Catch 22 Race - July 22/23rd, 2006

I'm finally getting around to writing about this race! It was definetly one of my favorites so far this year....a 22hour adventure race put on by Velocity Adventure Racing, it took place in & around Musquodoboit Harbour-NS. The different disciplines included trail running, swimming, lots of bushwacking, mtn biking, canoeing and rappelling.

Shawn couldn't race this one, it conflicted with Dave's stag party. So I raced with Mark Campbell and Sara Vlug....the two best and most experienced adventure racers in Atlantic Canada. They haved both raced internationally at big races like Eco-Challenge, Primal Quest, Raid Galoise, and many others... Needless to say I slowed them down a bit :), and I learned a ton about racing. The best part was.....we won! We raced as team "Sweets & Sour", playing up the fact that we had a 2 girl/1 guy combo; this is an unconventional mix as usually teams only have one "token chick".

Race Report:
(Warning: Long read, don't feel obliged!)
The race got off to a crazy start for me: We ran off the finish line with team "Hail to the Chimp", leaving all of the other teams in our dust....but we were running at a crazy pace. I wasn't sure that i'd be able to keep up for long! Luckily we soon got into some more technical and slower trail running, and my lungs caught up to my feet :)

After 6km or so, we left check-point #1 (CP1) and headed into the woods for the treacherous 5km bushwacking section...or as some racers called it "Juan-whacking"; there was a lot of tree-fall, apparently from Hurricane Juan. I thought that it was a really fun section! We climbed through the woods for 3hrs, but time passed quickly as we chatted, laughed, swam, and chased spiders and water beetles out of our skimpies. We lost "Hail to the Chimp" somewhere in the haunted forest, and later learned that we had come out of the woods 45mins ahead of them, in first place.



From CP2 we headed off on the 17km trail run (oh yes, we ran the whole thing). I kept looking over my shoulder expecting to see a long, lanky, red-head sporting a backward mesh trucker's hat (ie. Dave Eaton--the DAL cross-country star) running toward us. But, there was no sign of them as we (we meaning Mark) navigated our way through a maze of logging roads to CP3/TA1, the first transition area. Just as is was getting dark we threw on our life jackets and packs, swam the 400m across the lake to our bikes (way tougher than i thought!), and peddled our way to CP4, just over an hour before the midnight cut-off.


We continued to bike through the night to CP4a (advanced section), and finally to CP5. It was dark, foggy, and despite my bike lights, I couldn't see a frigging thing. There was a lot of double-track biking (ATV trails), all lined with alders. Most of the alders overhanging the trails had small twig sized branches, easy to bike right through...but every once and awhile I'd hit one that was about the size of my wrist! Sometimes I could recover and stay on the bike....sometimes I couldn't :)

From CP5 to CP6/TA2 we chose to take the longer but safer route....a 20km road bike. Sara was getting sleepy, and apparently when Sara gets sleepy she gets intense and goes as fast as she can! Well, I learned the art of drafting as I barely kept up to Mark and Sara for the speedy ride into TA2. Apparently we were so speedy that we made up about 20 mins on "Hail to the Chimp", who had not done the advanced section and left CP6 about 30 mins ahead of us.


From CP6/TA2 we jumped into the canoe and paddled, and paddled, and paddled. To keep herself and us awake, Sara entertained us as she screamed random noises and songs as loud as she could. We played word games and counted strokes and we paddled through CP7, CP8 and finally to CP9 where we did the awesome rappel! From there Mark portaged the canoe 2.5kms, then Sara and I took it the final 500m into the finish....total time 20hrs26mins.

Thanks Mark and Sara for a really fun race!