I almost hoped I hadn’t signed up for this race in December because I have so much work I was feeling guilty and distracted about taking a whole day from work doing real work. But it was spring break, after all, so what the heck.

March Madness is Infiterra Sports’ fun early spring sprint adventure race: six-hour cutoff, and this time with only two disciplines, trekking and biking. Location was the Bald Mountain State Recreation Area in Lake Orion, Michigan. The fun thing about it was that you could choose entirely what order you’d want to get the checkpoints, whether you’d bike or hike, and how many you’d want. There were thirty-nine; the organizers announced in the race briefing they didn’t think anyone would get them all. Indeed, the winner got twenty-nine.

This was in part because of the weather conditions. It was a beautiful, beautiful spring day, but it meant that the still snow-packed trails would be unrideable and almost unrunnable slush by the early afternoon. Indeed they were. While the temps were in the 20s Fahrenheit at the start, it got close to the 50s in the afternoon.

The race went pretty well for me. “Well” means that I didn’t make any horrendous mistakes, my navigation was good and final placement not an embarrassment. It took me 5 hours and 35 minutes to get twenty-two checkpoints, which placed me fifth in the solo category and thirteenth overall, according to the preliminary results. There are, of course, things I realized afterward I could have done better. I gave up the pursuit of two checkpoints I began pursuing, and those were good calls, but I shouldn’t have tried in the first place: there were other, strategically easier ones.

A couple of quick overall observations:

• Water in marshes is cold in the winter. I was crossing a narrow marshy isthmus between two lakes, thinking it was good I was close to some bushes and brambles in case I went through the ice when, you guessed it, I went through the ice. I only went in hip-deep, and I got out OK. While my shoes, socks or pants never really dried the rest of the day, the pants and socks were meant to take this sort of watery abuse. 
• My studded bike tires are awesome. Before the trails turned into slush, they were a combination of tightly packed crispy snow and ice. My new (Finnish!) studded tires worked like charm on them, making one early riding section one of the most fun rides since I was a teenager. 
• Running in bike shoes is not fun. I carried my trail shoes with me, and I did change into them for a longer hiking portion. But for the most part, I got the checkpoints by biking near them on a moderately rideable trail and then hiked the rest of the way. Mountain biking shoes are designed so you can do some meaningful walking in them, but by the end of the day my feet really hurt. 
• Going through the ice once makes you leery, and that’s a bad strategy. My last two checkpoints, pursued on foot, were on the south side of a lake from the race finish. I was pretty hesitant to do the obvious thing — run across the lake — until I saw a bunch of ice fishers on. Fine: if the ice holds hefty Michiganders, it’ll hold me. It did. 
• Mud is muddy. As the trails turned into slush, the dirt roads — an eminently preferable option to biking on the trails — turned into sludge. There’s nothing bad about getting dirty, but it got so muddy that my chain kept jamming. Annoying. 
• I’m not a terrible navigator. March Madness is meant to be a beginner-friendly adventure race, and it was: most of the checkpoints were very easy to find. Only once did I actually have to use my compass to take a bearing, and even then much of the locating was with the map and the features.
• It was a good workout, all in all. I kept track of my heart rate for the race — data collection freak, I am — and my average heart rate for the whole race was what it usually is for a regular easy run for me. In other words, I got a nice five-and-a-half-hour workout in.