Team Moziatex and Team Silent Chasers first met online, when team members were unable to make the championship race held at Four Winds Resort and Marina. We agreed to unify and do our best.
After arriving, on Thursday
afternoon, meeting each other, checking in, getting our cool swag that we
promptly split up, we headed to the pre-race brief meeting that would hopefully
answer last minute questions and give us a better idea of the still secret
course layout.
We would not get our maps until
6:30 am Friday; we also learned there would be plotting on the course and race
strategy would be important. After
finishing the meeting, we headed back to room to finish last minute packing and
catch as much sleep as we could, 5:45 am would come too quickly.
We were up, and feeling good about
the day. We gathered our gear, readied
ourselves, and went to get our maps. We
had less than thirty minutes before the 7 am start, to quickly review things,
and execute a hastily formulated plan drawing from our cumulative team
experience. We would start with a foggy paddle.
The ‘gun’ went off and the field
sprinted towards the canoes 400 meters away.
The eerie foggy morning calm of the lake reservoir, was shattered by the
clanging of fierce paddlers, shouting directions, trying not to ram each other,
and find their way. We had found our
canoe that we would need to be-friend, and we hopped into her, got started
paddling, and finally settled into her.
I should mention that when we started, visibility across the strangely
calm water was less than 50 meters; we were guided by Matt’s ‘more left,
ok…straight, more right’. It was
nerve-racking not being able to readily see landmarks, and distances. Although
it seemed as though we were alone much of the time, if one was to imaginatively
lift the fog, we would see that we were with a pack of boats; they just were
not visible…yet.
Our first stop would be a
checkpoint where we would receive coordinates for the next 7 checkpoints on the
course. Throughout this course, a team
could chose to strategically skip and do any checkpoints in any order; cool- my
kind of race, the kind that allows for creative solutions and strategy. Matt masterfully guided our HMS canoe to her
first stop. Generally, paddling
navigation is simpler and straight forward navigation; today Matt’s skills were
severely tested immediately. We were the
ninth boat ashore, in a fast lead pack.
We went to checkpoint (CP) 1, and proceeded to get to work plotting; we
did it quickly, and a brand new AR team was bonding, making me smile inside;
someone observing would not have known this was our first race as a team. We made quick work and were off with Matt on
the maps.
The next few points were not to
far away in the foggy terrain, and Matt guided us flawlessly to each one and
back to the boats with only six boats that had left before us. The fog was beginning to thin, but still ever
present, and we hopped back into HMS canoe, and headed to a second set of
trekking CPs further up the
reservoir.
By the time we arrived, the
fog was barely noticeable. Again, we
communicated and executed our canoe dismount and matt guided us flawlessly to
the next CP. Then, what had to be a
funny (or maybe humorously annoying??) conversation from Marc’s point of view
occurred where Matt was unselfishly wanting to not do all the navigation, and
wanting to share. My philosophy was if you
are on a heater (a roll), keep it going; no reason to risk stopping a good
thing. Matt insisted I do the next one,
and I wanted him to keep it going. I
took over the navigation for the next two points, with full intention of being
relieved soon at some point. After
initially making a three minute ‘oops’ while getting my mind focused on
navigation, we knocked out the next two points, smoothly. Back to the boats, and we were headed to the
transition area where we would switch to bikes.
We had spied and decided on a
portage that shortened our paddle by 3.5-4 km.
We had arrived in 7th position to the course area affectionally named
Triple Triple. This are had a total of
nine CPs that could be done in any order, by any means of transport (bike,
foot), and in this section the teams were allowed to split up as they saw fit
to acquire the points. We were issued
three separate maps, and we quickly split the work load with Matt taking the
furthest four CPs since he was the fastest on bike. Our team had elected to use bikes as much as
possible to get each point, which seemed to be the best strategy for us. Matt took off, whilst Marc and I did our
final briefs and went about our CP tasks.
Marc was back to the meeting point first, and I showed up next.
We had fun chatting a few min with race personnel
and talking about how we met and formed our team. We took advantage of our time waiting for
Matt, looking at the rest of the course, eating and situating bikes, and
gear. Matt arrived 15 to 20 minutes
later, and he was ready to go. We submitted our completed CP punches to race
course personnel, and were informed only 5 teams were ahead of us…great news,
we had moved up one more spot! I situated the bike map on the map board one
final time and we were off.
I continued to navigate and we
had agreed, that strategically we should initially skip the large majority of
the initial bike points, in favor of getting to a key orienteering section
called the Dog bone orienteering section, in order to maximize our time
orienteering during the daylight. We
peddled and collected two CPs on the way to the Dog bone orienteering
section. We arrived as the first team
but we understood that other teams had elected to collect bike section CPs and
were simply completing a different order of CPs.
We moved out and began to get to
work, I handed Matt the maps for this section and said that he was the right
person for this section; he cleverly
played hot potato with it, for which he won, and I was still on the maps; again
I wondered if Marc was thinking ‘would someone just navigate!’. This section was large and a pivotal point
of the race, I try to reason that rested eyes would do better; I still
lost. Our team was fantastic. We had built an estimated one to one and a
half hour of lead on the closest all-male division team racing. We had about two and a half hours of
daylight, and this area at night, would punish even minor mistakes. We (I) made one of these procedural mistakes,
punching one of the ‘dog bones’ in the wrong order, forcing us to redo that
particular leg in order to stay official.
Although this cost us an estimated 30-40 minutes by our estimations, and
some sunset light, it was far from a disastrous error. Our team was one; no one ever complained, we only
moved on, although I did apologize incessantly for a bit. Our physical navigation
was virtually flawless, with one exception of not finding a trail and having to
back track 150 meters to locate it. We pushed fairly hard, had some great
laughs, and worked together spying and calling out landmarks and CPs. We humorously called the CPs Jean-Claude,
saying ‘oohh lala, Jean-Claude is looking nice tonight!’ whenever we spotted them, making me chuckle
every time. We completed it in roughly 5
hours and 50 minutes, only 15 minutes behind the next team that elected to do a
similar strategy, as they were still in the transition area when we
arrived. This marked approximately the
two thirds completed portion of the course.
We transitioned and reset for the
final third of the course; food, filled water bottles, map folding, and extra
clothing layer since it was now the cool late night, early morning
temperatures. Left was a bike, paddle
back to the transition at the finish line, and a final trek to complete the
course. At that point, we had just over 12 and a half hours to complete this
course. We were in great spirits, in great position, and theoretically, had
plenty of time if all goes well. Collectively, our agreed upon route choice was
selected, and we moved out. Then it
happened.
About forty minutes later, whilst
on the ‘lolipop’ stick portion of a single track loop, Marc had an unlucky
event. I heard some loud commenting and
Matt, saying in his awesome french accent…’oyyhh’; that could not be good. Marc’s derailleur had taken blow from a
stick, that broke the derailleur hanger clean off. Marc and Matt were prepared and fortunately
packed a spare derailleur hanger. Our
team assessed the damage and we started to look at how to repair it. Marc and Matt got to work and handled
it. I decided to look at maps, and
eventually take a seat, shining my head lamp on their work space; those two
were on it, and I would only be in the way.
One coed team did pass us about 35 min later, however we were on our way
to collect more CPs with-in 40 minutes.
We ran across great adventure racer ‘OG’ Carrie Sona, had a quick chat
and continued around the loop portion of the trail, collecting two more CPs on
the way. Marc stated that he would hear a creaking but his bike was working
relatively fine, and he was doing his best to be gentle on it. Once we were
heading towards more CPs further on the course, about 40 minutes after the
first incident, this time I heard a clear ‘thwack!’ followed by I think some
choice words by Marc. Matt who went to
him first, was saying ‘oh my, that’s it’, and I quickly saw why. Another stick had gone into Marc’s rear tire
spokes, gone around striking his carbon frame, cracking the frame, smashing his
derailleur into several pieces, and braking the derailleur hanger off, all in a
lickety split-second. Unlucky, was not the
word to describe this; the odds of a
completely separate incident causing similar and even further damage again, on
the same bike have to be insanely high.
We did not have a second derailleur hanger for that bike and the
derailleur was completely inoperable.
We looked at the damage, and we came up with ideas, and elected that we
should try to make the bike a single speed bike by removing the derailleur from
it. Marc and Matt went to work, and Matt’s
chain breaker broke while working on the chain…what?! The earlier team soon went past us again, no
sure how that happened, along with two more teams. We were able to borrow a
team’s chain breaker, and complete the process of converting Marc’s bike into a
single speed bike. We were still in the
fight, and likely dropped one possibly two overall race positions. Then the discovery happened.
After getting rolling for the
second time, Marc’s chain would not stay on the bike. We had discovered that Marc’s front crank
ring, was a special Oval-shaped ring. This caused the non-stretchable chain to be to
tight, then to loosen as Marc pedaled his two wheeled steed. This caused the chain to either drop off, or
go up and be too tight on the other rear gears causing the tire to ‘seize up’
and stop turning. This required brief
removal of the rear tire to allow it to turn again, and re-positioning of the
chain. In 30 minutes, we had barely
made it 2 km, with 30 plus km minimum, including skipping CPs to shorten the
bike leg in order to complete the course.
In this competitive field, this would cause our overall ranking to
plummet to bottom of the field….if we even were able to make it back to the
canoes, and final trek. Our team was
completed gutted. Our goal of a top five
overall finish, and first place in the all-male division, was over. Each of us understood this was not
sustainable, and after a post-race inspection, unsafe. The carbon frame was compromised and would
have likely completely failed at some point, along with we would likely not
make the time cut-off (getting the rest of the CPs), even under full bike
tow. We agreed to return to the
previous transition and with a heart-breaking decision to drop out of the race;
it was quiet for the first time whilst we travelled.
After returning to the hotel,
none of us regretted this decision, nor the effort we had placed into this
race. We had given 100% and there was
not another decision to make for our team.
Marc, Matt, and I were a team.
Thank you to all our families,
Moziatex, the friendly brotherhood of adventure racers and volunteers, is not
enough, for the allowing the possibility of us racers to do what we do. By Phil Nicholas...
