BEAST of the East

June 5-9, 2002

Harrisonburg, Virginia

story by Mindy

 

Racers:  Nancy, Carey, Mindy and John Porter

 

It’s Saturday night and like any good adventure racer I am standing on a mountain ridge, elevation 3,000 feet, low on water, short on food and desperately sleepy...let’s party! The goal is to bushwhack to CP16 which is somewhere on this ridge. The wind is blowing and the night is dark but we keep moving. Nancy leads the way by headlamp with Carey guiding her based on the magic compass heading of 211 degrees. It’s Day 3 of the Beast of the East somewhere near Masanutten Virginia. We started this race Wednesday night at 8pm and have had about 3 hours of sleep so far.

Some 23 hours ago we left ACP? with 90 minutes of sleep under our belt and some hot delicious Chef Boyardee in our bellies. We knew this trek would be about 40 miles which doesn’t sound like much…if you’re driving your car. The miles coupled with the elevation change made this quite a challenge. If we weren’t going down we were going up, up, up to be followed by more down and more up, up, up. Total elevation change over the 250 mile course was more than 57,000 feet!

The tempo of this race was set from the start.  The prologue, which is Don Mann’s fancy name for his oxygen depriving, lung screaming starts, required teams to hike up the ski runs to the top of Massanutten ski resort for a quick gear check. Now I know it’s Virginia but even here the ski runs are pretty steep.. Then it was back down scree, a fancy name for little rocks that slip and slide under your feet, roads to our bikes and the beginning of the race. The first 3 miles of biking I actually rode my bike (ok I did walk up one steep section) but the next 4 miles were hike-a-bike up and over Kaylors Knob to CP1. From there we made a pretty serious navigation error and wound up on the purple blaze trail from hell. We kept looking for those purple blazes not realizing we could have taken a nice ‘improved’ road. Just kept looking for purple blazes, I swear I will never watch Barney, ever.

 We pushed our bikes for about 3 hours and finally dropped out on the ‘improved’ road to see about 5 teams rolling by us. That detour took a lot of energy as well as time but we sucked it up and kept pedaling. More hike a bike ahead with some pretty steep drops and ankle twisting boulder climbs. We reached CP2 at dawn Thursday where we were able to refill with water. At this point, we actually rode our bikes to Burners Gap where we were met with a steep, rocky descent that ended at a farmhouse where we were greeted by two of the nicest people. They gave us directions and offered up some sweet watermelon that I still regret not stopping to taste.

We arrived at CP3, our first transition, to cheers from our support crew. Paige and Lisa were terrific, always there with words of encouragement, cold drinks and nice hot food. What a team! Next it’s off to the paddle, 30 miles of very low, boat scraping water. We passed a couple of teams on this section and all was well until the 50 knot windstorm blew in. Of course the wind was directly in our face and we had to keep paddling to keep from moving backwards. We finally arrived at the transition cold and wet after 8 hours of paddling. Fed and supplied with ham sandwiches to go, we start the trek to our first rappel at Buzzard’s Rock.

After a pretty strenuous hike and a couple of 10 minute sleep breaks, we find the CP at about 2am. The ropes crew helps us rig up and they lead us to the rocky precipice where I look down and see only darkness. Carey goes first on one rope and I follow on the second rope. “Just climb on out and sit back in your harness” he said. I look down in the darkness again and I ask him if anyone is down there to help. “Not until your teammate gets down there” he replies. So we rappel into the darkness and once we get to the bottom I look up. The view of that rock face was very impressive. We couldn’t even see John and Nancy at the top. Nancy said it took some convincing to get her out there over the edge but once she started she got down in a hurry. The rope assisted descent after that was scarier than the rappel, 400 feet over loose boulders and around trees down to the creek. Cary was last to descend and dislodged a 50 pound boulder that came crashing down next to us and splashed into the creek. “Rock” she cried out, of course the first thing we do is look up…what are you supposed to do?  I remembered something about curling up into a ball but I think that was for a bear attack.

We bushwhacked our way along the creek for about 2 miles arriving at the next transition at 8am Day 3. This was our first chance to sleep since the race began 36 hours ago. Back on our bikes for 30 or 50 or 70 miles…whatever. This time we actually rode more than we pushed our bikes. Some nice climbs on single track with a few boulder strewn descents for fun, then it was out on the highway for a thrilling downhill run to the town of Edinburg. What goes down must go back up and we had a nice long hill climb back up to Wolf Gap, arriving once again to the smiling faces of our support crew.

We transitioned back to foot for a trip to our 2^nd rappel at Big Schloss (who makes up these names anyway?). Once again we hit the ropes course at midnight and this time it includes a nice rope traverse across what could only be described as an abyss. Read a-byss 1. a. The primeval chaos. b. The bottomless pit;hell. 2. An unfathomable or immeasurable depth or void. We were told it was 120 feet of void which, I figure to be the optimal height for killing one instantly rather than causing prolonged pain and suffering. We wait on a rock ledge while Carey goes first, our navigator, our leader, our strength. Before she goes 5 feet she yells back “this is really hard you guys”.  This fills Nancy and I with dread since Carey does not exaggerate. I wonder if she means really hard like math is really hard for Barbie or really hard like freaking impossible. We each take our turn and I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about dying at least once. When we complete the traverse we get to do the rappel, that’s how you have to think about this stuff, they let you do this…for fun. The rappel was good except for the part where John forgot to say ‘on belay’ which tells Carey down below to hold his rope in case anything happens. John has trouble at the top and proceeds to flip upside down and crash into the wall. If he had let go of his rope it would have been one really big adventure but he held on and righted himself. Once we were all safe on the ground we said a short prayer, something like ‘can you believe we just *#%&^ing did that?’ and trekked on. The rest of the trek is a blur and I keep breaking it up into smaller and smaller sections just to get through it mentally. Ok we have 50 miles to trek and we trek 3 miles an hour that’s 27 hours, no, no, ok we can trek 3 miles an hour so in 2 hours we’ll only have 44 miles to go, no, ok I can walk for 15 more minutes before I need to stop and pee…you get the idea. We did take a 20 minute nap at CP11, thanks to John and Carolyn Clark for their kind words and for letting us sleep in their tent.

It’s now dawn on day who knows what and we are off again trekking to CP12 at Rock Cliff Lake where we fill up with desperately needed water. Now it’s a 12 mile hike up 1,000 feet to the ridge where this story began. This section was difficult for me, I felt like I was awake but dreaming. When I spoke out loud it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. It was a total ‘out of body’ experience. It’s the first time I felt like my mind was in complete control of my body. I kept muttering my mantra ‘the body does what the mind tells it’…weird. We did get to meet Rick and Lisa manning CP13, they took our picture and shared some stories with us…very nice folks. So now it’s a race against the darkness and we know we won’t make the entire ridge. Once it gets dark it becomes almost impossible to find the trail. Hours after starting the hike in the dark, we find CP14 at 10:50pm. That was the most beautiful glow stick we had ever seen.

Now it’s a steep downhill run/walk to our transition at CP15. We get 90 minutes of much needed sleep, some hot ravioli and we are off on the bikes at 4:11am. We ride through some beautiful rolling hills through farmland with sheep on one side and cows on the other, or they might have been rocks, who knows. We get to see the sun rise…again and it’s almost pretty. If I had been in a strato-lounger with a nice cold beer and a masseuse it would have been prettier but it is after all a race. We bike to CP16 at the Endless Caverns (don’t know, don’t care) and proceed to the last transition point. We drop our bikes and leave the transition after only 5 minutes.

It’s 10:00am and we have until noon to trek 8 miles to the finish. We push hard but the Massanutten ridge is wrought with big boulder climbs which slows us down considerably.  We trekked down the same ski slope that we raced up so long ago to begin the race. We cross the finish line at 1:18pm finishing in 3 days 17 hours. Looking back, we could not have gone much faster or slept much less. This was the toughest race I have ever experienced. We didn’t meet our goal of finishing the pro class but we did finish and sometimes that, in itself, is enough.

          Mindy

          Proud Member of Team Crew Zen