New Hamshire Race--Sept 16&17

We travelled to New Hamshire a couple of weeks ago to compete in a 24-hour race put on by Racing Ahead LLC. The race was definitely one to remember!

Team capenrage.com was the only Canadian entry in 18 teams to start. Started Saturday morning at 7 am, we knew we'd be trekking, but we didn't receive the maps (containing the first 6 CPs) until after the start had begun, when we ran across a field to get them!

Running toward the first maps....can you spot me? (Hint: I'm headed straight for the map girl wearing red)

We tried to not get too excited in the first moment rush of the race, and were the very last team to orient ourselves and plan our trekking attack... We could only improve from there, right?? :)

That's us on the right, taking our sweet time figuring out where the heck to go!

Then we were on to tackle all the hills that surrounded us. Had 3 unmanned trekking CPs before we came back to hop on the bikes. After leaving the start in last place, we arrived in 3rd, behind EMS and and all Male Team.

Running into TA1 in 3rd Place

We had some mechanical troubles at the TA with our bikes and left in 4th place. 10 miles of hilly biking to get to our first of a few bike drops (and in NH - they don't let you drop your shoes or helmet!). Dropped the bikes and headed for a killer up and up trek, with a few fun nav bushwacks. Killer heat! I stripped down to my skimpy tights to keep from overheating with a pack heavier than I was used to. We popped out of the woods in 3rd place, to find another CoEd team had overshot a bushwack and were headed back into the woods.

Shawn in his skimpy tights :)

Onto a 15 mile canoe paddle in 3rd place, but by this time, EMS had 1 hr on us, and Second place Summit Acheivement had about 45 minutes.


Finished the paddle behind 4 or 5 teams - what happened!?! Were we THAT slow?? Turns out most teams had missed cuttoffs for the water CPs and were on shortened courses. Only 4 ranked teams remained.

Finishing the long, LONG, paddle

Finished the paddle around 6 pm to get on our epic bike ride. I guessed it would be 7 or 8 hours. 12 hours later we are still on the bikes, and frantically trying to make the last cuttoff time of 6 am to get on the last orienteering section. We had a heck of a time finding a few controls on top of the ski hills and lost a good 1.5 hrs. Exhausted but feeling quite accomplished, we rode into the finish line on a modified course (missed the last 6km of orienteering) at 23 hrs 55 minutes.

Just after finishing...

Only 2 teams finished the course ranked. EMS SMOKED the course in something like 19 hours!!! We were given 4th place (although we sort of thought 3rd since we'd stayed ranked longer than any other team :) ). We learned some hard lessons about route choices in hilly terrain, orienteering with 4 different scaled maps on the fly (none of which actually had the scale on them), travelling with much more weight than we were used to, and hills, hills, hills! Overall, definitely one of the toughest races we've done so far, and fun to see some new faces and race in a new area.

Team Capenrage.com, including our wonderful support crew: Ernie & Cherie, Thanks Guys!