Saturday was the Jackrabbit Mountain Adventure Race outside of Hiawassee Georgia .I raced with longtime adventure racing teammate Andi and Lee, who is an adventure racing veteran, but someone I had never raced with before. I ended up being the mandatory equipment needed to make us a coed team.
Adventure racing combines paddling, biking and foot travel in an event that requires map navigation to find control points throughout the course.
Control Point
We typically get the maps the night before the race to plot our strategy and route choices for the next day. Sometimes this is the most stressful part of the race. Second guessing route choices can make for a fitful few hours of sleep the night before.What looks good on paper doesn't always translate to the best choice when you are out in the woods. The map is never marked "Stay out! You will get ripped to shreds". Too bad, all three of us suffered a long bushwhack through the "shiggy".
Consequences of the Bushwhack
The paddle section went quickly, about an hour and twenty minutes. We saved some time using portage wheels and running the canoe about a mile and a half down a road to avoid paddling around a large peninsula.
We transitioned to the mountain bikes and started riding to our first bike checkpoint, CP5. This ride gave us a foreshadow of the climbing that would be a constant throughout the rest of the race. On the latter part of the leg from CP5 to CP6 is where the briar patch bushwhack occurred. This really slowed us down picking our way through the saddle to CP6.
Back on the bikes and a long steep climb up to CP7. There was a great overlook at this high point, we spent 3 seconds taking it in, and started back down to the next checkpoint. CP8 was a transition area where we dropped our bikes and went out for a trekking section with 4 checkpoints to find. On paper (the map) it looked to only be about 5 miles for this foot section. Five miles if you don't lead the team off course and a couple hundred extra feet down the mountain. We floundered around until we finally found the trail we missed back up the mountain and things went better from there. We collected the 4 CP's and made it back to our bikes knowing we would have to skip one of the remaining bike points to make it back to the finish within the 10 hour time limit.
We changed our route to CP15 from what we had plotted the night before. This turned out to be a good move and really saved us some valuable time. After punching CP15 on our passport we headed back toward the finish and the Jackrabbit mountain bike trail system where we had 9 more checkpoints to pick up. Eight of the checkpoints on the trail system were worth 1/8 of a point compared to 1 point for all the other checkpoints.
I had never ridden at Jackrabbit and was looking forward it. The trails were muddy from the early morning rains but were still fun to ride. We got all the CP's and then had about a mile to ride to the finish. We finished up the race with 15 of 16 points and about 30 minutes left on the clock. Our decision to skip the long out and back bike checkpoint was a good one. We would have not made it back to the finish within the time limit for the race and would have been DQ'd.
The race was well planned and the CP's were placed correctly. It was a tough course for a 10 hour race, we climbed 8500 feet during the race. Only one team got all the 16 possible points for the race, a testament to how tough of a race this was.
I enjoyed racing with Lee and Andi. They never grumbled, even with the briars and extra mileage. Racing with them made it easy for me to be the mandatory equipment.
