Odyssey One Day Adventure Race

Big Island, Virginia

23 hours 28 minutes

story by Mindy

 

Suck Mountain. Those two words would echo in my mind for the entire race. As it was, we began our race with a prologue (as if beginning at the start wasn’t enough). All 58 teams ran, scrambled, slipped and slid to the top of Suck Mountain then headed back down to the start where we began our 24-hour adventure. It was rainy and cold but the climb up that mountain had all of us sucking air and sweating rivers.

 

This race had strict cutoff times for each checkpoint. Miss a checkpoint time and you are considered unofficial racers. To be considered official finishers, we had to complete the course in less than 24 hours, a task made more difficult by the rain.

  

This area of Virginia is pretty hilly and we began our trek by ascending up to 3,000 feet over 3 miles. We were told that this race would have over 30,000 feet of elevation change…only 28,000 feet to go! We found ourselves in an open field with about 5 other teams looking for the first punch point, an unmanned checkpoint marked by a glow stick. After checking our maps, we decided to backtrack and head in the other direction. I can’t tell you how great it felt to see that glow stick marking our first milestone, even though it was difficult to see through all the rain.

 

Now we’re really hyped so we start running the flat and downhill areas to gain some time.  We reach our first transition to the bike shortly after midnight. Our support crew Carolyn and Nicole had the canopy set up and were waiting patiently for us. I can’t say enough about how great they were, especially in all the rain.

 

So it’s off on our bikes where we can really make up some time. We fly down the hill for at least 2 minutes before we come to the first horse trail. Now why any horse would want to walk on this trail is beyond me. It’s steep, slippery and spiced with rocks just big enough to prevent us from riding…at all. We pushed our bikes for 2 hours up, and I do mean up, to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Once at the top, it’s straight downhill for 4 miles on gravel switchbacks. We alternate between sweating on the up hills and freezing on the down hills. The climbs were tough and around every corner was one more climb. At some point during each climb, I would have to dismount and push my bike but Nancy rode them all. She was an animal on that bike. Did I mention how difficult those trails were in all the rain?

 

The trail began to disappear and we found ourselves, along with about 8 other teams, in a v-shaped ravine with a boulder-strewn creek at the bottom. We pushed our bikes at a 45-degree angle making a path along muddy, rocky, muddy, tree filled, muddy sections. Paige fell, flipped and tumbled down the ravine sliding to a stop some 25 feet lower…her bike, of course, never moved. Two hours and 3 wasp stings later, we emerged on the road and actually rode the short distance to the next checkpoint…still raining.

 

The next transition was to canoe and our big whitewater test. We were required to have whitewater, class III rapids certification for this race and I was pretty nervous. The most dangerous part of this section was portaging our canoes to the river. We had to cross railroad tracks and Carey and Nancy looked up just in time to see a train bearing down on them. They scrambled across the tracks and, less than 20 seconds later, that train blew by us…pretty scary. We ran the whitewater pretty easily but we’re still trying to figure out how a 50-foot throw rope was going to help in a river that was 350 feet wide! Oh yeah…now it’s really raining.

 

We leave our canoes to trek/bushwhack to the zip line. The passport read ‘you will cross a creek and come to a steep hill’. That hill looked like a tidal wave curling back on us. We clawed our way to the top and hiked a mile up the hill until we were looking down on the river. We had to climb down to the zip line poised on a ledge about 40 feet above the James River. Scary does not describe this descent. Carey went first using assist ropes to lower herself down the boulders. The assist ropes only went halfway down; apparently you were supposed to be able to climb down the rest of the way using fingernails and prayer.

 

The zip line was great…375 feet across the river at about 40 miles an hour. Near the end of the zip line, you dipped into the river. Carey made it further than any racer that day. Depending on what part of your body touched first, you skipped like a stone or stopped like one.

 

The last leg was a relatively mild 14-mile bike to the finish. We had 2.5 hours to make the cut off and we were growing confident that we were actually going to make it. Two miles into the bike leg, Paige’s chain broke. Carey jumped into action like a racecar pit crew, flying off her bike and flipping Paige’s bike over. Calling for bike tools like a surgeon, she punched out the old pins, installed the power link and we were off again. Two minutes later, Paige’s chain falls off. We forgot to thread the chain through the derailleur, something that will never happen again. We couldn’t unhook the power link so we had to break the chain again. Fortunately, we had another power link (apparently you can never have enough of these). We made the repair and were off again. I can tell you at that point, nothing would have stopped us from completing this race. Carey was already considering running the rest of the bike leg while we would have pushed, pulled, towed, carried, whatever, that bike to the finish! As it was, Carey and Nancy helped Paige and I up the climbs and we were able to gain back the time we lost.

 

We rode under the finish line together with 32 minutes to spare. People were waiting to applaud the finishers and our support crew was leading the cheers. Special thanks to Carolyn and Nicole, they were simply wonderful. There was hot food, hot drinks and hot showers at the finish. Don Mann, the race director, presented us with plaques and told us we were the first 4 person female team to ever complete this race…ever.  It even stopped raining by the time we finished the race.

 

We are very proud of our accomplishment, learned a few more things and, as always, grew stronger for it.

 

Keep those cards and letters coming!

 

-Mindy   Team Crew Zen