Training Log Archive: Bash

The closest thing to training today was a trip to MEC to shop for outdoor gear. Why is it so impossible to ever have "enough" outdoor gear?

ESAR Adventure Race, Caledon

Emergency Services Adventure Race (ESAR) in Caledon - teams from Police, Fire, Paramedic, Hospitals and 15 civilian teams, including us. The big news is that Bent's open male team, the Tree Huggers from Mars, came 1st of 79 teams! I'm so proud of those guys!! After the race, Bent got the usual questions when people saw his recumbent (hence the nickname "Bent") mountain bike, since yesterday's race course had lots of trail riding. For the first time, he was able to say, "Yeah, it worked OK out there. Actually, we won." :-))

My open female team, the Tree Huggers from Venus, included Luscious and Gorgeous, who had never raced before. Thanks to Appalachian Extreme, I was wearing an arm splint and apparently I sprained my ankle in a strange place last weekend (which I didn't find out until after ESAR - my chiropractor raced with Bent and noticed it as we were sitting together). So... let's just say that we went out there with every intention of being a fun team.

It was fun to race close to home. We started out in Forks of the Credit with a nav section, then mountain biking mostly on trails, then canoeing on the Credit River, then back to trail running and nav on the Bruce Trail and in Terra Cotta CA, then to the finish line biking on roads. There were a few special tasks, e.g. climbing across a rope bridge, carrying a stack of stretchers, climbing a 3 meter wall, and carrying a team member on a stretcher across the finish line.

At the first CP, I thought I heard the volunteer say we were 55th, which seemed OK for a fun-oriented female team in a field of 79 teams. But I must have heard wrong, because we were 13th at the next CP! I've got to hand it to Luscious and Gorgeous. As new racers, they did a lot of running during the day and were lightning fast in TAs. Because of my arm injury, they had to contribute more, e.g. taking the canoe at the portage and carrying me in the stretcher over the finish line. They kept the mood light all day and never complained, even when I was leading them through nasty, rotten fallen trees in a foot-sucking marsh. They especially never complained as we were climbing the escarpment to Devil's Pulpit right behind two teams of young policemen dressed in shorts (who eventually asked us to lead the way). ;-)

End result - we were 1st of 11 female teams in the race - yahoo! Unfortunately, because we were civilians, we didn't qualify for the female category, so the female team of emergency services personnel who finished half an hour behind us got all the great prizes. We were 4th of the 15 civilian teams though, which was still good for a medal and a gift certificate at Running Free. We were somewhere around 12th-15th of 79 teams overall, which I wouldn't have believed possible if someone had suggested it beforehand.

So hats off to Luscious and Gorgeous for kicking some butt in their first adventure race! :-)

It was really cold on the descent from the fire tower, and a couple of team members got mild hypothermia. We couldn't decide if our driving rain had turned into driving snow, but it was definitely a toss-up. Shifty even attempted to break into a locked outhouse so we could get shelter inside. We made a couple of stops, including a puppy pile nap in a tarp which actually restored us to consciousness in just 30 minutes.

The next section mostly took place on high mountain summits and ridges, covered with soft, thigh-deep snow and icy bogs. We had a couple of good CPs and were thrilled to learn at CP20 that we were in 5th place in the elite coed category. Every team ahead of us was well-known as a great team - what a strange feeling to be in their company. In the ensuing excitement, we drifted off bearing and lost time on the last CP before the TA. There was a 3:30 p.m. cut-off to start the paddling section and we only had two hours left, so we needed to make decent time. We wouldn't have time for a long TA, but there was plenty of time to do a 1.5 km steep downhill bushwhack, followed by 1.5 km on roads. Or so we thought... We came out on a road that wasn't marked on our map - but we didn't know that and both our altimeters were giving inaccurate readings unbeknownst to us, so we spent far too much time looking for the TA.

In the end, we missed the paddling cut-off after trekking for almost 30 hours. We could have moved forward to the final mountain bike section, which would have given us a reasonably good race ranking, but we all felt that we only wanted to cross the finish line if we'd done the entire course. So we retired from the race, both pleased and disappointed with how we'd done. An amazing experience overall, for me.