Saturday
May 17
Event:
Odyssey Wild, Wonderful 24 Hour AR
Writer: Bryan Mayer & Kristin Eddy
Brian: We
executed everything well and worked well as a team. I made one wrong choice in
route decision but lost minimal time. Also had trouble finding one tough CP in
the dark and misplotted another. We triple checked the one that I thought was
misplotted and still didn’t realize my mistake. Luckily it was the closest
point to the TA/finish so we were able to re-attack at the end without wasting
too much time. If this had been in the middle of the course we would have been
in more trouble.
Kristin: Next time I will ask you if you are 110% sure (not just 100%
: ) makes me laugh just thinking about it.
Brian: Ronny
put together a great MTBO on the new Fayetteville MTB singletrack trails
(Arrowhead) and we had a pretty epic trek back to ACE HQ from there. Lots of
tough Nav.
Kristin: The arrowhead trails/mtb section was
one of my favorite parts of the race - always sweet to have great singletrack
rolled into the race WITH challenging nav (which, by the way, you'd never know
was challenging the way that Brian navs it: fast paced & nailed each point)
8
AM
Paddle
was cancelled. River peaked at over 16ft exactly at race start. This was the
22nd highest peak recorded. 0 is standard and 4-6ft is normal for this time of
year. The rafting would have been EPIC. The river looked insane. Like a beast. I surely would have peed my pants if we had rafted it
(though would have been fun i'm sure) SICK!!!!
Road
Running 5:00 0.34 mi
LeMans
start to bikes. We literally had to tell Dan
to slow down (by the way, I said this to him more than once during the race!!!
: ) He was a human rocket...for the entire race!!!
When
I got to my bike I found that someone decided to lay it down in some nice
poison ivy. Thank you.
Mountain
Biking 40:00 4.58 mi +960ft
Climb
to Fayetteville from “takeout”
9
AM
Road
Running 40:00 4.6 mi
Run
through Fayetteville to gather some CPs the
lovely rhodo that blooms in the neighborhood between the park & town was in
glorious full bloom...it is tri-color and almost as big as the house that it
shades - remembered it from previous races, love that beauty.
10
AM
Mountain
Biking 1:50:00 11.63 mi
MTBO
on Arrowhead trails. Really well designed course section. Adding topo lines to
the trail map and making the lines less than a 1/2 in thick iwould make this a
professional MTBO. Yes, Ronny did a great job
with this - FUN!!!
12
PM
Orienteering
9:00:00 24.2 mi
Long
Orienteering section. Started with some points we had to plot around
Fayetteville area. Had some amazing views and awesome scenery on this section.
Did some of it with GOALS.racing alongside
goals & the sweet spots of the controls were definite race highlights -
overlooks, waterfalls, cool rock formations - really gorgeous.
On
the first half (14-19t) I had to make a few minor recoveries (1-2 min) to each
of the points. But no real problems. Still good navigation. (GREAT nav)
The
second half was on ACE property. Struggled deciding when to get CP 22. Got it
after 20 because I thought it would allow for more trail travel but I think in
retrospect it would have been better after 24 (i
tried to tell brian this, but he wouldn't listen, can you believe that?).
Distance looked just as far but with the way we ended up leaving 24, 22
wouldn't have really been out of the way and would have been on trails. It was
a tough call for me though so I don't feel too bad.
On
our way to the last few points before we went to TA I started having trouble
with the trail map. The labels are aligned E-W. I kept reading it as if they
were N-S though so we were going the right way because I was following terrain
but every time I looked at the compass I couldn't understand what was wrong.
Befuddled me for two points until I realized the cause. Other than the 1 route
choice only one 5 min error on the second half. Misread the map right before
the attack to 24.
The
pace was fast for this entire trek (yes it
was...brian & dan kept steady gunnin', even with no sense of
pressure...always nice to push simply to do our best - which i think we did!).
Running whenever we could. Finished just after civil twilight.
9
PM
MTBO
2:40:00 12.25 mi +1300ft
Gathering
the last points around the TA on bike instead of foot. Moved slow on these
because it was dark, the trails are slow and everywhere, and we were starting to
get tired.
Translated
CP30 to the trail map incorrectly onto a parallel spur (the spur had a matching
road with a unique shape, trail, and reentrant). When it wasn't there we
thought Ronny had misplotted because the clue was off. We double and triple checked
and then moved on. Next two points were clean and the trails to them were all
good.
27
was difficult. Everyone had trouble with it. The planned attack was through
private property. Had to back out and attack from farther away. On my way
realized I mistranslated this point as well (just 1 reentrant off) but caught
it in time. Had trouble finding the small (actually big but shallow) reentrant
in the dark. Spent time looking in an wrong reentract full of briars before we
reattacked from the top/private property. Still had to go all the way back to
the bikes though. (low point of the race for
many folks...lots of stories afterwards about this one!)
Had
trouble finding an ACE trail on the way to the last point but got it and then
rolled back to TA. When we got back we asked about CP30. Teams had apparently
collected it so I checked one more time and noticed my translation error. The
road is really what messed me up. Luckily it was only a mile or so away (but
400ft climb) so it was fairly easily attainable.
Orienteering
race 1:30:00 2.3 mi
Trekking
during MTBO
You are invited to view K
mama's photo album: Team American Adventure Sports at Odyssey's Wild Wonderful
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