Brent and I signed up for an “AR Warm-Up” on May 28th, organized by MNOC [Minnesota Orienteering Club]. The weather that day was in the mid-90s with a fairly strong wind. Perfect for racing! (Well, we’ve raced before when it was in the mid-40s with a fairly strong wind and pouring rain—this was a lot closer to perfect!) We were also wearing our official GT Frost racing gear, so the other racers gave us the “Best-Dressed Team” award. The race was a short course that was supposed to take approximately 4-6 hours. The first team that made it to all the checkpoints finished in exactly six hours. Unfortunately, Team GT Frost suffered from premature completion of the race.
Everything was supposed to start at 9:00, but it took about 10 minutes for the race organizers to bring us all to an open field as a starting point, which is where they gave us the maps we used to plot our course. The first couple checkpoints weren’t too far away and most people left the field at the same time, so the beginning of the race was basically a large cluster moving along at a relatively slow pace. Things really started to get spread out at the first transition area [TA], which was where we all picked up inflatable kayaks and hit the water.
The kayak fits two people and is a really basic shape—a bottom, the sides and a little cover over the tips on the front and back to keep waves from splashing in and eventually dragging the kayak down until you’re paddling next to the fishes. Since I was riding in the front, I went to grab an inflatable seat to support my back, whereas Brent could lean against the rear of the kayak. I used a pump to put air in the seat, but it wasn’t staying inflated. I thought maybe I wasn’t closing the plug quickly enough, but after the third try, it seemed good enough. However, as I walked towards the lake, I realized that it was deflating again. A non-inflated seat wasn’t going to help any, so I decided to leave it on shore and we took off into the water instead of getting another. That was a big mistake.
Sitting in the bottom of the kayak without anything holding me up in the back meant I was stuck in a permanent sit-up position. I quickly shifted around to kneel and sit on my ankles, then twisted around so I was sitting on my feet, then shifted back… I moved around as much as I could, but it was impossible to get comfortable for more than ten minutes at a time and we were on the water for significantly longer than ten minutes. Eventually, I reached the point where I couldn’t paddle anymore. I just leaned forward in the kayak to keep pressure off my feet because it hurt so bad. During all this, we still had to go all the way across the lake and directly into a headwind to the next checkpoint. I paddled for a majority of the way, but towards the end, Brent was the only reason we were moving forward.
When we got to the checkpoint, someone helped me out of the kayak and I sat down so I could roll my feet around to get the blood flowing and loosen them up. When we got back into the water, we changed our technique: we both laid down on the kayak facing one another. One of us would sit up and paddle forward for a while, then he’d lie down, we’d spin the kayak around and the other person would paddle. I was amazed at how well it worked and we finished the remainder of the kayaking section a lot faster than I expected.
I’m not sure how far behind the pack we were by then, but we had a lot of ground to make up. The next part was another orienteering section, so Brent pulled out his compass, figured out where we needed to go and we took off towards the next checkpoint. There aren’t much in the way of trails in a state park like that… well, there probably are, but the checkpoints were off the trail and in the woods, so we did a little trailblazing instead.
Trailblazing is basically how is sounds, except there’s no fire involved. We pick out which direction we’re supposed to go, then go that way and storm through any brush that gets in our way. Thankfully, we wear tights during adventure races (chicks think they look sexy…), so the slash marks are kept to a minimum. It was pretty impressive at how well Brent was doing with the map and compass. We took one wrong turn, but he caught it after about thirty yards. Aside from that, we did almost no wandering at all—his bearings took us straight to the checkpoint flags where we punched our card.
By the time we got to the TA where we were supposed to pick up our bikes, we had made up some lost time and were about half an hour behind the leaders. It was 12:10, so we’d been on the trail for about three hours—not a bad pace, especially considering we’d both been sick recently and hadn’t been working out much. After gathering our helmets and some other gear, we jumped on our bikes and got ready to hit the road.
“Dude, you’ve got a flat tire.”
I looked down… yep, my front tire was flat. That was rather strange, given that we’d pumped up the tires shortly before the race started. I’d ridden the bike a couple times before to exercise—no problems then—but now I had a flat. Thankfully, Brent had changed the tires on his bike earlier, so we knew what to do.
Unfortunately, we had four spare tubes between us and only one of them had a valve that would fit my bike—the others were too big to fit through the hole in the tire’s frame. We rummaged through our gear for a couple minutes, then when we finally found tube #4, Brent slipped the new tube into the tire and started pumping it up. We’d inflated all the others to about 60 psi, but he got to about 35 psi and
BOOM!
The tube literally exploded. What’s worse, it tore open the sidewall of the tire when it blew up, so both the tube and tire were completely useless. One of the race directors offered to let me borrow his front tire, but it was designed for a different kind of braking system, so I wouldn’t have had a front brake if I used it. We had to accept the truth: GT Frost’s race was over.
We withdrew and got listed as “DNF” [Did Not Finish]. Brent and I sat around to wait and cheer for some of the other racers when they made it to the finish line, but given that we withdrew at 12:45 and the first team got back at 3:10, we were waiting for a while. During that time, we made a few discoveries.
First, when comparing the two flat tire tubes, we discovered that the location and shape of the puncture marks were exactly the same. They made an “X” that was too big to patch, then when we stretched out the tubes with the valves next to each other… same place, same shape. What’s worse, we talked to someone at the finishing area who said she’d heard a bang at about 11:00. I wonder if that was someone’s tire? I’ve used the bike outside before, but apparently the wheel likes temperatures in the mid-50s a lot better than in the mid-90s.
Now there are less than two weeks until the Wild Adventure Race Summer Sprint and we have some things to work on:
- Strength and endurance
- Kayaking skills
- Getting the guys at the bike shop to fix my tire
Stories from the next race coming soon…
– Shawn Bakken, Team GT Frost
