24h Rogaining World Championships!

This is going to be an all time classic that I will remember for the rest of my life... in fact I think even alzheimers wont be able to take that away from me!
Met Michi (my buddy Michael Eglin from Switzerland, he s the one that got me into the crazy races about three years ago!) in Phoenix where we rented a car and drove up into the mountain boonies. We had two days go get acclimatized to the 10.000 feet of elevation (which is too little for most, unfortunately) so we drove right up to 8.000 feet and stayed at a nice motel, getting a beer at some shabby bar where come cougars (e.g. old mountain p.... yeah, that) tried to chat us up.... grosssss... one was so drunk she fell of her bar stool and could not get up anymore.....
Anyhow, the mandatory beer before the race was crossed off the list and the night after we made it up to the campground, where hundreds of campers were already getting ready for what was going to be an excellent 24h rogaining event on a new map in a very nice area. It was pretty flat up there at elevation, but nontheless there were plenty of hills to be climbed during the event. What the heck is rogaining? Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance (ROGAINE) Seriously? Seriously!
24h of running around and finding as many checkpoints (which have different valued points depending where they are and how hard they are to find). That is the layman explanation I guess......





Map distribution and getting ready...

Got one! 50 points added...


Middle of the night, tired, sweaty, feeling a bit crazy...



They came from everywhere, 30 countries, Central/Eastern Europe, Australia, NZ, etc... some super fast, many just there recreationally, or fast for their age (e.g there were over 10 superveteran teams of each member at least 55 years or older!)

Michi and I wanted to go as hard as we could, and we did. To take it upfront we finished 16th out of rougly 200 teams, not bad ey? We stared off what I thought was slow but in hindsight was way too fast... I am slowly getting the hang of not being so ancy..... oh well. Moving along through the first day, we made great leeway on our planne route and had over a quater of the maximum points in a quater of the time. Thing is noone was supposed to get them all! And noone would. In a 24h race you make or loose ground on your competition after 12h.. some will come to a crawl (like us, Michi had altitude problems and I helped him for a while but soon became too tired myself to push the team along really), some move almost as fast at night as during the day.

We had a great time though, since I dont nav there was no disagreement there, plus Michi did a phantastic job, and we just got along great the whole time. I managed to jump into a lake shortly before night broke (dumbass me thought it was a reflection... of what??), so my feet never dried and were totally blistered up after the run was over. At night I got super tired for an hour or so but then got over it once the sun came up, was happy to see that I should be able to manage that well once I did more 24h adventure races .






Done!

Not much else here, a great event, Jeff was there too with his buddy Mark and had a great time as well. Michi and I limped to the finish with 2700 points, the winners (Team Nike/Balance Bar, Mike Kloser and Michael Tobin) had 3490... not THAT much more :)

Totally fascinated by the sport, will need to learn how to navigate!

Trioba Sprint #1, or Roger's first Adventure Race!

So I am now officially an adventure racer, with a 1 of 1 record, having completed the first adventure race with Jeff Woerner and Kimberly Shavender in Ellensburg. I met Jeff at a Seattle Running Company run in early February and while running together at Cougar Mountain told him that I was thinking of doing an Adventure Race, namely the Trioba Series. Found out that he not only had done four twenty four hour adventure races last year but was also still looking for teammates. Since then we have been regularly training together pretty much every weekend, and joined many DART trainings (Dirtworld Adventure Race Team, the best and most competitive AR team in the northwest). We usually run at cougar mtn. and bike at black diamond. My technical skills still are lacking a bit on the bike but I can hang on the climbs and am faster than most on the runs. The SRC sunday runs have really helped propel my running shape into being fairly competitive. I met other great runners, Carol O'hear for excample, who finished top10 at Western States 100 miler last year, who I ran with (35miles, 6h) at tiger mtn last weekend. Anyhow, so much to tell, I ll keep it short. We got to the race start all hyper, I was a bit worried though since my really big race is next weekend, the 24h World Rogaining Championships in Arizona, so I wanted to not completely blow out my legs. Not a problem the way we navigated. After some chatting with Cyril Jay-Rayon, the captain of DART, we started off like a rocket following DART instead of actually navigating, and already we made our first mistake and completely overshot the CP. In this way it continued, we were reasonably fast but Jeff sucked at the nav and I was no better at helping him out, so all day long we kind of flailed around and eventually got done with the trekking section. Some teams we must have passed five times, while we were faster they always took the direct route until we passed them again from another direction. I am sure it was fun for them!

Pre-race... wheel's on, check!

Pre race chat with Cyril from DART

Truckin towards the finish...

On the bike Jeff blew up a bit since he tried a new drink, yup, never try anything race day of if you have not used it many times in training, lesson learned! That mattered very little compared to the two extra misses we had on the nav., so we finished somewhere in the bottom 2/3 at the end. All in all not the greatest race but one under the belt and a lot learned. Woohoo this is my sport!

Good/Bad Luck on Mt. Adams

Holy of all swiss cows! This past weekend my german buddy Rainer convinced me to climb Mt. Adams. Good idea, we re both in shape, he's climbed it before, the weather was ok, we had a 3 day weekend (of which we only needed to spend 2 days, up and down quick)... so nothing really spoke agains it.


Drove down there in one go and were able to still climb up to about 300 meters from the termed "Lunch Counter", a flat-ish area at around 9'000 feet where people camp when the weather allows. Well we never even got there. Up around 8'000 feet it started storming (it already looked worse than predicted all day) and by the time we got close the wind was blowing icicles sideways onto our face such that we decided to camp for the night. We chose what we thought was a good protective area, a flat patch just besides a protective ridge.

Digging our campsite...

In the tent at night.. rainer likes his sleeping bag...

Took this at 3.am while shoveling snow off the tent..

On the way down....

Mistake. The wind picked up even more, right over the ridge, and carried more and more snow over it which started to cover up our tent. More and more. By now it was night and we could not sleep in a full blown strom on the mountain. We had to get out of the tent alternatively every 30 minutes and shovel the tent free.... that we did until late in the morning. No way getting off the mountain until it calmed down. Eventually the tent sort of collapsed and started ripping apart, and it was time to try to crawl down the mountain. Huge wind gusts, hail, not a fun outing. We made it down even though it was complete whiteout... a bit lucky since I met up with a rather big snow track that was half overblown. ..... at the end we were wet, cold, tired and had just had to leave the tent (rainer's 500$ expedition tent) behind. Tough luck, but we were happy to be back safe and a bit freaked out..

Volcano 1, Underprepared Foreginers 0


On the way going there....

Same place, on the way back....