Summer Groovin'

Adventure racing has sort of become a passion of mine in the past 2 years or so.  This past Saturday, Mike Wilson and I completed the 15 hour Summer Groove race, put on by Apex Outdoor Gear.

I met Mike at church and we found out that we both had some adventure racing in our past, so we decided to do a race together.  It just happened to be the longest one either of us had ever attempted.

The race was held at Yankee Springs Recreation Area, which is kind of our "home field".  We did a couple practice rides and a little practice orienteering prior to the race. 

The race started at 3 AM (and yes, that is supposed to say AM), so we knew we were going to have to do something in the dark.  We were given our maps and then set free.  The start and finish was located just west of Hall Lake.  Here's a map to get a rough idea of the area.  We first had to trek a couple miles over to the bike staging area (east of Deep Lake) without being able to use the paved roads.

We made it, but were the third to last team to arrive to get our bikes.  Next up was mountain biking the first 9 miles of the single track mountain bike trail at Yankee Springs.  In the dark.  Things got off to a rough start.  Mike got on his bike only to find a flat rear tire before we even got started!  We got it changed out and proceeded out on the course.

Single track riding at night is tough, as I found out the hard way.  With it being tough to see, I got a little close to the edge of the trail and the earth just gave way under my tires.  My bike stopped and skidded down the slope, while I continued moving forward and flew over the handle bars.  Relatively unscathed, I got up, got my bike and we kept going.

We made it to the next transition area, still in third to last place.  It was light out now, which was helpful as we had to start the first orienteering leg.  We got the first three points very quickly and had made up a lot of ground, but got a little lax looking for the last point in the area and spent a lot of time walking in circles, which set us behind even more.

We finally found it and got back to our bikes to head to the paddling section on Crooked Lake in Delton.  It was about a 20 mile ride on the roads to get to our canoe, and hit one optional point on the way as well.  There are not any big climbs on the route, just rolling hill after rolling hill. 

The paddling section consisted of four check points, two mandatory, two optional.  We got the first two mandatory points, which still involved about 4 miles of paddling.  We decided to skip the optional points, get back with plenty of time, and focus on the final orienteering portion, as it would have been another good 2-3 hours in the canoe.

We biked  the 15 or so miles back up to Yankee and prepared to set out on the orienteering course.  There were several mandatory check points and a bunch of optional ones.  One of the mandatory points required swimming to an island in Hall Lake.  The water actually felt great, and was a nice way to cool down a bit.

After the swim we started picking off check points like it was our job.  Things were starting to work in our favor.  We were making great time and finding all our check points quite accurately.  We definitely owe some thanks to another team, who we worked with to find a few points, as well as an older guy living on Gun Lake, as he let us use his hose to fill our packs because we both ran out of water with about 2 hours to go.

We were routinely up to our knees in swampy muck, and in Mike's case up to mid chest level on occasion.  It's tough to be certain how many miles we actually covered on foot in the orienteering course, but I would estimate somewhere between 12-15 miles.
We ended up nailing all but one of the orienteering course points, to give us 22 of 25 check points.  

This was enough to give us 2nd place in the 2-person male division! 

It was definitely a day of perseverance physically, but mentally as well,  after having such a rough start to the race, we kept a level head and kept pushing. 

It was an absolutely awesome day.  Mike was a great partner to have out there and we worked quite well as a team.  Unfortunately, I had to leave out a lot of details to keep this somewhat readable, but if you want more details, either or us would be more than happy to share.

Here's a short post race video...