I had not raced with Julie before but Eric did and they were supremely successful, so I was not the least bit worried, and found out soon I did not need to be anyways.
We arrived at San Jose Airport and were picked up by Eric who drove down with all our bikes and gear, and off we were to Santa Barbara. We were planning on arriving early to have plenty of time to prepare, but the day ended up a blur of constant running around checking in, picking up race maps and infos, going to meetings, getting the gear ready, working on maps very late and dropping in bed to catch 1h of sleep from 3-4am... knowing we will not get any sleep the night after anyways unless we drop out....
Race start had an interesting twist... a warmup... one had to ride to the start... it was about a 6 mile ride on undulating roads to the start, where we then coasteered along the beautiful coast (we ran across Kevin Costners lawn.... sorry!!), all the way back the the hotel where the kayaks were waiting... (not really worthy of the name, pretty sad that they used Sevylor Tahiti inflatables for such a big race!).
There were 50 teams present, two boats per team, makes 100 boats... and one was deflated... ours DANG!! Could not believe it... had to run around and find the guy responsible who then pumped up and fixed the boat... then Eric in a Boneheaded usual approach to try to stay as dry as possible was trying to enter the surf way too early and capsized.. not once, not twice, three times... we were on the water in probably 48th or 49th place..... wow, what a start....
Our paddling skills did not help, I was sitting way too low in the boat and did not get enough power so we only passed about 5-6 teams on the water and came out in the early 40 range, ready to rumble! The first bike leg went well and we moved past team by team... the only good thing when you are way in the back....
Eric powering up the first hill of the day...
Then we got to the trek and had a superior run, partly because we ran well and Eric's navigation was solid, party due to a misplaced checkpoint that two teams nicely enough mentioned and we found it in the wrong place immediately... after 7 hours or racing we suddenly found ourselves in 6th place!!! The race was on!
After we got on the bike we were once again plagued by bad luck, Eric's light gave out and mine had connection issues so apart from having to deal with the issues we had inferior lighting once darkness set compared to the other teams out there. It was necessary, the downhill sections were brutal and Dan Barger, in his usual, slightly arrogant fashion, proclaimed that the night before with "I dont like easy races...!", yup.
We fell back to about 10th place throughout the night's uphill fireroad battles and downhill singletrack maddness, and as the sun came up I caught second wind. This is something peculiar with me, I get a huge surge of energy the morning after a long hard night, and used it to tow Julie at first, then Eric, and then both, and we managed to pass a team up to the last hilly checkpoint... from there it was downhill to the beach, finish a reasonably short Orienteering section, and along the coast to the finish. With strong headwind, cramping muscles and big smiles we rode the last few miles along the beach and finished the US Championships in 8th place... superbly happy with this race... could we have done better? Always, there s not a team that does not drop minutes, maybe hours in a race that lasts 27h30minutes.. but overall this race went about as well as we could have hoped for.. after all we were ahead of many very strong and well funded adventure race teams such as Golite Timberland Sprint, Wingnut and Mighty Dog... this is it for me for a while... I am taking a mini-sabbatical from MerGeo, stepping down from my captain role and will only race the fun races next year... its time for others to step up and for me to take it a bit easier.....
Done! A well deserved 8th place...
