In my quest for new things beyond running, I did my third adventure race on October 10. This was a nice combination of “sprint” (i.e., less than 24-hour) and longer races: its cutoff was 15 hours, but it started at 3 a.m., which at this time of the year meant at least four hours of darkness.

The race was called Summer Groove because it was supposed to have taken place in July. Because of funding cuts in the federal bureaucracy, though, their permit to use the Manistee National Forest was not processed in time, and the race had to be postponed until yesterday. That meant that the swimming was cut. Bummer.

The race was in western Michigan, home to more sand than any mountain biker wants to think about. Or so I feel now, having gone through it.

Adventure racing is basically an invitation to the seven-year-old in all of us to do all kinds of fun stuff we like to do, but with the twist that it gets hard fast, especially if you want to be competitive.

Another aspect of AR is its team element, but I raced this solo. It meant all the tasks — navigation, gear, strength — were on me, but so was all the blame and responsibility. And the bickering would be only inside my head. I did have a team name, though, for my local gym, Joust.

In AR, time matters, but more important than that is the number of checkpoints a team or a racer gets. So going fast is important, but you have to strategize a lot, too, especially when there are cutoff times. This race included tons of optional checkpoints, many of them pre-plotted on our maps and equally many given only as so-called UTM coordinates you had to plot yourself. The plotting part the night before was no problem — thanks to twelve years of mandatory orienteering in Finnish schools — but getting all the optionals in the race was.

Anyway, given that the race took me a little less than thirteen hours, I could go on for very long. But let me just offer the following couple of anecdotes.

The race began at 3 a.m. with about a nine-mile bike ride to the canoe/kayak launch. (Canoes for teams, kayaks for solos.) The ride was a bit longer for me and most others as the location was less obvious than it seemed on the topo map. More seriously unplanned was the second-thickest fog I’ve ever seen (don’t ask me about the thickest fog) as well as the opening of the duck hunting season, which the race director found about only the day before the race. Picture this, then: It’s toward the end of my paddling in impenetrable fog for four hours. I’ve paddled about eight or nine miles, most of it with only the moon, Venus and the Orion, plus my trusty compass, giving me a sense of where the heck I am. (Yes: thick fog, and totally clear above. Weird. And cold as heck: 35F or so.) Suddenly, by a little island, I paddle into a huuuge gaggle of oddly calm mallards. I wonder what’s up when suddenly I hear, “Hey buddy, stay the *&^@#^ away from my decoys.” Paddle, paddle, paddle, fast. I wasn’t shot at, in case you’re wondering, or hoping. But it meant that I ended up missing one CP from the paddling section. All but one were optional. The stupid thing was that I spent almost an hour paddling to the furthest CP to get it and then missed the easy gimmee. Oh well.

OK, next up was a hiking section. This was actually pretty cool: usually adventure races make most foot travel orienteering. This section was essentially trail running along an awesome multistate North Country Trail. The checkpoints were all on the trail, and you just had to keep putting one foot in front of another. I was behind (I thought — hard to tell in the fog), so I made this glorious section a fun run where I caught up with and passed quite a few people as the sun rose and cleared the fog. I began it so damned cold I had to use chemical hand warmers for the first time in my life, but soon enough I warmed up enough to really enjoy the beauty of the trail.

After about ten or eleven miles of this was a transition to the next bike section. This section, too, was relatively easy on the navigational front, although not trivial — if you didn’t have a bike computer, you were hosed, I think — but it was made almost unbearable by the quality of the trails. There’s a lot of sand in western Michigan. When it rains, as it had the day before, the sand becomes quite unpleasant. Progress was slow, and many a ground encounter was encountered, on account of my inability to get out of SPDs fast enough. At least it was soft.

With about 25 miles on the bike computer, it was time for land orienteering. Yay: my favorite after the trail running. That is, my strong suit: romping in the woods, finding checkpoints. I pretty promptly got most of the CPs, although one — previously announced as very difficult — took a long time and collaboration with a friend of mine also racing solo and whom I ran into in the woods.

At this point, I was eleven hours into the race, and it was time for some tough decisions. Whether because of the running I had done to make up for lost time, or because I’m a weak cyclist, or because it hadn’t occurred to me to taper for this race, I was feeling pretty whupped. The next orienteering section was entirely optional; you’d want to get all those CPs if you wanted any of the prize money, but you didn’t have to. The section required a couple of miles of riding to the next TA, and then a very long ride back to the finish after finding the optional CPs. The easy option was merely a long ride back to the finish from where I was. As I felt I was out of the running for anything meaningful, I said, “Goshdangit, I’m done.” (OK, I said something other than “goshsdangit.”) “Done,” of course, still meant about fifteen miles of riding, six of it on (or in) horrendous nasty muddy sand.

Lest you think any of this was heroic and gutsy, I must admit to being pretty wimpy. I was feeling very sorry for myself, and also envious of the other people, such as my friend Bob, who went ahead for the optional orienteering course. In the end, after stopping to eat to prevent a total collapse, I made it in with twelve hours and forty-five minutes on the race clock.

Ironically, all this ended up working out well for me, in terms of placement. I won the solo division and was eleventh overall (of thirty finished teams/solos). But it was neither strategy or talent. I ended up with 24 checkpoints. Of the teams that got most of the 35, only three beat the fifteen-hour cutoff, the last by twenty seconds. Lots of teams went for them, but simply didn’t make it back on time because the final biking was both long, technically difficult and geographically challenging. In other words, here’s three cheers for wimping out being a good strategy.

I did carry my video camera and managed to shoot some footage. Neither the athletic performance nor the production values are of Eco Challenge quality, but there it is, anyway.

Foolishly enough, I’m ready for more. Well, once this horrendous soreness and fatigue let off.