Well, me and my buddies (on Team Animal Tested), just completed a 24 hour race. Phew.

The Story:

A week ago, we find out our planned 60hr race in Downieville is cancelled. We’re pissed, we wanted to race and frantically look around for a race. We found a 24 hour race in Big Bear, just a week away, for an amazing $50. We contact Team Sole, who is putting it on, and they let us do it. We run through all the pre-race prep in a huffy, figuring we can rent Kayaks in Big Bear. We pack up the car, ask some of our parents to crew for us, and we jet. We get to Big Bear at 4:30, and realize we still have to pick up the kayaks. By the time we get there, “Captain John” is gone, and we are stuck… so we “picked them up” (stole them), and left a note on his desk. Uh oh.

We make it to the race meeting in time to eat some pizza and paint our faces like something with whiskers (we’re the Animals from Team Animal Tested, see?). At the race meeting they tell us what a crazy race we got ourself in to. We wondered to ourselves, did we miss the “Expert Only” note on the website? 11000ft of elevation gain? Tough navigation? Desert heat and alpine cold? Did we actually read anything about this website? Do we want our money back? Hell No! We get the maps and checkpoints, and plot the points on two extra-large MyTopo.com maps. As we are working with our maps, we notice Team Dart/Nuun sitting next to us doing the same: cool. In Cycling you never get to prep next to Lance Armstrong! Adventure Racing is sweet because it’s small, and you can actually get tips in person from the best in the business.

Once finished with the maps, we hop in the car and get close to the race start which was 2 hours away. It’s basically 12AM before we bed down in a Humane Society outlet store. Ugh. We would have camped out on the roof, to avoid the light, but we got some nasty looks from our support crew (Dan’s mom and uncle). We get up at 4AM (yes, we only got 4 hours of sleep), and we make it into Pioneertown. We start at 6AM, and we embark. Here is a map of the course, but to make it quick: 31 hours, 7000 calories, and dozens of sleep-monsters later, we make it into the YMCA camp that is the finish. We roll in 5th in our division, 8th overall, ahead of over a dozen teams who dropped out. We were tired, happy, and glad to be able to play in the hills with some of the strongest, most determined guys and girls in the world.

Many thanks to the course directors Karen and Paul of Team Sole, for putting on a hellacious and long course that pushed us like crazy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 2:41 am and is filed under Races. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.