at Untamed New England, so much so that team Breathemag.ca will be heading down to Virginia in September for a 30 hour race put on by the same company. The good news is that since that race is half as long, the race report might be as well!