Sleep When You're Dead 12HR Night Adventure Race (9pm - 9am)

Red Feather Lakes, CO at the Ben Delatour Scout Ranch

Rocky Mountain Adventure Series

JZ and PWild, 2p Coed (Finished 2p Coed 2nd Place and 6th Overall)

Prerace meeting: 8:30pm

Weather: High in the 20’s overnight dropping to single digits, 60% chance of snow and wind gust up to 40mph.  Yikes! 

Preplanned:  Boiled water put in thermoses at Start/Finish and one in the Bin for T/A.  We had a jet boil but the wind was too crazy to heat anything up to eat.  Just keep moving……

The race format: “any order” and “nothing is mandatory”.  All points are optional and you have to get those points within the leg and use that mode of travel.  No going back to legs and getting points out of leg order.  And be back in 12 hours or you start to lose points.  “Create your own adventure”.  This is our favorite.   Bring on the Night! 

Our Plan:  

Prologue, Opening Trek, Bike to CP6-CP9, check time and proceed to other bike CPS or Bike to final trek, then to finish.  

What really happened....

The race started with a short Halloween themed prologue.  They had two persons from each team come forward to a large tangled web of string.  You had to find your team number on one end of the string, find the other end for the other teammate and tie the string to yourself.  Then when they said go you had to try and go up, under, over and thru to get the string un tangled without untying it to your teammate on the other end.   Was very challenging since you had other teams tangled in as well at the same time.  This brought out comic relief as people were crawling, going under picnic tables, over tree limbs, etc.  Taking about 5 minutes total to longer it was funny. 

Leg 1:  Trek

Retrieve CPs 1-5 in ANY order of Foot.  This section was awesome.  Cool night but lots of climbing that warmed you up fast.  We ended up taking off our rain coats and hats so that we didn't soak them with sweat as we knew the temps were going to drop after midnight and we needed dry gear.  We did well on this section.  Most teams, if not all went right to cp1 first and we decided to do 3, 5,2, 4, 1.  CP2 was Peak of Monster Mountain at 8059’.  We could feel the wind picking up…..  back to the S/F T/A 1 and punch in.  Off to change to bike gear and back to punch out at T/A 1.  But gear bin in truck to transport to T/A 2.    We drank some hot water to just warm up the core as it started to snow now. 

Leg 2:  Bike (We should re title this one to HIKE A BIKE, due to our navigation choice)  We took off out of the T/A 1 and took a short route choice, we thought thru the woods on the blue diamond trail as it looked like it intersected the road just up a short hill…..all we had to do was follow it north and it would hit the road.  Hike a bike straight up off the dirt road and across the small creek bridge covered in moss. (not traveled a lot)  It started to snow like blizzard straight sideways making it hard to focus with your headlamps.  It was white out conditions and it took all of us to keep our heads down and the snow out and keep the heat in.  Climb, climb, keep pushing….we would try to ride 20 feet and end up off our bikes again looking for the trail markers…..  Seemed liked we just keep going and going.  Then there it was!, no not the road but a building……what?  We shouldn’t have run into a building……  so we decided to regroup, go in the outhouse bathroom, and look at the map out of the wind and snow.  It didn;'t take long until "Remember when I said we should have just stayed north"…..well somehow the trail turned and went due northeast and now we were in the camp soaring eagle section of the course.  

Lesson re-learned, Follow your bearing, pretty rookie mistake.  Feet started to get cold from all the trekking in bike shoes, so we had to take a minute and change our socks, warm up a little and regroup.  This really put a damper on our spirit but we prevailed! 

Ok, so we need to leave this building and go do NORTH and we should hit the road.  Right?  Right!  Ok, back out in the blizzard.  At least we were able to ride from the building to the gate we had to climb over to the road on our bikes.  Finally!  The road, so now we had to decide what to do.  We didn’t have time to go way north due to the conditions.  So we decided to get CP6 and CP7 and then go straight to TA 2/3(not getting 8-17).  We passed a few teams that had flat tires and were walking…..bummer. 

Leg 3:  TA 2/3….was just a gate road entrance.  No shelter from the snow and wind.  So we grabbed our Bin and got on the other side of the volunteer car to try and block some of the cold wind as it was single digits at this point WITHOUT wind chill.  Sat down on the plastic we had to change to our trekking shoes.  We didn’t want anything else in our bin but the HOT WATER.  We drank to warm our core again and hurried to move on.  Keep moving, it’s the only way to stay warm.  This trekking section was a area that was not like the first trek.  This was very windy prairie, open, windy, rocky, and windy, with ups and downs in the wind and the snow covered the trails so you really had to watch where to go.  We got CP21 and CP18.  Leaving CP 19 & 20) CP18 was a grave and jay played a trick on my and said “it looks like its dug up” yelling down to me, I said   “what? In a freaked out voice as its close to Halloween!” and he said “just kidding".  My water had frozen and I had to rely on JZ’s to drink.  The trick of blowing the water back down your hose was a new one to me.  As we took the road back to the T/A 2/3 to our bikes the sun started to come up, we thought this be a warming feeling but it just seemed to feel colder.  The bar mitts on our bikes saved our fingers.  It wasn’t till this point in the race that we started to get REALLY cold.  Temps just kept dropping the whole race. 

Leg 4:  Bike to CP22 and to finish.  My bike chain decided to freeze and would let me change gears.  So riding a single speed and that S*&cks, lol.   Jay was afraid if I tried to change gears while riding it would break the chain and we would be walking back.   At one point we switched bikes, jay worked on my chain got it free and then rode my bike….keep in mind hes 6’2 and im 5’6 and he looked like a clown on a small bike ……but we got it moving again.    Back to the finish, we were done, its hard to keep eating as well when all your food if frozen.  But we made it.  What an amazing race night in the woods.  Good times and thank you Katie and the Boy Scouts!

Post Race:  We had a small breakfast burrito when we finished, thank you Katie's Mom. We had about an hour to wrap up event so we went to change out of our cold cloths.  That was nice!  We returned and did a lot of talking and chatting with other racers.  We enjoyed the going around the room and hearing how others got into this awesome sport.  We look forward to seeing them again and building the Colorado and beyond AR family. Congrats to all the first timers, stellar job. 

Thank you Katie, Nic and matthew and all the volunteers.  And for the photos!!!  It was really nice to see Katie at the finish and the photographer to catch the emotion of our frozen faces. 

Quarry Mountain Quest 6HR AR, Steamboat, Colorado by Athena Adventures/361 Adventures

1st Quarry MTN Quest 6HR Adventure Race

Steamboat Colorado

June 2019

by Athena Adventures/361 Adventures

Team Lupine Racing 

2P Coed

Jason Zorilla and Paula Pearson

Very excited to be a part of one of our old AR friends athena and 361 races to grace the Rocky Mountains. We took on the Quarry HR AR as a good "getting" back into it. June in the Mountains can bring any type of weather and it did, hot temps, rain, hail, lighting and more hot sun. This race was a fundraiser to support the Routt County Search and Rescue.  

Normally this race would have taken on a very different face. Due to weather in Colorado.  This year we were met with Epic high snow pack run off which Nix'ed the tube/paddle section which was very understandable.  We scouted out the section of water the night before and was like "wow".   Athena was on top of communication on this and said they would let all teams know options the morning of.  We brought our gear just in case.  

The race started at 10 with prerace at 930.  What we get to sleep in?  This felt odd, but great!  Arriving at 8:15 we staged our bikes at the central TA, gear bin and went to find bathrooms.  Seemed pretty calm compared to other races.  The park was full of softball games going on and all kinds of activity as well in the heart of Steamboat along the river.  

We received our maps at 8:30 and the planning began.  Rules of Travel, Clue Sheet, Passport, Emerald Mt Trail Network and Local Topo Trail Map at 1:16,000.  See maps below.  Navigating between each map made it challenging as well as they were not oriented to each other.  (see North Arrows drawn in by JZ)  The Paddle section was now a trek.   

There were 3 legs to the race.   Best part you could do them in ANY ORDER.  You had to get the points with in each leg only when you were on that leg.  Returning to TA after each section.  Once done with section you could not return.  

Pwild suggested and we agreed as a team to go on foot Leg 1(6 points): as we notice the bike leg was in the same section.  Getting to know the trails first may help us on the bike section later.   The Trek section took a little longer as we planned due to missing some early short cuts by going back and forth between maps.  Lots of trails, switchbacks and elevation.  It was a ski place after all.   We made some new trail buddies, 16 years old and just getting started in AR.  They were fun and said "we just want some new friends".    We said that's awesome!  See photo below of them on the course with us.  Great guys!  Hope to see them again in the future.








  

It was very hot and we went thru way more water than we thought we would.  In all our years in CO we have never seen Mosquitos like this year, not as bad as Wisconsin but bad.   Getting all CP's, 6 total and back to the TA.  On the way back we talked about doing the bike leg and then the trek(was paddle) but we notice we were doing well on foot and leg 5 had 5 points plus a bonus.  Bonus was the farthest point and a volunteer gave you a mental of physical challenge.  

Leg 3 (7+1 points): Trek in town we are doing!  In and out of the TA in 3 minutes just time to check in and get some water in packs.  This section started straight back up the Olympic ski Jump Mountain to the top of the main ski jump.  JZ helped PWILD climb by allowing her to hang on to his shorts from behind. We were just hoping they didnt fall down.  :)  This is were PWilds hot spot on her right foot came on.  Dealing with this for months now.  So it was jog and fast walk the rest of the race.  ARriving at the farthest point JZ took on the physical challenge, he had to stack 7 rocks straight up as fast as he could.  Bam!  Done, he was so fast even the volunteer was shocked. Side note: He like to do this as a hobby.  Off we went.  Getting all the points, the last point a storm started rolling in on our way back to the TA.  Like monsoon raining, JZ said you want to take cover?  PWild said "%$^#" it lets go we are already wet.  

Back in the TA most racers were under the pavilion.  We check in and JZ brought our bin to the shelter so we could get our bike gear on.  NO time to waste.  We thought we had the wrong tires to start but now we REALLY knew we had the wrong ones.  This was going to be a mud fest.  :)
Leg 2(5 points): We went for 2 points, maybe 3 if we had time of the bike section.  The storms were still raining hard on us and we headed out anyway.  Because that just what you do!  Got the first point then turned to climb higher and the black cloud above was loud with lighting and thunder.  Jay stopped on the trail and said we cant go out in the open prairie or we could be in danger of this lightening.....lets hunker down for a minute and see if it passes soon.....we waited.....waited, under a small bush like tree cover but not really, getting more wet.  We waited I bet 10 minutes and then took off, just in time to grab point number 2 & 3 and take the fire road STRAIGHT down behind the TA.  Slip and Slide the whole way!  DONE!

Came into the finish it stopped raining and we hugged and smiled it was over.  Great race for beginners and seasoned racers.  Well done, creative, positive atmosphere and still challenging all around.  We recommend this race to everyone!

CHASIN' the Bone AR in WI by Rick Schnell

May 4, 2019 was just too nice a day for an Adventure Race.  Light winds, cool temps, no bugs, no rain, and clear skies.  Team Lupine meet  at the  St. Cloud recreation center in Wisconsin, just North of the Northern unit of the kettle Moraine State Forest. The race was the Chasin the Bone 9 hour Adventure race.  This was the 2nd race of the 2019 Wisconsin Adventure racing series, and Race directors Anthony Leiton and Mike Prucha were getting to be old hands at directing this race.  The race started at 9:00AM, with a short Mountain Bike ride to the paddle put-in on the Sheboygan river.  Located on the river, both upstream and down, were  checkpoints of varying values.  (two check points downstream were worth 1 and 2 points, and another, located upstream was worth 3 points)  Team Lupine members Dan Ziegler, Michele Ericsson,  myself, along with fill-in team member Andy Starsky loaded into canoes, and set off on a 8 mile paddle to collect the  3 checkpoints .  We also hooked up with Solo racer Jeff Everson, whom will be racing with us in a couple weeks (Rib Mountain Adventure Race).  Jeff stayed with us the remainder of the race.  Always nice to have another set of eyes on the map. After the paddle leg, which took us 1 hour 49 minutes,  we transitioned to Mountain bikes for a 7 mile road ride to TA2 at the Red Oaks Orienteering section in the North Kettle Moraine state Forest.  The woods are very topographically challenging, but we found the 11 controls with little difficulty, returning to the TA2 and setting off on a 5 mile road ride to the Greenbush area of the Northern Kettles.  At the TA3 we hit the Mountain bike trails for 9 miles on the Greenbush Mountain bike trails.  We completed this section exhausted, but with the 2nd fastest time.  Again now at TA3 we transitioned to the last orienteering section on the Greenbush maps. The maps and area that we were orienteering in are some of the best that Wisconsin has to offer.  If you ever get the opportunity to do an orienteering event here (Usually hosted by the Badger Orienteering club) I highly recommend it.  This area was sculptured by a glacier hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the woods are very clean and run-able.    We managed to locate 18 of the 24 controls (2hrs 24 minutes), before our self imposed time limit of 5PM made it necessary to return to the TA3.  We then quickly transitioned back to Mt.Bikes for the last 10 mile bike leg back to the finish in St.Cloud.  The team  finished at 5:41PM, with a total of 40 out of a possible 46 controls. 

So, when all was said and done, we finished in 2nd place in the Coed Elite division, 3rd overall.  We managed a qualifying spot in the USARA Nationals race in September down in North Carolina., Due to the fact the 1st place team racing the Chasin the Bone adventure race (Rib Mountain Racing team ) had already received the $400.00 sponsorship towards Nationals in an earlier race this year, that sponsorship rolled down to us.  That, and $100.00 cash for 2nd place finish in our division made a nice day even better. 

Thank you to Lupine Lights, Hammer Nutrition, Suunto, Zeal and Salomon!

Next up will be Rib Mountains 8 hour Adventure Challenge, the next race in the Wisconsin Adventure racing series.  Come out and Play with us!  

http://www.ribmountainadventurechallenge.com/Race/Home.html