Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Christmas in Christmas AR Report

The Cow Tippers aren't known for their Elitism, but a 3.5 hour Elite race?  That we can get behind.

What we didn't get behind were the ACTUAL COWS that blocked the area early that morning, according to Greg.  Sorry we weren't handy to assist.

Finally recuperated from our sicknesses/laziness from last race, we were looking to make our mark on our favorite of all Elite races.

This race looked to be a bit more substantial with several key decisions required that would affect our efficiency and speed.  Our sequence was pre-determined:  BOAT, BIKE, and FOOT.

THE PLAN

Some of our considerations:

BOAT:
Which direction to head out on the boat would be a race-time decision, based on how many groups were ahead of us.  Racers were given the heads up that CP 14 and 15 would be in a narrow part; so we didn't want to end up clustered in canoes.

BIKE:
Always the question -- should we take the hardpack or the trail.  Often the hardpack road is more reliable to gauge condition than the trail... unless the hardpack turns into sugar sand!  Also, we saw an opportunity to grab a CP by bushwacking a short segment between hardpack and trail, cutting out a lot of slow stuff.  But it would be a racetime decision based on how thick the ground cover was.

FOOT:
Not surprisingly, if you are good with course bearings you can cut a lot of time off by avoiding the longer trails and going straight to the site.  This can backfire if you miss your bearing/distance, but often you can hit the trail if you overshoot, and reorient from there.  CP's 2, 3, and 5 were great opportunities here.  The downside?  Late race bushwacking can often lead to cramping in our experience.

THE RACE  

a.k.a. where the plan falls apart.  Its always fun to discuss where things go really well or not so hot, right?

We got off to a fast start, hoping to overtake some teams and avoid a canoe jam.  But once we got there, we divided to grab two canoes, two team members each.  There was some confusion, and we ended up portaging the canoes on separate sides of the waterway.  One side was definitely faster, and we lost about 5 minutes here.  We ended up jogging with the canoes on our shoulders to catch up!

Full Beast Mode!


Which way did he go, George?

Next on the bike section we made a decision to bushwack with the bikes... again... after our experience at Lighter Knot this maybe was foolhardy.  But it worked.  From CP 7 we took at shot out to hit the bike trail.  Shortly thereafter we were well on our way to CP 8.  It remains to be seen whether or not coming back down to the main road inbetween CP's 7 and 8 would have been faster, would be interested to know other teams' experiences on that.  Overall, going this route from CP 7 to 8 took ~10 minutes this way.



On the run, we hit some more interesting issues.  Again we planned to make a series of bearing shots on the lower parts of the course to cut some extra distances off the route.  We ran CP 1,4,5,3,2.  We were fairly good on the bearings.  We lost time taking about 10 minutes to locate CP 3 after getting there.  Vegetation Boundary clues are always tricky for us.  Only bearing with errors was from CP3 to CP2, where we were off and came up on the trail north of our target.  CP 2 was indicated as close only 30 m off the trail, so we looked for the telltale bend in the trail, and reshot.  Time to get back to Main TA!  But we assumed the direction other teams were coming were from the Main TA, and went out opposite their direction.  That was determined to be wrong, as we found ourselves headed south -- time to turn around.  That mistake cost us about 5 minutes.  We got in to find we were third to turn in... but others may still arrive and beat us.



Summary of lost time:

Canoe direction -- 5-6 minutes
Locate CP3 -- 10 minutes
CP2 misshot -- 4 minutes
Wrong Direction to MTA -- 5 minutes

Excluding any potential time savings from CP 7 to CP 8 on bike (assuming not) then our total time lost due to errors totaled 25 minutes.  A perfect race would have put us in medal contention.  But it wouldn't have been enough to win!  We completed the course within 2:42:55 to claim 4th place.  Elite win continues to elude us!




1 comment:

  1. Congrats on a great race! Don't feel too bad; Good'Nuff and Primal were both flying...

    A few things we did differently: we went for 11 and 12 first. We were the first team to go on the boat, so we wanted to get those two before anyone else got there (so were not bird-dogs for other teams.) We also were able to take advantage of other teams searching for 14 and 15 by the time we got there. I think we passed you guys on your way back in from 15 as we were going out...

    We did the bike very much the same way you did. We lost about 10 minutes at CP8 by going into the woods too soon. When we got back to the bikes to keep going to the corner, I was sure we had squandered our shot at the podium... Only difference in route choice: we stayed on the trail after CP8, because the road segment was so short, we did not think it would make up for the bushwhack time.

    We took the trek in the opposite direction for two reasons: 1) We thought the attaches on CP2 and CP3 would be easier from that direction. 2) We could bushwhack straight south from CP1 and run into the finish on the road. As you say, the race is where plans go to die: After CP2, we tries to straight south to the yellow trail and totally missed it. So we ended up hitting the road instead and followed that down to the clearing to pick up the vegetation boundary for CP3. Not too hard to find, but not the most efficient route. We got to CP4 by going back to the east/west road then taking the south southwesterly road and attaching the palm cluster from where it intersected the trail coming in from the west. This worked out well, as we could see the cluster as soon as we stepped into the clearing.

    Thanks for sharing the report,

    -Bill Dean (We Blame Javan)

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