“Most guys can’t do pink. You do it well, man.” This is a compliment to cherish, coming as it did from a member of the Eastern Mountain Sports adventure racing team, multi-year national champions and the eventual winners of Adventure Rage 2010, during which the comment was made. The occasion for it was my pink kayak, which they spotted as they were coming from punching a checkpoint in a channel off Center Lake and I was on my way. At this point, I wasn’t even that far behind them!

Not that time is the most important thing in adventure racing. Time matters, but how many checkpoints you manage to find is the primary criterion; time settles the placement for the teams with the same number of checkpoints.

But enough about the general principles. The Rage was my first adventure race in the “sport” category. Those are races 24-30 hours or so. The cutoff time for the Rage was 28 hours, which meant that when it started at 8 a.m. on Saturday, July 17, at the Leoni township boat launch in Michigan Center, Michigan, we had until noon of the following day to make it back to the Planet Rock climbing gym in Ann Arbor. The ways to get there were, in the following order which racers had found out about the night before: paddling on a chain of lake, riding a mountain bike on a variety of dirt and paved roads and a field, bushwhacking in Waterloo State Rec Area wood, mountain biking from Waterloo to Pinckney State Rec on single-track hiking and mountain biking trails, bushwhacking in Pinckney State Rec, tramping on country roads from Pinckney to the Huron river, paddling the Huron down to Delhi park, and, finally, biking a few measly miles from Delhi to Planet Rock.Wanna see a very rough mapping of the route I took? It’s here. It’s hard to tell exactly how much I traveled, but it’s something around 90 miles give or take — well, give — a few miles.

But most of y’all have no interest in the tedious nuances of the race, let alone the finesses of orienteering. (I mean, I was really mad at myself for confusing a contour line for a trail at 4:57 a.m., thus missing CP9 of the Pinckney O-course. But do you care? If you’re reasonable, you don’t.)

So I’d like to offer some highlights instead.

• This was a supported race. That meant I could have a team bringing me food, supplies, transporting my gear, etc. at pre-specified transition areas (TAs for short). Danielle and my friends Gina and Ellen volunteered, and they really made the race go smoothly and also served as motivation when I was demoralized, tired, or ready to quit, as was frequently the case. 
• Of all the legs, I hated the daytime road biking the most. It didn’t help that I made a couple of mistakes and ran out of water an hour before the TA. It was very hot during the day.
• Did I say it was hot? How hot, you ask. OK, here’s a statistic: I drank 11 gallons (about 45 liters) of liquids during the race, and I peed four times. 
• I really liked the twenty-two-mile night-time mountain biking section. This was on narrow trails, and I was almost entirely alone, which made it very stressful at times. But it was a wonderful combination of being in the nature and feeling like I was in a video game, what with the powerful lights, narrow trails, and wilderness. Also, it turned out, interestingly and totally surprisingly, that I was the all-around fastest competitor for that section.
• But I really loved, loved, loved a night-time orienteering section. It’s been more than twenty-five years since I did night-time orienteering, but being alone, on foot, in the middle of a thick forest, was maybe the highlight of my year. It was very hard to locate the checkpoints in the dark because it was hard to see all the features, but the clear sky and the stars above, raccoons, deer, and frogs both helped and simply made it lovely. In fact, I’d like to thank the frogs of Pinckney for helping me find a couple of checkpoints: their sounds allowed me to figure out where swamps and ponds where when I couldn’t see them. And if you’ve never heard a bullfrog at night, you should. This recording doesn’t do justice to the fact that the sound carries for more than half a mile.
• In general, adventure racing is an opportunity to experience wildlife. Sandhill cranes, raccoons, muskrats, great blue herons, deer, the aforementioned frogs, just to mention some. And I wish I could have stopped to pick the chanterrels I saw, or at least all the fabulous blackberries. (Alas, the blackberries just tore me into shreds, but that’s OK.)
• Food. My awesome support crew brought fabulous food to every TA. I always thought I wouldn’t feel hungry, but being able to eat a pound and a half of potato salad at one go (at 9 p.m. no less) and then being able to eat a couple of veggie wraps and a banana three hours later showed that I could eat a lot. 
• Still, it was a competition, and the most exciting fact was that there were national and world-class teams in it. Seeing those boys and girls every once in a while was really inspiring, even though they made me feel like a slow, incompetent loser. It was worth it. I ended up being ninth overall and third in the solo division. All that sounds pretty good until you hear the field included barely twenty-five teams or solos. Still, I take it. 

See, adventure racing is fun, interesting, exciting, and yet fun for the whole family. Consider one in your neighborhood in the near future!

(Post-script: Since I’m finishing this report more than two weeks after the end of the race and know all gruesome details, it behooves of me to report the very nasty case of poison ivy I got on my right arm, and in smaller quantities elsewhere. I won’t bore you with the details of how I got it, despite Ivy Block and Tecnu, but I did. Oh well, it is all about experiences, isn’t it?)