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!
No comments:
Post a Comment