Adventure Story
TeamSOG (Brian Mayer, Steven Baker, Julia Pollock, and Joe Moershbaecher) set out on an extremely daunting "24 hour" adventure race course.

We arrived Friday night and crashed to get some rest before the race. Saturday morning we woke up got some gear together and headed over to registration. Brian took a quick detour to do a radio interview for Lionheart on the Doug Pike Show. We got our maps and started plotting. The race was interesting with a neutral start scheduled for Sunday morning when people would be allowed to start the paddle with only a short bike afterward and an orienteering course. This was going to make the last 6 hours very intense.

We started the race in the intense heat from the Wilderness Adventures camp in New Castle, VA at noon on Saturday. After a short prologue we got out of the camp in first place and right away were thrown onto a steep 700' MTB climb. It really took a toll on Baker. Combo the heat and the effort and he was really feeling it. We spread out his gear between us to lighten his load and continued on.

At the top of the mountain we entered a forest road and began to see some teams catching up. We were soon able to pull away again and made our way down the ridge to the town of New Castle where we were glad to fill up on water while enjoying some AC at the Dollar Mart. We then remounted for a 2700' of climbing. Again this took a toll on Baker and once we summitted Baker emptied his stomach 100 yards from the CP. We now had to make sure to rehydrate and refuel him appropriately. Dark was approaching and we had a very technical 1800' descent. This allowed Baker to begin to recover as well as some relief from the heat as night came upon us. On our descent we saw IMONPoint/Odyssey about 15 mins behind. We rushed through the Bike-Run TA and began the trek to the paddle put in with several checkpoints along the way. Baker was slowly feeling better but we spend a signifcant amount of the time fast walking to help him. The course was also fairly thick not allowing much of a chance to run. We also were beginning to feel some real fatigue.

We were bushwhacking along a ridge for what seemed like forever and finally caught up to IMONPoint/Odyssey who had passed us by taking a slightly different route. It was nice to see some companions in our same situation but we soon split up again. They chose to drop down off the ridge too early as we continued on to attack from further along the ridge. At the time we didn't know if they meant to do what they did or not. Either way we raced our race and got the CP. We then chose to get the first optional CP which included a gruesome bushwhack descent because we couldn't find the trail that went down from the ridge. This took a lot of time. Upon returning to the top of the ridge we came across IMONPoint/Odyssey again to find out they did get lost and did not get the optional CP. We were now in first place and had an advantage on them with the extra CP.

We continued on to the next optional CP. Daylight was now approaching and I was realizing we still had a long way until; the boat put in. I was beginning to think the optional CP may have been a bad idea. Either way it was done and we had to keep moving. We got to a section where we were supposed to follow a "trail" from one CP to the next. The catch was it started in the middle of nowhere and was not on the map. We had trouble finding the plotted trailhead and when we started traveling down it we were getting frustrated because we didn't know where we were and where the trail was supposed to be going exactly. Eventually we decided to drop down to the river and attack the point from there. We ended up finiding part of the "trail" again shortly before we approached the CP. We now, due to some Nav troubles and a trail that didn't really exist, were already past the cutoff for the paddle meaning we would not complete the entire course. Upon arriving to the put in  at 1030am we found out that IMONPoint/Odyssey had already arrived and skipped the paddle to the final bike to finish the course. We would have 100 minutes to complete the final bike in order to finish officially and win the race. If we didn't we would finish unofficially. We were told the bike would take approximately 2 hours and that was on par with our estimates.

We decided that even though we were unlikely to finish we had to give our best efforts and try to finish officially for the win. We were transported to our bikes and then took off. We were on a mission and REALLY wanted to get the win. Unfortuantely we were unable to make the cutoff. We finished about 15 minutes over the time which was still faster than what the estimated time was for that section of the course and about 40 minutes faster than IMONPoint/Odyssey completed the course.

We had completed more of the course than any other team and were very proud of our accomplishment on such a tough course in such harsh conditions. We were certainly winners in our book. Most teams had to turn around earlier than us and didn't get the optional CP we got. In retrospect that optional CP cost us some valuable time but at the time we decided to get it we felt that we did need that point to win the race and thought we would have enough time to finish. A long tough course prevented us from doing so.

We are getting ready for Lionheart in 2 weeks. We are sending two teams and looking for a first and second place!!!