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Saturday Jul 17, 2021 #
Event: Maine Summer Adventure Race
Adventure Racing 24:00:00 [3] 85.5 mi (16:51 / mi)
24hr MSAR with Janet. This was her second race, and a big jump up from the 6hr Trilogy AR earlier this year! She turned out to be the perfect teammate, powering through the course and plunging down into sketchy ditches, quarries, and brambles to punch the passport. More importantly, she was unflappably upbeat, unfazed by weather, darkness and mud, and she pulled me along through the course.
Janet and I both sea kayak and mountain bike together, so MSAR seemed like a perfect fit. Conflicting schedules meant we didn't get very many opportunities to practice together, but we did get in a few sessions of mountain biking with dogs and a long trek/packraft/night-nav after work one evening.
We knew we weren't going to be clearing the course, so we opted to play to our strengths, and focus on the biking and paddling. I was disappointed to see the sea kayaking was on a lake. I'd really played up the SEA part of MSAR's glorious history in convincing Janet to try this out. We picked out a shiny green double, which seemed brand new (packing plastic in the back hatch) except for several empty beer cans behind my seat. It wasn't us, I promise!
Final kayaking anecdote: we all paddle rudderless sea kayaks, and pride ourselves on our graceful edged turns, initiated by edging the boat and transferring weight to the OPPOSITE foot peg and using a sweep stroke to turn. EVERY single one of my ruddered turns started out with the boat going the wrong direction. :)
The mountain biking was great fun. All three sections were really enjoyable. Very happy we got to experience all of these before it really started raining.
We went full course until the Lost Valley orienteering, skipping that section entirely. I'd promised a course with no running, and neither of us enjoy hill climbing, so we made a pre-start decision to skip it, and even sent our trekking shoes ahead in the paddle bag. I felt very ashamed when we got to the TA and I had to tell @jerkface that we were skipping the O-course he designed and mapped. He assured me there would be plenty more at the next trek section.
Our first real nav bobble was at CP 29 "Ruins", spending a lot of time with some other teams searching downhill and north of the loop trail when we should have been climbing the hill. I spent a good part of my stuck-in-traffic drive home thinking about CP 29 from the point of view of an orienteererer, a novice adventure racer, and from the imagined point of views of an experienced adventure racer and of a race director. If you're reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments on the merits/downsides/lessons/etc of points like CP 29. I'll hold mine back for a bit.
My food choices for this race weren't agreeing with me, and Janet was practically spoon-feeding me Good To-Go risotto as we set off for the trek/packraft. We absolutely spiked the first CP31 (cliff base), pace counting right up to it, and were feeling pretty good, despite the horrid muddy slop on those ATV trails. Got to the far side of the bridge to attack 33 (N outlet pond), and again, things seemed to be going well. The train still had all of its wheels.
Up until a few hours ago, when I had a chance to unpack and study the maps, if you had asked me where this CP flag was, I would have sworn on my life that it was on the right bank of the stream draining out to the south from the pond. That's not what the map shows, but hey, that's what's was seared into my sleep-addled brain. We worked our way up the north (east) side of that southern stream, until the going got rough, and easy terrain beckoned from the western bank. So we crossed over and kept going, with every intention of just steering back right as we approached what I expected would be a beaver dam holding back an actual solid water pond. We ended up on some sort of boggy meadow from hell, with a herd path that lured us in and took my concentration off the map and compass and into "we're so close, let's just stumble around until we see it" mode.
Our track shows we nearly stumbled onto it (85 ft), but instead we got so turned around that I switched into Panic Bearing to Safety mode, and that had me even more worried, as our escape bearing was about 120 degrees off from what I would have guessed from where I thought we were. At the exact moment where we were huddled around the map, having a very tense conversation about getting back to safety, the tree above us exploded as two or three grouse took off. It was surreal, but definitely lightened the mood.
When we finally came out, we were on the south side of the bridge and it started to become clearer what had happened. It was now a bit after midnight, and we'd given ourselves a generous 2:30AM deadline to be south of the 4AM suggested point. We had talked about hiking up to 38 and back to redeem ourselves, but decided to cut bait and head for the water. That turned out to be a critical decision, as we ended up needing more of our time cushion than expected on the way back to the finish.
Inflated the rafts at the trail north of 32, and paddled up the increasingly-narrow arm to 32 rather than getting out and walking, mostly out of stubbornness, and a relief to be back in boats again. A highlight of the race for me was seeing a family of 5+ raccoons peering down on us from a tree by the water as we paddled by.
We got lucky on 35 and simply aimed at "where all the lights had been" as a shoreside team tagged that point ahead of us. It was drizzling enough that our lights weren't carrying over the water, and my light was putting out fewer lumens as the battery silently ran down. Once I swapped in a new battery, things improved a bit. I'd taken a bearing for the crossing from 35 to 34, and planned to hit the tip of the long island between on the crossing. Unfortunately, we got joined on this leg by our good friends from 4050, and they were paddling faster than we were. We rounded the tip of something to our right and then started working our way down the next shadowy thing in front of us, even as my compass bearing started turning further and further off-course. They landed and started searching at a narrow squeeze between two islands. There was a narrow squeeze on our maps meant we'd been sucked down the intermediate island thinking it was the far peninsula. Janet and I worked our way back up, made the correct crossing, and things proceeded smoothly from there.
I really wished we'd had clear skies for the overnight paddle. The overnight canoe on MSAR 2018 remains one of my favorite AR memories, and this could have easily surpassed it. The return of daylight and a few minutes of play in the outflow from the second dam lifted our sagging, soggy spirits.
After a final, incredibly-soggy transition to bikes, it was a 20mi hilly road ride back to the finish. The final hour seemed to be competing with Untamed 2018 for "cartoonish amounts of rain whilst riding a bike".
MSAR 2021: We knew we'd be racing in the rain. We had no idea we'd be racing into history:
1.98" of rain fell on Sunday in Gray, ME (Pineland Farms), setting daily records in Portland, Augusta, and Concord NH. Nearly 7" fell near Jaffrey, NH (Monadnock)
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GRAY ME
0407 AM EDT MON JUL 19 2021
...RECORD DAILY MAXIMUM RAINFALL SET AT PORTLAND ME...
A RECORD RAINFALL OF 1.17 WAS SET AT PORTLAND ME YESTERDAY JULY 18.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 1.12 SET IN 2008.
Janet and I both sea kayak and mountain bike together, so MSAR seemed like a perfect fit. Conflicting schedules meant we didn't get very many opportunities to practice together, but we did get in a few sessions of mountain biking with dogs and a long trek/packraft/night-nav after work one evening.
We knew we weren't going to be clearing the course, so we opted to play to our strengths, and focus on the biking and paddling. I was disappointed to see the sea kayaking was on a lake. I'd really played up the SEA part of MSAR's glorious history in convincing Janet to try this out. We picked out a shiny green double, which seemed brand new (packing plastic in the back hatch) except for several empty beer cans behind my seat. It wasn't us, I promise!
Final kayaking anecdote: we all paddle rudderless sea kayaks, and pride ourselves on our graceful edged turns, initiated by edging the boat and transferring weight to the OPPOSITE foot peg and using a sweep stroke to turn. EVERY single one of my ruddered turns started out with the boat going the wrong direction. :)
The mountain biking was great fun. All three sections were really enjoyable. Very happy we got to experience all of these before it really started raining.
We went full course until the Lost Valley orienteering, skipping that section entirely. I'd promised a course with no running, and neither of us enjoy hill climbing, so we made a pre-start decision to skip it, and even sent our trekking shoes ahead in the paddle bag. I felt very ashamed when we got to the TA and I had to tell @jerkface that we were skipping the O-course he designed and mapped. He assured me there would be plenty more at the next trek section.
Our first real nav bobble was at CP 29 "Ruins", spending a lot of time with some other teams searching downhill and north of the loop trail when we should have been climbing the hill. I spent a good part of my stuck-in-traffic drive home thinking about CP 29 from the point of view of an orienteererer, a novice adventure racer, and from the imagined point of views of an experienced adventure racer and of a race director. If you're reading this, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments on the merits/downsides/lessons/etc of points like CP 29. I'll hold mine back for a bit.
My food choices for this race weren't agreeing with me, and Janet was practically spoon-feeding me Good To-Go risotto as we set off for the trek/packraft. We absolutely spiked the first CP31 (cliff base), pace counting right up to it, and were feeling pretty good, despite the horrid muddy slop on those ATV trails. Got to the far side of the bridge to attack 33 (N outlet pond), and again, things seemed to be going well. The train still had all of its wheels.
Up until a few hours ago, when I had a chance to unpack and study the maps, if you had asked me where this CP flag was, I would have sworn on my life that it was on the right bank of the stream draining out to the south from the pond. That's not what the map shows, but hey, that's what's was seared into my sleep-addled brain. We worked our way up the north (east) side of that southern stream, until the going got rough, and easy terrain beckoned from the western bank. So we crossed over and kept going, with every intention of just steering back right as we approached what I expected would be a beaver dam holding back an actual solid water pond. We ended up on some sort of boggy meadow from hell, with a herd path that lured us in and took my concentration off the map and compass and into "we're so close, let's just stumble around until we see it" mode.
Our track shows we nearly stumbled onto it (85 ft), but instead we got so turned around that I switched into Panic Bearing to Safety mode, and that had me even more worried, as our escape bearing was about 120 degrees off from what I would have guessed from where I thought we were. At the exact moment where we were huddled around the map, having a very tense conversation about getting back to safety, the tree above us exploded as two or three grouse took off. It was surreal, but definitely lightened the mood.
When we finally came out, we were on the south side of the bridge and it started to become clearer what had happened. It was now a bit after midnight, and we'd given ourselves a generous 2:30AM deadline to be south of the 4AM suggested point. We had talked about hiking up to 38 and back to redeem ourselves, but decided to cut bait and head for the water. That turned out to be a critical decision, as we ended up needing more of our time cushion than expected on the way back to the finish.
Inflated the rafts at the trail north of 32, and paddled up the increasingly-narrow arm to 32 rather than getting out and walking, mostly out of stubbornness, and a relief to be back in boats again. A highlight of the race for me was seeing a family of 5+ raccoons peering down on us from a tree by the water as we paddled by.
We got lucky on 35 and simply aimed at "where all the lights had been" as a shoreside team tagged that point ahead of us. It was drizzling enough that our lights weren't carrying over the water, and my light was putting out fewer lumens as the battery silently ran down. Once I swapped in a new battery, things improved a bit. I'd taken a bearing for the crossing from 35 to 34, and planned to hit the tip of the long island between on the crossing. Unfortunately, we got joined on this leg by our good friends from 4050, and they were paddling faster than we were. We rounded the tip of something to our right and then started working our way down the next shadowy thing in front of us, even as my compass bearing started turning further and further off-course. They landed and started searching at a narrow squeeze between two islands. There was a narrow squeeze on our maps meant we'd been sucked down the intermediate island thinking it was the far peninsula. Janet and I worked our way back up, made the correct crossing, and things proceeded smoothly from there.
I really wished we'd had clear skies for the overnight paddle. The overnight canoe on MSAR 2018 remains one of my favorite AR memories, and this could have easily surpassed it. The return of daylight and a few minutes of play in the outflow from the second dam lifted our sagging, soggy spirits.
After a final, incredibly-soggy transition to bikes, it was a 20mi hilly road ride back to the finish. The final hour seemed to be competing with Untamed 2018 for "cartoonish amounts of rain whilst riding a bike".
MSAR 2021: We knew we'd be racing in the rain. We had no idea we'd be racing into history:
1.98" of rain fell on Sunday in Gray, ME (Pineland Farms), setting daily records in Portland, Augusta, and Concord NH. Nearly 7" fell near Jaffrey, NH (Monadnock)
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GRAY ME
0407 AM EDT MON JUL 19 2021
...RECORD DAILY MAXIMUM RAINFALL SET AT PORTLAND ME...
A RECORD RAINFALL OF 1.17 WAS SET AT PORTLAND ME YESTERDAY JULY 18.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 1.12 SET IN 2008.