by Jess Evans
August 6, 2018
Woohoo! What a race!
I arrived in New Hampshire on Sunday, July 22 with the rain. The rain would be a theme throughout the entire New Hampshire/Maine race experience. By Monday, July 23, my team (Only MOSTLY Lost) was gathered together at University of New Hampshire Durham to start our exciting journey. Tuesday morning was filled with checking in, weighing gear bins, prepping bikes for transport, and switching more gear into my bin because mine was the lightest. Several of my teammates had bins over the 50 pound limit and my bin was 30 pounds! Once some of their gear was transferred to mine, I was up to 50 pounds too. There was a pre-race meeting and then onto the buses for a 3 hour ride to our secret destination, which turned out to be Bethel, Maine at a ski resort. Once there, we received our maps and began planning our route. We could see it was going to be a long tough race with steep terrain. We all had trained for the steepness, luckily.
The next morning, we were up and ready to go by race start at 7AM. Leg 1 started with the first four checkpoints around the ski slopes. We climbed straight up the first slope to get to the top and started finding checkpoints. After visiting the manned CP 5, we entered the woods where there were no trails, only downed trees and branches jutting out to obstruct our progress. It was hard to walk in a straight line. We used map, compass, pace counting, time, and the altimeter to keep in touch with where we were on the map. CP 6 was deep in the woods past several peaks. It took us a while to walk to it. After we found CP 6, the rain started. It would not stop for quite a while. Picking up the next two CPs was slow going due to the tangled mess of vegetation and the fear of slipping on the wet ground. We made our way out of the mountains and into TA 1 by early evening. Everything was wet and it was still raining.
We transitioned to our bikes and took off. During leg 2, we road on paved and gravel roads in search of our elusive CPs. The rain continued to come down. I could hear the small stones grinding into my chain and bottom bracket on the bike. It did not sound pretty. The rain fell like sheets of water on us as we biked on. There was one other team close to us during this leg. We kept playing leap frog with them. I struggled with keeping up with my teammates and Owen was there to give me the extra support I needed. Later in the evening, we reached the start of our first paddling section. By this time, the rain had tapered off. I was cold but I knew my body temperature would rise again as soon as we started paddling. This was a 30 mile river paddle. We got on the river and began to paddle. We paddled the rest of the night to sunrise. There were several times where each of us was about to fall asleep and fall overboard. We sang songs and told stories. Robert took a caffeine pill and was on Cloud 9 for a while, but even that wore off before we reached the next transition area. Once we got to the TA, the sun was up and it had started raining again.
We did not sleep that first night, knowing we would have a chance to sleep during that day. We kept our rain gear on and hopped on our bikes. This bike section was also mostly on pavement. The rain continued to our pancake TA where we had to do an O-Course bike relay. While the rest of my team ate pancakes and slept, I went out on the first leg by myself. I found the three checkpoints but not without making a few wrong turns. It was not my best navigating. Later during the bike-O, we learned that we can skip them to take a time penalty in order to make some cut-offs later on the course. Therefore, we skipped the last bike-O course and took a 45 minute penalty. We left for the next TA on our bikes. We had a few checkpoints to pick up and then went to the TA at the Belknap Mountains. We had enough time to stop at a little restaurant somewhere in New Hampshire and eat some much desired “real” food.
We reached the TA late that evening and started out on foot as soon as possible. Many teams were sleeping in the TA. We got our first CP, and began to climb to the summit of a mountain to get our second when fatigue overcame us. We laid down for an hour in the mosquito infested woods. I had my head net on, and could hear the mosquitoes all around me. We were up again quickly and reached the top of the mountain just as the sun was coming up. It was so beautiful. The rest of the day we trekked around the Belknap Mountains. It eventually got really hot. There were blueberries all around the trail and as we passed by, we would bend down to grab a few to munch. They were so good. That was a long trek and by the end, I gave Jason a short navigation break by taking over the map for the last CP and the TA.
At TA 5, we found the medical crew waiting for us. I decided to have a blister on my hand drained because holding the handle bars for my bike was going to be a bit uncomfortable. Then we were off again on our bikes. The first few CPs were on very rugged ATV trails where we had to push our bikes. As night fell, we wondered if we would make the 6AM cut off at TA 6. Around 9pm, a huge storm rolled into the area. A guy in his “wife beater” undershirt ran out of his house yelling at us to take cover in his New England accent. We eventually found a gas station that was open until mid-night. We learned the size and severity of the storm from some locals. With that information, we bedded down under the overhang of a small ice cream stand near the gas station. We slept until 3AM, when the storm was clearly out of the area, and started on our way again. We definitely were not going to make the 6AM cut off now, but we felt great and our spirits were high. There was one last short trek we had to complete in the middle of all the bike CPs. We completed that, got back on the bikes for the last few CPs and then rolled into TA 6 at Dover, New Hampshire. We got there around 11AM.
We were told at TA 6 that we had to go straight to the finish. We could not pick up anymore CPs nor do any other legs. Resigned to our “short-coursed” fate, we started the last leg of our race. It turned out to be a lovely paddle out of the freshwater and into the salt water. We cruised along at an enjoyable pace and gawked at all the sailboats and big boats buzzing past us. I said many many times during this paddle, “This is the best last leg of a race ever!” We reached the finish well rested and delighted at our experience in Maine and New Hampshire.
I have never considered myself a member of the extreme sport club, but people I talk to who do not do adventure races feel it is an extreme sport. For me, adventure racing is a jolly time in the woods. Now, I realize everything is relative. What is one person’s “jolly time in the woods” is another’s “difficult race”. But when I hear someone say “I can’t do that!”, I don’t believe them. If you can walk and ride a bike, you can do an adventure race. Sure, there can be “extreme” aspects about adventure racing such as rappelling, biking on technical single track, huge downhill plunges, canoeing or rafting on white water, but for the most part, adventure races are pretty tame or you can choose to make them tame by skipping the extreme aspects of a race.
