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Cental Coast Adventure Race

2K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  Triathlete 
#1 ·
So last weekend my wife and I loaded up the Rodeo with our gear, and participated in our first adventure race at Santa Margarita Lake. For those of you who aren't familiar with the sport of adventure racing, it is an endurance type race that combines all sorts of outdoor sports and skills. We elected to run the team "sprint" race, which consisted of 3-4 miles of kayaking, 8 miles of mountain biking, and 5 miles of trekking/climbing/running/scrambling/etc. Here's good ol' Suzie as we were loading her down:



The courses were pretty well marked, but each team was provided with a topo map of the area and sometime a certain amount of orienteering was
needed. The blue course was the mountain biking section, and the red was the trekking:



1st Leg: Kayaking
Overall, this was probably our strongest event. The start of the race began with a 100 yard dash to the launch ramp, where all of the teams scrambled to mount their 2-man kayaks without ending upside down (we did quite well at this, but not everyone was so successful).



The first task was to paddle to a check point about a mile away. Here they had a map posted, with 5 additional locations spread around the lake. It was our job to collect 3 of the 5 check points, punch our "passports", and head back to the launch ramp. We devised our strategy, figured out which of the 3 check points we were going to collect, and were off. We fell into a pretty good cadence early on, and even passed a few teams as we paddled along the lake. After collecting CP's 1, 4, and 3 we raced back to the transition area to grab our bikes.



2nd Leg: Mountain Biking
The mountain biking was probably our most challenging section, considering that my wife had never really mountain biked before! The fear of dying as we careened down the mountain aside, she did really well throughout the entire course and we even held our position for quite some time. Until, that is, Mr. Murphy struck. At around mile 6, we heard the dreaded "pssssssstttt" that every biker fears. We moved off the course to asses the situation and found that not only did my wife's bike have a flat front tire, but also a 2-inch long gash in the sidewall. We performed a little trail-repair magic, and were good to go!



And after two more miles of limping along with a band-aided tire and no front brakes, we finally made it through the second leg.....but lost quite a few positions while we were at it.

3rd Leg: Trekking
The third and final section of the race was a 5 mile trek through the mountain, forest, ponds, and river beds that surround Santa Margarita Lake. The race organizers were particularly evil for this section, and included a few bushwacks straight up the side of the mountain that had several hundred feet of elevation gain. And luckily for me, the primary fauna in this region of the state appeared to be poison oak. So here I sit a week later typing this, covered from head to toe in nice itchy red bumps and pink calamine lotion. Yes folks, I paid money for this. Woohoo. Anyway, the trekking was pretty grueling, but when we weren't on the uphill climbs it went pretty quickly. The sinister race organizers got their last laugh, though, once we got to our final checkpoint. The punch for the final CP, just happened to be tied to a float in the middle of the stinkiest, slimiest, mosquito-farm of a pond that you've ever seen.....and the water was COLD! I was the lucky candidate from our team that got to jump in to retrieve the last punch. =) From this point we made pretty good time, until Mr. Murphy struck again about 1/2-mile from the finish. Right around this point, one of the trail markers had been knocked down. It also happened the the trekking trail intersected itself as well. We had a 50-50 shot at which way to go, and of course we chose the wrong way. After about a 30-min detour and a several more positions lost, we were back on track and headed to the finish line.

Needless to say, we had quite a bit of "adventure" for our first adventure race. We finished with an elapsed time of 5h 13m, of which we could have easily shaved an hour off of with out our little detour and biking issues. It's all part of the sport though, and we had a great time doing it. We'd do it again, but hopefully next time Mr. Murphy decides to pick on someone else for a while and it goes a little bit smoother! =)
 
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