"Expectations Are Overrated"

EXPECTATIONS ARE OVERRATED

(This is a slightly modified version of a Redoubt Reporter article from June 2012. It was one of three articles—the others written by my teammates—and an explanatory sidebar to appear in the newspaper concerning the adventure race called “Bushwhack This!”)

Lying inside a down bag in the bed of my truck, I had almost drifted off to sleep when another burst of automatic-weapon fire jolted me awake.

I cracked open my weary eyelids, noted the greying skies of evening, and wondered if the shooters were ever going to tire. For three hours now, and with a wide assortment of guns, they had been plugging away at targets propped against a copse of birch trees on the nearby hillside.

Just then, a trio of four-wheeler riders blasted past us, jumping a nearby ditch and roaring off into the gloom down inky trails dotted with puddles and lined with sprawling alders. It was nearly 9 p.m. Our race was slated to start at midnight, with a pre-race meeting scheduled for about 10. I doubted I would get a moment of real sleep before the race began.

Nestled in her own bag, my teammate, Yvonne Leutwyler, had remained motionless throughout the latest artillery barrage. Either she had actually managed to drift into a sleep deep enough to escape the noise or she was simply remaining stoically still. Ensconced in the cab of the truck, my other teammate, Mike Crawford, also seemed immobile.

We were entered as a coed team in the 2012 “Bushwhack This!” adventure race, billed as a 12-hour competition encompassing approximately 40 miles of mountain biking, orienteering, trekking and paddling. At about 10:30, we were to be informed of the exact nature of the race course, along which we would be expected to locate nine hidden checkpoints and punch a card proving we had passed through.

Of the three of us, only Yvonne had had experience with the race. A strong athlete with solid endurance, she had participated in 2011 in a cold day-long August rain and had vowed never to do it again. Mike, in great shape from his continual triathlon training and his work as a P90X instructor, had, like me, no experience with a competition of this duration. And I, as the oldest member of the group, was by far the biggest racing newbie—having entered only two races since graduating from high school: the 1980 Mount Marathon race and the 2012 Run for the River 5K.

Yes, there are 32 years between those experiences.

On this particular weekend, with Father’s Day looming only two days away, the campers, motor homes and heavy-duty trucks had infiltrated the site en masse  with trailers packed with motorcycles, ATV’s, and four-wheelers, providing us with myriad illustrations of the Doppler Effect, and creating a makeshift RV Village.

And it was literally in the middle of all this motorized mayhem that a group of 22 helmeted, sleep-deprived adventure-racing participants were about to clamber onto their mountain bikes and launch into a fully human-powered competition.

Before any of us contemplated another good night’s sleep, however, we would be pedaling about 25 miles (over muddy mining roads, along stretches of highway, down a deteriorating old railroad bed paralleling the Matanuska River, and through the streets of Palmer), trekking approximately 10 miles (down empty city streets, up a pair of wooded buttes, along mosquito-infested trails and swamps, and even down a hard-packed gravel road), and paddling six miles of slack water in one-person flat-bottomed pack rafts.

Prior to race-start, I laid out my goals: (1) Avoid injury to myself or my teammates. (2) Finish the race. (3) Have fun. I assumed that success in the first two categories would ensure success in the third. I also assumed that the high character and athletic prowess of my teammates improved the likelihood of accomplishing all three goals.

Then—despite whanging my left kneecap on a sharp chunk of granite when I fell along the river, despite unnecessarily carrying a spare inner tube and a patch kit during the non-biking portions of the race, and despite our group making a navigational error that added about three miles and an hour and a half to our time—I succeeded in all my goals.

Me, Yvonne and Mike atop Bodenburg Butte in Palmer, Alaska. (Photo by
Vyonne Leutwyler)

Of course, the rest of the 12 hours wasn’t exactly a walk in the park—well, part of it was, with a bit of biking and running at 4 a.m., as we searched for Checkpoint #4.

There were plenty of moments at which we could have allowed frustration or fatigue to overpower our good natures and cause us to snipe at each other. But we kept our attitudes positive, even when Yvonne hooked up me and Mike like sled dogs to tow her up Bodenburg Butte, even when our butts were getting wet as cold stream water pooled in the bottoms of our rafts, and even when we climbed the wrong mosquito-ridden summit of Burnt Butte and then had to descend and go climb the correct mosquito-ridden summit to find a checkpoint.

In fact, our team, the K-Pen Cats, was the first to arrive at checkpoints 3, 4, 5 and 6, and to the transition area, where we swapped our muddy bikes and wet clothing for our rafts, paddles and a few dry items before hurrying off down another trail.

By the time noon rolled around, we were cruising over flat water at about two miles per hour, and the 40-something-degree temperatures of pre-dawn racing had been replaced by 70-something degrees and bluebird skies. To end the race, we pulled our crafts from lower Jim Creek and shuffled with them across sandy flats to the north bank of the Knik River, about two miles upstream from the Old Glenn Highway bridge. And from there, we could see on the far shore the support vehicles, the finish line, and a chance to rest in the sun.

After a few hang-ups on sandbars, we arrived, rang the finish bell, changed into dry clothes, then stuffed ourselves full of peanutbutter-filled pretzels, Red Vines, and chips and salsa before dropping onto the soft gravel for an attempted snooze.

Across the river, on the Jim Creek Flats, motorcycles and four-wheelers roared back and forth, but it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

The last two photos are courtesy of Yvonne Leutwyler. To read our full accounts of this adventure and see all the photos from the newspaper article, follow this link: http://redoubtreporter.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/take-a-whack-at-adventure-backcountry-race-tests-navigation-endurance-teamwork-sanity/#more-8381