Triangle Adventure Racing Team

Contributed By Dale Long

Well, we sucked! We did fare physically better than last year. We raced hard for
17 hours 21 minutes, but only hit 13 of 34 points. We were strong even to the
finish. But, the points were harder this year as several were over 1000 meters
from catching points. We made a terrible tactical mistake by thinking “in the
box” and not seeing a huge canoe portage shortcut. The paddle section for us,
because of the missed portage opportunity would have totaled about 30 miles.
Bill and Rob tout this race as one for “critical thinking”. We screwed that part
up.

We ended up finishing 10th male, and 18th overall. The all-male teams really ran
the field, with the exception of winner Enduraventure, formerly known as
Adventure Sports Magazine, last years winner. They only popped 28 of 34 points,
and the next highest was 22. We were the 3rd team to finish on time, but all the points we
had left were too far to reach. Oh yeah, it began raining at 5:00 am and did not
stop until the drive home.

They had a unique format for timing, no penalties, just # of points wins. The
finish time would serve as a tiebreaker. The race ended at 20 hours. One second
over and you lose one point, you lose one for every 15 minutes after that. At 21
hours DQ’ed with no question. Enduraventure came in at 19:59:37!

We did make it up to the John De La Howe school, and found that last years
challenge events we missed were the same as this year’s. They have an awesome
ropes course that has a knotted rope climb, a wall, and a vertical playpen. We
each had to do one discipline, then punch a marker at the top. One of us had to
then reascend and do a traverse and hit the last point. It was fun, but probably
too much time for the return. If you did 3 of 4, you got one point, 4 of 4 got
you 2. With the time spent putting on harnesses, and doing the event, we could
have covered a lot of ground. But it was a hoot to do a wall climb at 1:00 am.

I believe we may have a handle on pacing, eating, and staying strong, but we
really learned a lot this year about tactics and race selection.