Pangea - Scar AR, Elite 6hr

I remembered last year's Scar AR was a race we ran in the most heated conditions among environments that looked the same wherever you went--fields of palmettos and sugar sand.  Although there were some cloud coverage this year, the heat would later play a role in the fate of our race.

Stuart ran alongside me at his second event.  We scored a 3rd place during his first event.  He's a great racer to have, someone with an above average memory and who constantly engages with navigational talk during the race.

race map and instructions 

Prologue

The race started with a quick 5 minute prologue of scrambling around the parking lot area to grab five control points (CPs).  I believe this was designed to prevent a clog up of boat launches that came next.  We originally thought the punches would have a corresponding letter to them and purposely skipped a couple that we found correctly.  No worries since they were all within close proximity to each other.

Canoe

We decided to skip CP8 from the start, remembering how overgrown it was last year.  And how we conveniently carved the vegetation out to form a clear path for racers who came back to it in the end.

CP7 appeared easy to grab from the looks of the map, but we missed it on our way up the river.  In fact, in real life, it looked nothing like it was drawn on map.  There was no body of water north of it or an obvious island below it.  I still struggle with these topo maps on water sometimes.

CP6, 5, 4, and 3 had the benefit of other racers punching them ahead of us.  I still kept track of my position on my own map, however, just in case.  I use a little pinch of sticky tack as my map marker and keep track of every turn.  It works great for me.

Sticky tack paid off at CP1, where we accidentally followed a few solid teams but they overshot the channel leading down into CP1.  As they headed further north, I had a hunch we overshot too, which we did.  Stuart and I had been identifying some small channels to our left in anticipation for CP1.  We turned around into one of them and immediately found it.  It eluded every team ahead of us and upon talking to them after the event, they thought they were going towards CP2 at that point.

Once we identified the river split, CP2 was just a matter of paddling our way up on the adjacent river til we found it along the channel.  As we headed back, we traded places with Ron Eaglin's team a couple times.  We enjoyed our assumed first position, but knew it wouldn't last long :)  Apparently they had skipped CP7 on the way out too, and as I attacked in at an incorrect nearby opening, they found it on first try and just pulled away.

We picked up CP8 in the end and immediately transitioned out to the foot section with no stopping.

Run 1

CP10 has got to be the gnarliest bushwhack I have experienced to date.  I had determined the first trail bend as an attack point, but upon getting there, it was a thick wall of trees, palmettos, brush and stiff criss-crossing brambles.  So we went further to see if the next trail bend would provide a better opening.  It did not.  I told Stuart, "either we go in here or back there."  He had a look of "wtf??" but complied :)  The wall of vegetation looked like this:

Usually we just bust out our machetes and slash away at a bushwhack, but this entangled mess had our feet and arms roped up at times.  A little further in and we ran into some eye poking brush.  It was even denser!

We eventually ran into vegetation that had less density at the lower foot or two.  Stuart took initiative, crawled on hands and knees, and slithered belly down for about half a football field.  Here is some incredible footage:

CP12 was next.  The quicker way was to bomb down from the trail north of it (route A).  We stayed safe by going the long route (route B).

CP14, 13, 11, and 9, completed the counter-clockwise loop, and were relatively easy with our skills.

Bike 1/Run 2

Our morning strategy had us picking up 21, 20, and 17, on the western ends, and then heading up to gather the northern controls, before going back down to 18 and 19 on the return route.

On our way to 21, I became pretty concerned with Stuart.  We had been biking extraordinarily slow, almost the speed of jogging, but he struggled to keep up on the sugar sand.  His breathing resembled what I would be like when doing rocky sprints on a treadmill.  I could only imagine what his heart rate was like.  I took off to grab CP21 when we were near, while he walked the bike behind me to save whatever energy he could.  Then I strapped his bike to the tow rope for a few minutes, but it was futile.  We were just beginning the biking portion, in which trails would get worse and worse up north.  I had seen and heard these symptoms before with my other race buddy, Nate, during another scorching hot race, in which he thick-headedly endured about 4hrs of heat exhaustion.  It is an experience I would never wish upon another man.

Pride can only take you so far, but for Stuart, I strongly suggested to him that he ended the race early.  There was no good to be had for "toughing it out".  I know it took a lot for him to swallow, and it was a race he had been training hard and truly looking forward to, but it was the right choice.  He insisted I continue forward and that he would walk back.  I acknowledged the DQ and plowed ahead.  It also solved the issue of him forgetting his helmet on this bike portion :)

CP20 and 17 flew by en-route to CP16.  At CP16, I bushwhacked through some dense razor sharp palmettos taller than my head.

some environments on the north side

red swamp

there's a path underneath somewhere

At CP15, I debated changing my morning strategy of attacking these CPs clockwise.  But I stuck to the plan, ditched the bike here and ran to grab 22 and diagonally bushwhacked to 23 since all was slow-going up there.

My plan for getting 24 was something like this:

In actually, the plan executed like this (below), lol.  I was mentally fatigued at this point.  After missing 24, I took a safety bearing of West to get out, only to hit the canal and follow it down.  I gave it a couple minutes to find WP2, but with time I had allocated for getting back to my bike to finish the race, I took another abort bearing back out to the trail I came from.

As I biked back down the trails, I took the route that would allow me to touch CP18 and 19.  18 was easy to find.  At 19, I knew with a clue of "small pine between marshes", it would be difficult to find with how vague marshes are illustrated on this map.  However, I did see a marsh from the trail, so I gave it an attempt.  The first marsh was a large circle of overgrown yellow grass-like plants.  I followed the southern perimeter and ran up to the west side of it, but there, the brushes were too dense I that I could hardly see 5ft in front of me.  There were plenty of small pine trees out there!  I went and tagged about a dozen of them but failed to see any controls.  Upon GPS review, I was literally on top of it!

That last attempt at CP19 forced me 4 minutes into overtime.  Oh well, I was already DQ'd.  As I booked it back to the Main TA, it drizzled, rained, and then poured.  Without the DQ, Canyoneros were 4th!  At the Main TA, it was cool to see plenty of father/son/daughter teams.

FLO - Little Big Econ

This place is pretty tricky when it comes to orienteering.  I've been stumped here before, and I was stumped here again, today.  I like to use the Florida Orienteering events to try new things, learn through repetition, and get a good workout.  Here's the breakdown:

CP1
The first CP always calibrates my head with map scale, time and distance.  I overran CP1 and had to backtrack in a loop to luckily find it.

CP2
I slightly overran CP2, found the trail by the river, but not the mapped marsh.  So I had to pop back out on the trail and attack it again.  Found it quickly on second try (pic above).

CP3
I took the smaller trail going towards this control and as I saw the river to my right, I poked out and saw the CP a mere 40m across it.  Do I get dirty and plunge into the river?  Not this soon.  I went back and around the channel.

CP4

This one was easy to find, as I've been to this location before during another FLO event.

CP5

On way out, I debated bushwhacking a straight line towards CP5.  Upon heading south out of CP4 and observing the vegetation en-route to the next control, I deemed it way too thick and entangled with vines to consider.  So I ran the long route.  I wasn't thinking as I headed on the south trail near the river and overshot the first trail to the control.  No worries, I took the 2nd one and headed up to CP5 by following the creek.

CP6

Upon GPS replay, it appears I spent 35min trying to find this one from the moment I attacked from the main trail to the moment I returned to the main trail--ouch!

The attack point I wanted to use was where the two trails were at its closest (marked blue above) and shoot a bearing straight down.  Usually I can rely on my sharpshooting skills to hit a target.  However, I didn't find out I had the wrong attack point until I got home, but I can understand why I spent so much time running around in the forest once I counted paces to the proper distance.

My saving grace was that I found a creek to the west, which was mapped to branch out to the east.  I used that intersection, followed the creek and walked right up to CP6.

CP7

This was another tricky one.  The mapped trail going north was completely overgrown, with just a barely discernible creek that revealed it.  I overshot it the first time, realizing it after seeing my compass turn south, but then found the trail with the clue of a puddle of water on the trail at point A.  On the map, there was a small marsh that leaked onto the road there that I used to follow.

Once I got on the trail that was completely overtaken by weeds, some as tall as me, I headed north, trying to find point B so I could use point C as an attack point.  I never saw it, which led me further north.  After getting a feeling that I was running too far, I dashed into the woods to see if luck would find it.  Hehe...luck works sometimes, but it's best try to develop skills to avoid using it :)  I didn't find it.

So I ran back south to see if I just didn't see the trail at point B.  I used the tall trees (colored green on the map) to sense I was getting nearby.  Sure enough, it was a trail completely overgrown as well, but not as bad as the one prior.  Once I found the trail, it was a homerun to CP7.

CP8

My rule of thumb for bushwhacking is "3 to 1".  If the running trail is more than 3 times the distance of the bushwhack, choose the bushwhack.  Why?  It conserves energy.  I also assume that a good running pace is 6mph, and a bushwhack is 1/3 of that at 2mph.

My goal was to hit point A, so that all I had to do once I found the trail was go north.  The direct approach is to hit point B exactly, but if you do that, sometimes you have to guess if you accidently overshot it too far north or south, causing you to confirm by running both north and back south, sometimes.  If you deliberately miss it in one direction, you have better chances of knowing you just have to scout the other direction.

Come to find out, my bearing was as sharp as a sushi knife, as I hit point A with some crazy accuracy across almost a kilometer of distance.  Find CP8 was a matter of locating the trail intersection (point B) and following the creek til you found the control, which wasn't far from it at all.

CP9

I wasn't thinking here since I originally planned on using point A to attack straight down to CP9.  For some reason, I ran to point B, but used the same bearing I had in mind for point A.

This mistake forced me to scramble in the area before running back out to the trail to attack it with the correct bearing.

CP10

I had to squint hard to see the trail crossing over into CP10.  Seems like I took the most direct approach.

All in all, this event has reinforces the fundamental ideas of orienteering to me.  Focus at all times and read everything on the map to confirm position.

here's my GPS route:

Pangea - Atomic AR, Elite 30hr

Three Canyonero members from last year set out to return to Blue Ridge, GA.  It was a race we excitedly anticipated returning to for a year.  We were joined by Bill Dean, my backup navigator from team We Blame Javan, and Nate Whitaker, who has raced with me for the most of the last year or so.  This would be their first time racing in the mountains and paddling in the rapids.

Team Canyoneros and Canyoneros II - Nate Whitaker (left), Hien Nguyen, Greg Watson, Robert Foster, Bill Dean

I received my giant tablecloth of a map in the morning and really only had time to merely locate the 53 CPs that were marked.  With the added access to 90,000 acres, folding the map into the map bag was quite a chore!

race orders given at the start

Foot 1

We were bused to Skeenah Mill, an area that had over 150yrs of heritage, to start on foot.  A quick 10 minute jog led us ascending immediately into the mountains for a rough warm-up.  CP1 and 2 were found with the aid of the mass start.

climbing mountains

As we headed down the trail to CP3, I realized that the topo maps given were going to have the usual inaccurate illustrations (see map below overlayed with GPS route).  For instance, getting to CP3 was a matter of following a trail that went primarily south.  In actuality, there was a section that curved north, causing me to backtrack a little just to make sure we did not get distracted onto another trail.  Furthermore, the trail used to attack to CP3 wasn't even illustrated close to where it was in real life.  The CP ended up on the west side of the trail, as opposed to the mapped east side.  Thanks to Ron Eaglin's team for that one.

topo maps aren't the most accurate with mapping trails

On our way to CP4, we met a cool friendly team called the Bearded Bastards.  These guys were the epitome of slow and steady.  Every time we took off running, somehow we saw them around the next corner.  These bearded guys were there passing us again and again, only walking with their trekking poles.  We had never seen anyone walk as fast as they did, even up cliffs!  It was quite comedic :)

Bearded Bastards (left)

CP5 was was a matter of following the boundary of the open field.  On our way to CP6, again the map's resolution was not the greatest, so we missed it completely.

swinging suspended bridge

As we ascended to the top of a mountain that housed CP7, the grand mountains in the distance revealed itself around us, some steaming with smoke.  The burnt path towards this control was voted to be the most visually interesting.  It even had funny history to it.  Ten years or so ago, this mountain was apparently the mistaken location of a controlled burn that went out of control.  The trees and ground were still charred from top to bottom, painting us completely black by the time we found the control.

Up until this point, we had climbed mountains.  There was no way to CP8, except to descend steeply.  Down we went towards the nearest trail.  Here's a video of it.

going down a mountain is just as tough as going up

Bill did a great job identifying the road split and mapped creek that we would use to attack a direct bearing into CP8.  Our incredible sharpshooting did not even lead us an inch away from the control.

There really was no other efficient way to CP9, except to cross a river with powerfully flowing water.  We followed the creek north to get us to the river and used the intersection to shoot a bearing from.  Crossing the river was something we did last year in the thick of the rainy night, not knowing how deep the water was.

the water is much more powerful than it appears

Canoe 1

After transitioning into the canoes from CP9, we paddled effortlessly downstream with the aid of the current.  It was a very pleasant paddle.  Nate and Bill were excited and a little nervous after hearing all of our stories of the previous year.

We completely missed CP10 in the mayhem of several rapids in a row.  From then on out, I prioritized finding the CPs over dodging rocks :P

the rocks are like underwater bombs

Then came the moment I was never able to record footage of last year because we paddled in the dark.  The capsize!  Watch the video to see how Bill lost his glasses in the plunge and miraculously managed to find it in the canoe after we flipped it upside down to dump the water out!  What better way to experience rapids than to get the two Blue Ridge first-timers overboard, hahaha.  It was a great incident to recharge our adrenaline.  Amazingly, Greg and Foster did not capsize once--something they did about ten times last year.

THE CAPSIZE!!!

stuck sideways on rocks in rapids

Bike 1

We made our way to Stanley TA, finding 5 controls along the way.  This was pinpoint navigation at its best, except for CP18.  I attacked in at the pseudo parking lot, rather than the hidden path near the bridge there.  Once we saw another team attack in there successfully, we followed suit and found it as well.

When you're on paved road going downhill, you just keep accelerating and accelerating.  Without effort, my max speed was 56kmh on these slick roads.

Along this route, Greg's tubeless rear tire kept going flat--most likely due to not having enough sealant in there to begin with.  We pumped it up with CO2 cartridges before finally giving in to a lengthier procedure of returning it to a tubed tire.

Bike 2

At Stanley TA again, we refueled with Domino's pizzas that Greg and Foster ordered and packed the night before.  It was completely nightfall by now.  Our strategy changed to avoid the more challenging CPs here in an effort to put more energy towards the Sport race at the end, which should be better bang for the buck.

We grabbed only CP21 on this leg, basically by walking our bikes to it.  I had to keep track of where we were on a turn-by-turn basis since there were very few clear attack points to distinguish proximity.  So what goes up, must come down even faster!  Our return route consisted of coasting the entire way down at gut-wrenching off-pavement speeds that had you on the brakes more than the pedals.  We all risked the chance of bouncing off a rock and tumbling down a cliff in favor of the thrill rush of speed around curves in the night.  It was by far the most exhilarating part of our race.

Foot 2

We knew the CPs were the toughest of the race here.  We immediately dropped the furthest, most difficult ones and went for CP29, 24, and 25.  CP29 was a drone march uphill for a 1½ hr.  Again, I kept track of our positioning by thumbing the map, turn-by-turn.  Once we punched CP29, a storm came down hard.  It was another 1hr going back downhill, this time hammering our toes as they banged off the fronts of our shoes. Two and a half hours for one CP--this wasn't adding up too well.

When we returned to Stanley TA, the officials told us they had to shut down the technical bike section due to the rain.  We would have to take the paved road back to the Main TA instead.  This provided more time for the trek, so we went for CP24.  It was a steep climb to find this one.  Foster was constantly reading out the reading on his altimeter watch.  The CP was located much higher than the map's elevation showed, yet another indication that the map was not too accurate.

We mountain-whacked towards CP25 by evaluating a few areas along the river before crossing it.  There appeared a trail that we followed.  I incorrectly identified the river bend much too soon and had the team count paces to attack the control.  As we dipped down from the path to the river in multiple locations, we found nothing.  Turns out, upon GPS replay, we did not even go half way there.  Mountain whacking is a very slow mode of transportation that skews a Florida racer's sense of distance across time.

Bike 3

The rain thickened and fell harder.  We biked conservatively towards Aska Rd with rain sandblasting in our eyes.  At times I just let the brakes go to allow the bike to free-fall and accelerate.  Those times forced me to squint my eyes to the point I just saw tiny dots of light from the biker in front of me.  It became a video game.  If I hit something and fly off my bike, I just push restart...right?  Judgement was not really great now, seeing how badly I missed CP25 earlier.  Aska Road to the Main TA was like a never ending uphill slog.

Main TA

The team was beat and tired.  They voted to chill in the car with the heater on.  I succumbed and fell asleep in Bill's car within 10 seconds.  The sleep was deep, accompanied with dreams.  It wasn't very long before we woke up at daylight to take the canoes out.

Sport Canoe/Trek

I was fading, as I made several mistakes heading to CP9, dipping into every nook.  Good thing Bill still had his wits with him.  Good thing he knows how to navigate as well.  He basically corrected me with everything on this leg of the race.

some Georgia wildlife

Once we found the right area, we shot a direct bearing to CP4.  It was easy to find.  Up to this point, our sharpshooting was extremely accurate.  We shot another direct bearing to CP5, but ended up about 100m north of it.  Video replay shows I measured it 3 degrees off.  3 degrees off on an 800m mountain whack will lead you far from the destination.  There was a scramble of finding other attack points and trying to read the elevation before we called it off.  The team was hurting so badly with feet blisters, chaffage, and one fractured foot, that the constant up-and-down route to CP5 finally broke their spirits...the towel was thrown in :(  One more re-attack for CP5 was out of the question.

GPS route overlayed on map

On this Sport section, if we obtained the controls out of order, it would be for not.  There would be no point in getting anymore.  We took the flatter jeep trail back, gave up some 6hrs, and ended the race.

bike distance traveled - 68.88km

FLO - Woodpecker West

I had to run solo today.  My usual buddies were all out of the state.  I have never been to Ocala National Forest before, so I came into this one completely blind.  No homework.  That's been the theme for the last several months to prepare me for all things in Blue Ridge, GA.  I immediately attacked FLO's toughest course for the day, the blue course.

The breakdown...

Everything was just about pinpoint, except CP4.  The faint trail that was mapped was non-existent from the main road, so I resorted to trying to read elevation and contour lines.  Unfortunately, that put me too far out and I attacked the wrong area, before backtracking and finding it again.  It was kinda nasty, about 10minutes lost.

Onto CP5, I decided to try to find the fastest route possible, so that included a lot of bushwhacking across terrain.  I doubted myself a few times after not seeing the trail with the T near it, but I really started getting the hang of reading elevation at this point, so I chased down the highest point north of CP5, before honing in on it.  This CP was my proudest moment :)

CP8 was also a great one.  There was no obvious attack point to get there from any direction.  The first choice I had in mind was an epic long 1km bushwhack.  Even 1km is too far for our superior sharpshooting through forestry.  So I went to the main road for faster terrain and noticed there were power line towers every 200m or so.  Then I measured it on map, and sure enough, the little tick marks I saw on the map (red arrows) were the power line towers!  I used one of them to attack off of and that brought the attacking distance within reason.

The rest was a slam dunk home :)  Then I did the orange and white course after.

One thing that helped tremendously was that I counted paces at every attack point until hitting the CP.  It allowed me to really understand where I was on map and when I overshot.  The contour lines added a second layer of positional confirmation (amazingly, there was enough elevational changes in Ocala to really use them to my advantage).

I missed having my teammates on this one.  I was so tied up doing everything and had no planning for the next CP til I punched the current CP :)

GPS route

Pangea - Dixie Conquest AR, Elite 10hr

New to this year is the Dixie Challenge AR, a race that seemingly replaced the Nocatee AR of prior years.  Looking at the weather forecast ahead of time and knowing the reputation of Jeff Leininger's race designs, we braced for a challenging, muddy event.  He organized the race in a fashion that you would only get one of six maps at the start of each leg, forcing you to strategize on the fly.  We really enjoyed the format.  Immediately after setting up tent, it was pouring cats and dogs already.  Temperatures were in the cool 50's, which was perfect for racing, but when coupled with rain, it rattled your bones.  Apparently, I was the only one who didn't get the memo on bringing rain/cold gear.

Team Canyoneros - Nate Whitaker (left), Hien Nguyen, Robert Jordan, Bill Dean

This race began the forging of two powerhouses--team Canyoneros and team We Blame Javan.  We had previously started training with Bill at FLO events leading up to this race.  Bill will also join us at the 30hr Atomic AR next month.  Robert is a veteran navigator who would provide me strong navigational support.  And Nate is the hound dog who always reliably sniffs out the CPs with uncanny ability.  Everyone was at the same atmospheric level of fitness as we raced our first event together.

race clues and a non-orthographic prologue map

 

Prologue (foot)

mass start from the main transition area

There were 7 control points (CPs) to warm you up.  We all agreed to start slow and accurate and do not let other teams distract us.  The CPs were all pretty basic, except maybe one that you had to have an idea of your distance traveled.  Surprisingly, our intended slow start still had us first back in transition.

Robert (left), Bill, Nate, punching controls and running to the next, all at the same time

Bike to Canoe TA

There was nothing too eventful heading to the Canoe TA.  I kept on top of our positioning the entire time with the help of data provided by my teammates, just in case an unexpected trail popped out of nowhere.  Again, we were the first to Canoe TA with the fastest time of 38min.

Canoe

Heading out on the canoe voyage, we were in awe of a mystical thick layer of fog hovering on the midst of St. John's river.

I wanted to grab the northern CP8 first so we could ride the waves the entire length down to gather the rest afterwards.  CP8 was the killer of most all teams.  After digging deep in the area, we headed back out and went north into another channel.  Teams who saw us followed suit as we f'd them up.  The search party executed their hunt here, as well as several other teams, but again with no luck.  We decided to head back to the first channel for a third attempt.  This time, I triangulated our position using the docks nearby and confirmed that this was the right channel.  Then I shot a bearing and said we will truck down anything in our path to the CP from here.  It worked.  In fact, it worked too well, as it was right in front of our face as we docked our boat at the Y-intersection.  We spent a whopping 40 minutes finding this from the time we landed on this channel the first time around.

the elusive CP8

While paddling through channels with lush tropical rainforest-like vegetation hanging all around us, I envisioned what Indians and settlers saw back in the primitive days of exploration.

locating and tearing our way into CP9

We found the rest of the CPs with speed and accuracy by measuring distance and angles, and adhering to a stopwatch to estimate distance traveled.  Through training, we understood how long it takes us to paddle one kilometer and was able to use that information to our advantage.  Waves churned up and allowed us to ride them quickly to the south.  We saw teams struggling to paddle the opposite direction of us and knew we would have to face it eventually.  Sure enough, on the way back from the final canoe CP12, we fought these intense waves that see-sawed our canoe, belly flopped the front end into the water, and had us caught almost toppling over on a few occasions--all while a cold front rained through to add insanity to the mix.  We laughed it up like madmen.  This was the most epic and exciting paddling I had done in Florida.

crashing waves

Bike 2

On our way out of the Canoe TA, Nate turned up the turbo to max boost and completely tore the chain off his bike.  Robert had spare links, and Bill was a pro bike mechanic, who had him back up and running in no time, even with all of us shivering uncontrollably with symptoms of hypothermia.  During extreme conditions like this, you need calories and you need to burn calories to produce heat, which means eat and move!

the chain pit crew reconnects chain in record fashion

One of the challenge of the race was that you had multiple maps where you had to connect one to another  with varying scales.  The first CP on bike would be off of a trail from the main road.  There were multiple trails that branched off of this road, but knowing Jeff's maps, he will purposely not map all of them.  To counter this, I identified a obvious known road as close to the first bike CP as possible and measured the distance to it via highly accurate technique of 'eyeballing on the bike'.  ~800 meters from this road will get me to the trail I need.  I saw another team stop prematurely at an earlier set of trails, but we continued forward confidently and nailed the correct one.

Upon arriving near CP13, we saw another team hunting for it, but we grabbed it first.  Then we shot a bearing towards CP14 for our first bikewhack through forestry.  We must have crossed 3 or 4 swamps on our way over.  The mud was loose, deep, and shoe suctioning.  Several other teams followed suit.  We purposely walked more to the left in order to hit the trail, as opposed to accidently overshooting the trail to the right, which ends at CP14.

crossing swamps with bikes

CP15 was slightly tough to find, but as usual, trusty Nate honed in on it.  On our way to the trail that led down to CP16, we again saw a team question a trail right before it.  Not us, as we continued forward, not to be distracted.

Bike 3

Once we learned we were the 2nd team back in transition, we turned up our speed and focus.  This leg was the most effective portion of our race.  We had a "Tower Challenge" where one guy climbed to the top of a wooden tower to spot control points that the guys on the ground could not see at eye level.  The guy on the tower had to relay information, via screaming and hand signals to direct the CP attacker towards the destination.

view from top of tower

Robert commanded the tower, Nate and Bill hunted the CPs, and I planned our remaining route to complete our team skills.  We were literally nipping at the heels of Team JAX here (overall race winner) with no one in sight behind us.

CP24, 25, and 30 were straightforward and easy to locate.  We did not have to find CP 26-29 as told by the race volunteers.

Foot 2

At the Bayard TA, we looked at the map and decided to take direct bearings to all of them.  From CP17 to 18 to 20, we crossed half a dozen vast swamps.  The environment is what I imagine the FL Everglades to be--it was incredible in a crazy, adventure racer mindset.

After easily finding CP21, we had just two left.  We must have had an hour lead over the next team at this point.  However, just when things were going so perfectly, we ran into a fatal mistake that cost us 50 minutes.  We erroneously ran up the trail towards CP23, hunted forever to find CP22 but somehow found CP23, thinking it was 22.  And that snowballed and contributed into a period where we dropped four places finding the next CP23 that was never there!  NOOOOOOOOOOO!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Once Robert found us CP23 again, Bill finally realized our mistake and it was off to find CP22 again.  The morale quickly plummeted as we had no choice but to continue doing what we needed to do.

Bike 4

We jogged to Bayard TA and then biked back to the Main TA to finish in 6th place.  It was demoralizing yet very encouraging to the team to know we had 2nd place just about the entire race until the second to last CP.  We were proud to see our split times were fastest in many of them.  After a finish like that, we discussed what went well and blamed Javan for everything else :D

See you guys in Blue Ridge, Georgia next month at the 30hr Atomic AR!  We'll be ready!

video compilation, courtesy of Robert Jordan

our GPS route