Checkpoint Zero/Inov-8 Team Blog
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A Black Sheep in the family?
posted Monday, August 20, 2007 by Team Checkpoint Zero @ 12:41 PM - 0 comments

This weekend I had the pleasure of racing with my fiance and another friend as part of the Black Sheep Squadron at the Western Carolina AR. This was the first 12 hour race for both of my teammates and they were a little nervous going into it, not sure how they would make through the whole race with the heat and the distance. I'm glad to say they both did an excellent job and I think they are excited to try a 24 hour race with a little more training.

For us, the race started out the night before, we had decided to camp out because it was close to the start, and we like to camp. We didn't plan on the bugs or the car race track across the street from the park. Lucky for us it started raining, thundering and lightning just as we headed to bed so the cars didn't run much. Still, it was hot all night long and I didn't get a whole lot of quality sleep.

The races started up with a short rogain that had racers finding 5 CPs that were cost to the start, each with a look up code. When you got all 5 codes, you came back to the start, used the look up codes to find letters on a reference card. Once you had the letters you had to unscramble them and figure out what it spelled. The answer was "Modoc", the town we were in.

Up next was the paddle portion of the race. There were seven CPs which could be obtained in any order. We figured we would get the 6 closest, and use the time saved by skipping the furthest away point to get a point later on in the race. This plan didn't work out because I made a navigation error on the water and took us to the 7th CP by mistake.

As we got off the water, we made the horrifying discovery that we no longer had our passport. It had been in the jersey pocket of my teammate, it must have fallen out in the short swim we had to do at that last CP, or possibly during one of the times we got in an out of the boat on the way back. This was crushing, and we almost called it a day. We decided that the reason why we were really out there was to see if we could finish the 11 hours of racing. We took off at a leisurely pace, figuring we would finish the bike section and go from there.

The highlight of the bike section was a zip line over a river for both racer and bicycle at the same time. It was a lot of fun and you could hear the whoops and cheers as each racer made it across.

By the time we finished the bike section, we had about 2 hours left to do the trek section, and make the 45 minute ride back to the start. We managed to pick up one CP on the trek before the blazing sun and blistering heat took it's toll and we headed back. The last ride to the finish was pretty easy, but we were glad to be finishing up.

After all was said and done, we had picked up 19 CP's, but lost 7 because of the incident with the passport. Not a bad showing, and my teammates were stoked that they made it the full distance and still weren't last at the end of the day. The mental struggle of deciding not to quite can sometimes be the toughest part of a race. Just goes to show, the old AR mantra of "Keep going, you never know what can happen" is true.

-Peter

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