North Georgia Adventure Race

North Georgia Adventure Race (NGAR) Summary March 12-13, 2011:  Lots and lots of gear required for adventure racing—kind of a pain, but I’m sure you develop a good system of organizing/packing with experience.  5 of us (3-man team and 2-man team) went in a big Chevy and a big trailer loaded with bikes, canoes, packs and other gear.  Tons of Friday afternoon traffic and a late start meant we got to the Global Retreat Center mountaintop inn on hwy 52 west of Ellijay at about 7:30 pm and very hungry.  Luckily they had a big buffet.  We were given our maps and a briefing at about 8:30 pm and then we plotted the checkpoints and reviewed the notes, warnings and cautions.  I would have liked to have had more time to plan, but we needed to get to sleep—10:30 before we turned in as it was.  Most teams did their planning before dinner.  My buddy Trey decided to wake my room up at 5:40, even though breakfast didn’t even start until 6:30 and the race started at 9 am!  Glad I slept well, if not long.  The race started with running up a steep road where we picked up and then portaged our canoe back downhill to Carter’s Lake.  We then paddled about 7.5 miles to a checkpoint by a dam and back 7.5 miles.  3 guys kayak paddling in a canoe makes for a wobbly ride.  We must have had a very inefficient canoe as many teams beat us even though I calculated our stroke rate at 33% faster.  No big deal as the fastest team was maybe 20 minutes ahead. Some teams skipped the paddling altogether as it only was one checkpoint (out of 25 total).  That just seemed to me to defeat the whole point of an ADVENTURE RACE.  We got our biking stuff on and rode a dirt road route about 15 miles (and 1500 ft up) to a backcountry resort at Mulberry Gap.  I had an individual task on foot to do (in my cycling shoes as our support crew had not yet showed up—blisters!).  Three checkpoints to find, all up steep ridges.  I found two, but couldn’t find the third…blisters starting to form and I hadn’t even done the major trekking part of the race.  Didn’t figure on getting every point in my first AR anyway!  We rolled out again, this time on some serious (and seriously fun) trail.  The weather was just absolutely perfect and the scenery was great.  One of the two-man teammates (we raced together with them since they are friends) was having serious cramping issues which slowed us down—eventually he threw in the towel and the two-man team rode back on a road to the resort.  We made good progress despite some steep terrain…it was a blast.  As it was getting dark (beautiful sunset from a high point known as potato patch) we made the (fateful) decision to ride a jeep trail to a hike-a-bike trail to another jeep trail to the dirt road to the resort.  We knew it probably wouldn’t save any time since the longer route was all just dirt roads, but this was an ADVENTURE RACE.  Well, the 1^st jeep trail was very rough but ok, the hike-a-bike was rough with multiple stream and log crossings but ok.  The 2^nd jeep trail was fine, lots of climbing and descending but ok.  Except it kept going and had offshoots and we kept coming on dead ends.  We started to meet other teams and commiserated on our apparent predicament—we were lost!.  After literally almost 3 hours of this I called a “time out” and came up with a new strategy—head due east until we came to a road or some form of civilization.  It was about 11 pm, and quite cold, and we were long out of food and water…and it would be through rough terrain in the dark (we had headlamps but not the best).  Good news is by my calculations it would only be about 1 mile.  We took lots of rests (pushing bikes through streams, over logs, up 45 degree pitches is tiring) but eventually came onto a rough path toward a light.  Then the barking dogs started.  My teammates insisted on a retreat until I convinced them that it could mean another hour of walking.  The dogs were big, and they were loose, but luckily kept their distance (and no shotgun blasts or N. GA hillbilly Deliverance type of encounters either).  We got on our bikes and skedaddled down the long driveway to the dirt road and were home w/in 15 minutes.  Food-then-sleep (in sleeping bags while sitting in lawn chairs).  A teammate (John) was supposed to do another solo task….well he woke us at about 5 am but kept going on about how cold it was.  We fell back asleep… and so did he!  At about 6 am we all awoke and decided we’d better eat and do our team trekking portion of the race.  We got started just before sunrise and it wasn’t very long before we were sweating.  Beautiful scenery again but now came the thorn filled bushwhacking.  Our solo-leg-skipping teammate made up for his earlier deficit by his superb navigation and by leading the pace jogging much of the time (I was the anchor as opposed to easily leading on the bike legs).  We only skipped one more point way out in the woods, but trekked probably 18 miles in 7.5 hours.  We arrived at the mountain top Retreat Center finish with about 1.5 hours to spare in the 30 hour limit and 5 points shy of 25 possible checkpoints.  The pizza was cold but welcome.  Didn’t even know what place we came in our category (3 man) or overall, but we still felt a great sense of accomplishment. What an ADVENTUROUS way to see North Georgia!

Jeff