SteelSports 2009 Eco-Lonestar Race Report

*This is one of 3 maps that we used*

Team:  Rodney Skyles, Lesley Conrad, Emily Roe  Support:  Katrina

Eco-Lonestar event page

Race Date: Saturday, March 7, 2009

Race Start: 7:00 am

About:  This was a qualifying race for the 24-hour USARA nationals adventure race in October, 2009.   This was a 3-person race, instead of the normal 4-person, which was actually good for us, because Lesley and I could not find a 3rd person, until race week!  Our other teammates were either unavailable for this weekend, or injured.

Lesley knew Emily and invited her to come along.  Emily had never done an adventure race, but was very willing to give it a try.  She's a triathlete and is doing an iron man this year.

Pre-race:  Katrina and I arrived at the race Transition area and set up around 3:30 pm.  Lesley and Emily arrived a few hours later and we all set up our race gear.

Sleep was a little difficult, because starting out it was pretty muggy.  During the night, there were teams arriving and setting up their TAs, so there was always something going on.

Leg 1:  TREK

The race start was a 100 yard sprint to pick maps and instructions up off the road.  There was a HUGE bottleneck since all team captains were picking up these items from two piles.  One team came back saying they ran out of maps.  Oops!

We plotted the two points on the map and took off running down the road.  We were in the top 25% of teams as we turned off the road onto a logging road.  We took the logging road just short of the trail that the point was on to save some time.  It worked and we briefly jumped a head of three or four teams.

The clue for CP 1 was "Bridge".  As teams arrived at the bridge, there was a CP marker, but no punch.  Someone was there saying THAT was not THE CP, so teams began looking around.  I told Lesley and Emily that the CP was just East of where the bridge/trail crossed the creek, so we went down the trail a little ways.  Team Werewolves were close behind.  We all started looking where the trail headed East, after the bridge and then crossed the creek again.  No luck.  After about five minutes, I followed the creek back toward the bridge and BOOM.  Found it.  Tom Lane from Werewolves was right behind.  Off we go to CP 2.

Now here is where I made a rookie, navigation mistake.  Growing up, I have always defaulted to "muscling" through competition, instead of using my head.  I've gotten better as I've aged, but it's still a problem sometimes.  I think my dad can still beat me at basketball, because of the relaxed "touch" it takes to shoot.

For those who don't know, Navigating is a skill, just like any other discipline (mountain biking, paddling, etc.)  The more you do it, the better you get at it.   I haven't adventure raced much in the past few years due to money, time and injury, so I'm a little out of practice.  Usually Justin is racing with us.  I have a habit of planning the route and then quickly showing Justin what I am thinking.  He's a good navigator, so he will concur or let me know what he thinks.  Regardless, it's a quick double-check for me to make sure it's the best route.  Justin was directing another race on Sunday, so my normal routine was off.

In the heat of competition, there were now a lot of teams around us, I quickly decided to follow the creek to the next CP, since it went right to it.  Well, we tried to do this, but instead of heading East, we ended up going SOUTH.  We spent about an hour going in a circle (or two) back to CP 1.  From there, I did what I should have done before, which was actually look at my compass and head EAST to the CP2.  When we did this, we quickly found a HUGE, Wide trail that pretty much led directly to the CP on the bridge.  UGH!

We ran all the way back to TA.  Katrina let us know that Vignette was an hour ahead and Werewolves were a couple of minutes behind them.  We blew an hour on an easy CP.  SORRY!

Leg 2:  PADDLE 

I sold my Kayak after competing in the Epic last year, so Lesley borrowed Justin's boat and a solo Daggar whitewater kayak for this race.  We had to portage our boats about 300 meters to the water and start an 8 mile, open-lake paddle.   

I started out in the whitewater kayak.  It was a tight fit, but I was able to squeeze in there, with a shoehorn and some butter.  I was able to keep it in a relatively straight line, as long as I was paddling, but if I stopped, I would immediately do a 180 and face backwards (not sure why).After being the LAST team back from leg 1, we passed a couple of teams in transition, but they quickly passed us within the first quarter mile of the paddle (PB & J and Tom McMillan's team).

After about 30 minutes of paddling, Lesley volunteered to trade with me.  I pried myself out of the kayak and jumped in the big, roomy, tank that Justin calls a boat ( ;-P  just kidding ... kind of ).

Lesely paddled the remaining 6+ miles in the whitewater kayak.  It was still slow, but she is TOUGH!  I owe her a pizza or something.  Maybe I'll build her a cake.

We found CP 3 at the end of the lake with no problem and started heading back North for CP 4.   To our surprise, there were tons of boats on the shore at CP 4.  Mystery event!  We had to look at a map and memorize our location and the location of another CP.  As we arrived at each CP, there would be another map with our current location and the location of another CP.  There were three CPs on this trekking leg (CPs A, B and C).  With a ton of bushwhacking, we found each CP with very little problem.  We came back to our boats and noticed there were two or three other teams' boats still on the shore.  Bobby (volunteer) asked if we found all the CPs, we said, 'yes'.  He told us not to judge our position by the boats on the beach, because many teams did not find all of the CPs.  COOL!  A little encouragement after a poor race start!

So, we jumped back in the boats for the remaining 3+ miles back to the TA.  We did not get passed on the way back, so I guess we maintained our position, but our time was still slow.

Leg 3:  Mountain Bike

Glad to be off the water, we quickly transitioned to the mountain bike leg.  Lesley called out UTMs (very well, I might add), as I plotted and Katrina took care of me, as usual, by filling my water pack, providing food/fruit.  She rocks!

Oh, yeah, as a side note, Katrina said that our transitions were faster than she has ever seen them.  I was racing with two women, so that ruins the stereotype that women take longer than men to get ready (ZING!  Chris and Justin!)  

Anyway, this mountain bike leg would rely heavily on route selection for speed.  In spite of my nav error on CP 2, I was feeling pretty confident about our ability to navigate.  Most of the eight CPs on this leg were off trail.  I only remember #13 being on trail, so....

We made a number of route choices that saved a ton of time.  One was a risky choice that did not pay off and ended up requiring a little bushwhacking and fence jumping, but we did not really lose time.  Plus we knew it was a "risk" when we tried it.   :-D

The mountain bike leg required teams to bike on "multi-use" trails.  We saw a number of motorcross bikes tearing it up through the sand.  YES SAND!  Imagine the sandiest sectoins of Tyler State park.  Multiply that times 10 and have it go on for 100 yards.  Fun times!  Oh, by the way, Emily recently purchased her first mountain bike.  As we started the sand slog, Emily had her first wreck!  Congratulations, Emily!  ;-P

We passed a number of teams on this section.  Especially on CP 12, we bushwhacked through some gnarly briars.  There were three of us teams that went into the woods around the same time.  We found the CP and jumped back on our bikes and headed to CP 13.  As we passed the area all us teams jumped into the woods, there was Nancy Bills' team and a couple of other teams on the bridge looking at their maps and asked if we had found the CP.  I said, "Yes, but I'm hungry and need to find a pizza!"    Keep the jokes coming, is my motto!  But seriously, I was hungry ... didn't eat or drink enough.

We biked quickly back to the TA and got instructions for the last leg.

Leg 4:  Rogaine Trek

There were 6 points (plus a punch at the TA) on this leg.  We had to get as many as we could and be back by 7 pm (although this seemed to have changed by the time we got back, due to the late start).  We quickly transitioned again.  We had about an hour to get CPs and get back.  

The first CP to try was about a mile away.  We found the CP 16 with no problem, after a little bushwhacking.  We still had some time, so I thought we would try to pick up CP 18 and maybe stab at 17, depending on the time.  It started getting dark and rain a little.  CP 18 was a little under a mile away from 16.  It was getting dark and hard to see the terrain features, but we quickly started off the trail to look for 18.  In retrospect, I know that we were about 200 meters short of where we should have jumped off the trail to bushwhack.  Oh well, we need to get back by 7 pm (we thought), so we headed back.

We made it back to the TA around 6:40 pm.  The race started at 7:15 am, but Scott the race director said the cutoff was still 7 pm.  The race clock still showed 40 minutes left to race when we got back.

We found a race volunteer and asked what we needed to do.  We saw teams doing a special test.  She said, "If you didn't find all the CPs on the last leg, it doesn't really matter".  She scanned our bar code that recorded our finish time.  We talked to another volunteer and told them we want to do the special test, if it's part of the race.  We did that.  The race end was a bit chaotic.  We did not get five (5) of the CPs on the last leg, but got all of others (skipped 17 - 21 due to time) you can see on the map.

Finally:

Overall, the course was laid out very well and I really enjoyed the nav challenge.  I was not crazy about the sand, but that's part of it.  I'm looking forward to seeing split times of the other teams, because I think, the only "bad" parts of the race we had were my mess up on CP 2 and the paddle (of course).

This was Emily's first adventure race, but you would not have known it, by the way she raced.  She was fast, strong and positive.   She was a great teammate and I'm looking forward to racing with her again.  Lesley was strong, as usual, and showed that she is a well-rounded adventure racer.  I love her "can do" attitude too.

Even though we didn't achieve our objective for this race, it was still a good learning and training experience.  I do think we have the strongest, fastest team of core racers that I have ever raced with.  We just need to improve our paddle legs (working on that now) and keep reducing the nav errors, which I am more confident than ever we (and by "we" I mean my bonehead mistakes) can do.

When we finished the race, Katrina had most of the camp put up and ready to go!  I felt so bad, because I thought we would finish the race earlier and be ready to head back home.  Most of the people we know at races were not there, so Katrina was pretty much by herself most of the day.  I owe you BIG TIME!

Thank you, so much, to Katrina for feeding, packing, cooking, loving, caring for me/us while we race.  I love you!

I'M READY FOR THE NEXT ONE!

2009 Eco-Lonestar Results

• 15 of 28 Overall  (This is bad, but considering we were dead last after the 1st Trek and then we lost time on paddle, this isn't THAT bad.  I think we could have placed 5th or 6th overall with a faster boat.  That is with keeping the mess up on CP 2).
  

• 12 of 18 in Division