Triangle Adventure Racing Team

Jeff and I drove up Friday afternoon to southern PA for the Michaux Memorial Day Rogaine. We were expecting a long drive, especially with holiday traffic, but we got there in about 6 hrs and with just enough time to set up the tents. We got up the next morning with not a lot to do…maps wouldn’t be handed out until 11 so we decided to cruise over to the nearest town for some breakfast. There weren’t too many choices for a quick breakfast so we finally decided upon a family restaurant with an all-you-can-eat buffet. Remarkably, I was able to restrain myself and only had a modest number of pancakes. We drove back, broke down the tents and started getting our gear together. Aside from compass, whistle and water, there was no real mandatory gear list so we were able to pack light. I only packed poles, a waterproof jacket and a bunch of food. Jeff, as it turns out in hindsight, made an excellent call of also packing a first aid kit…more on this later.

At 11:00am sharp the RDs held the pre-race briefing in which they mentioned that we may come across some “deer fences”. We were told that there would be gates in the fences every few hundred meters or so and that they shouldn’t pose any real problem for the racers. Ok…duly noted. Then maps were distributed and everyone hustled back to their respective cars/camps to start analyzing route selection. In rogaines each member of the team gets their own map…so navigation is truly a shared responsibility. Jeff and I pondered over the map for a few minutes and the strategy and route became clear. We decided on a clockwise route which would take us through a higher density of mid to high valued controls during the day and leave relatively fewer and more spread out controls during the night leg. The theory was that we could motor through the daylight hours picking up a fair amount of points and take easier routes (ie roads) to more distant controls in the dark. We would also assess our progress against our selected route every few hours and adjust as necessary.

We started off at an easy jog down a primary road toward a 73pt control and found ourselves in a modest group of teams who all had apparently decided upon a similar route. In addition to the 24hr course, 6 and 12hr courses were also offered…all of which started at noon… so it was a difficult to pick out the “competition”. Anyway, we found ourselves with a couple of 12hr teams who were also jogging and we soon separated from the pack. We started up a small mountain with a little bushwhacking, quickly found some logging roads that eventually petered out and then reached the ridge with a little more bushwhacking. Thinking that we had come around the point of the knob I immediately (ie without consulting the compass) took a right on a well defined trail on top of the ridge. After not finding the control in a few hundred meters, it became apparent that I had taken the wrong direction. I whipped out the compass and sure enough it confirmed my mistake. After apologizing to Jeff, we started running back the way we came, passing the 3 teams along the way, and found the control. Rookie mistake…never guess or assume anything…always check the compass. Good news was that the intention sheet showed we had only lost about 7 minutes or so.

In rogaines, teams must write down the time they reached the control and which control they intend on visiting next on “intention sheets”. This allows the RDs to “track” a particular team in case they become lost. It also has the added benefit of seeing how you’re fairing relative to other teams with similar routes.

After our inauspicious start, we continued with our route and over the next few hours hit the 53, 44, 72, 60, 45 and 54pt controls without difficulty. The next control had us coming down off a ridge and onto a small knoll. Unfortunately, there was no good attack point along the ridge, so we had to guestimate where to head down. Evidently, we turned off too soon or too late and we wound up looking aimlessly for the knoll for quite sometime. Since it was only a 30pt control we decided to bail and move on. In retrospect, after not immediately finding the control we should have continued down to a road junction several hundred meters passed the control and re-attack from there. Knowing when to re-orient/give up on a control is always one of the hardest decisions…you always think that you’re really close to finding that elusive control (when in fact you have no idea where you are) but you’re better off re-orienting or, if you’ve already wasted too much time, moving on.

We continued on our route catching up with and passing a couple of teams along the way. We had some significant trouble finding the 70pt control. Map and clue sheet indicated that the control was on the southeast corner of a pond. We used a road junction as our attack point, took a bearing and headed off. We came across a couple of ponds, re-oriented based on those and continued our pursuit. Unfortunately for us, this particular area had several ponds…hardly any of which were on the map. After wandering from pond to pond, we stopped and decided to head back out to the road, re-orient and attack from there. Our second attempt did not fair much better. We knew we went past the control when hit our catching feature, an open field. We spread out, headed back the way we came and stumbled across the control. This was a deceivingly difficult control to find…maybe that’s why it was worth 70pts.

By this time it was getting to be late afternoon/early evening and we desperately wanted to hit the next control during daylight if we could. The route to 63 was pretty straightforward…follow the road till it crosses a stream, follow the stream and the head up to a saddle in a ridge. I should also mention that we had a 12hr team following us at this point. Soon after we left the road, we came across one of those deer fences that the RDs had warned us about, except that there was no readily accessible gate. Jeff found a locked gate, took off his map case and pack, climbed half way up the fence and squeezed through a small gap at the top. I tossed his stuff over, then mine and climbed over too. Unfortunately, the other team saw us and followed. We found yet another fence a hundred meters down and quickly adopted the same approach to get over. The team behind us was having difficulty crossing the second fence which allowed us to escape up the ridge. It turns out that we had stumbled (or rather climbed) into a private shooting club. We made our way up the ridge by following some roads that led from shooting station to shooting station until our progress was halted by another fence. This fence was unlike any of the other fences we had crossed…think of the fence that kept in the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. This was definitely no deer fence. It was 8ft chained link with another 3 or 4ft of square fencing on top of that. We followed the fence for what seemed like a mile looking for any passable point. No luck. Jeff had the brilliant idea of going back to one of the locked gates we had passed where there was more support and then cutting through the top and climbing over. I remember looking at Jeff a little weirdly, thinking “how the hell are you going to cut through that fence”, until he broke out his leatherman. There was no way we were going to waste a couple of hours backtracking, so up Jeff went and started cutting. It was at this point that the team behind us finally caught up to us. Despite our efforts at concealment, the team came over and asked how we were planning on getting over. We told them that this was the only place we could find where the fencing was “down” and we were going to climb over it. Jeff climbed up and over, carefully avoiding the barbed wire that still lined the top of the chained linked part of the fence. I tossed the packs over and climbed up. As I jumped down the back of my thumb nicked the barbed wire. It wasn’t that deep or that long a cut but it was definitely more than a scratch and it bled like a mother. Thankfully Jeff had opted to pack a first aid kit. We spent a few minutes getting me bandaged up while the other team climbed over. With the drama finally over we continued on up the ridge and hit 63 with plenty of light left. Between the leatherman and first aid kit, Jeff definitely gets the boyscout award for being the most prepared racer.

It was now dark and we easily hit the next controls, 52 and 64, and started towards the highest valued control on the course, 75. From 64, it should have been easy…bushwhack north to a road, follow the road northwest until it dies into a creek, follow the creek aways and then climb northeast up the side of a mountain to a sizeable flat spot. We made it all the way to the creek and started climbing. During the ascent we noticed that the grade was not as steep as shown on the map. We decided to keep moving up the mountain thinking that we would use the flat area as a catching feature. We made it up to a flat area and started searching for the control. We wandered around for a long, long time, trying to find anything thing that would give us a clue as to where we were. At some point, don’t remember exactly when, we decided to bail and move on to the next control. We headed back down to the stream and came across a trail/road that paralleled the stream. The trail was on the map but we weren’t sure where on the trail we were. We headed north for a ways and hit what we thought was an unmistakable bend in the trail. We used this to re-orient ourselves and went off to find a draw on the western side of the mountain that would take us within a few hundred meters of the control. We crawled in and around thick rhododendron for awhile but never found the draw. During this bushwhack one of my trekking poles decided to liberate itself from my pack. (I had lost 2 poles last year in another rogaine). What was even more frustrating was that I did not even use my poles the entire race (I had left my map case at home I wound up having to carry the map in my hands for the whole race.) Anyway, we came to the realization that we needed to move on and so we headed out along the trail to a major road. We still cannot figure out when, where or how we got off track. I think we spent around 3hrs looking for 75. More than anything else…it was this missed control, and the time spent looking for it, that cost us first place.

Dejected, we started on the second half of our route that would eventually take us back to the start/finish. We had some problems with the next 41pt control but caught ourselves, thought it through and quickly recovered. On to 50 (no problems there) and then onto a deceptively tricky 71. 71 was on the top of a rocky outcropping but the grade leading up to it was so gentle that following it proved difficult, especially at night. Thankfully, Jeff was taking the lead on this one and we came across it relatively short order.

At this point dawn broke and we started on a lengthy trek down roads that lead to several moderately valued controls and eventually the start/finish. We had hopped to hit this stretch during the night because it was easy, mindless nav but our travails at 75 had put us behind schedule. We hit 65, 33, 21, 61 and 40 without incident and made it back to the start/finish with 2 ½ hours to left to go. Rogaines frequently have a hash house somewhere along the course where racers can rest and refuel (many times with hot food). The hash house on this course was co-located with the start/finish so as we downed hamburgers and cokes we got the skinny from the RD on how we were fairing. The RD said we were looking pretty good, which came as a surprise because we were sure we were out of the running. The rest at the hash house also gave us the opportunity to strategize on our last 2 hours of the race. Leaving a few controls near the finish at the end of a rogaine I think is always a good idea. It puts you in a position to get maximum points with however much time you have left. For us, we were able to put together a short route that could gain us another 150 pts.

Leaving our packs behind and carrying only our maps, we headed out on our last leg at a determined jog. We hit 24 and 51 easily. The long, rocky descent down from 51 really took a toll on our blistered feet. We eventually hit the road that would take us toward our next target 55. We started running down the road and hit a junction. Given where we were and the condition of our feet, we thought that heading back was the best decision…that and the severe penalties of missing the 24hr deadline. Rogaines must, absolutely must, be completed in the allotted or there’s hell to pay. In this case hell was losing your highest control for each fraction of a minute past the 24hr deadline. So, if we were to come in 1 second late, we would lose 73 pts….61 seconds late and we would lose 145 pts. Very, very severe penalties. Never ever be late in a rogaine. So, we started walking back to the finish line, knowing for certain that we would finish within the 24hrs and wondering about all the “what ifs”.

We got back to the finish with plenty of time to spare. After all was said and done, our efforts resulted in an overall 3rd place finish…1st in the all male team category. In retrospect, we did have enough time to get the last 55 and 23 controls but the additional 78 pts still would not have moved us up in the rankings. What killed us was that 75pt control and the 3hrs spent looking for it. We stuck around for the awards presentation and picked up some miniature stained glass orienteering controls (hand made by the RD) for our troubles. The race was a lot of fun. There was a lot of good teamwork in route selection, double checking one another, etc. Definitely can’t wait for the next rogaine.