Cerberus Race Report

My main hobby is adventure racing: paddling, biking, and trekking through the wilderness to find checkpoints with only a map and compass to guide us. A pinnacle of the sport are expedition races spanning almost a week with continuous movement and little sleep. That last bit about the sleep is a pain. So when I saw that there was a new “expedition” stage race starting up I was excited. A stage race, you see, pauses each day (or stage) which lets you eat/sleep/futz with gear until starting up again the next day. Days of adventure racing with no sleep depriviation: count me in!

Day 1

The morning of a race is always nervous. We had arrived the night before and spent the evening working with our maps planning out our route. Once you have the maps it’s hard not to imagine the days before you and consequently quite hard to sleep! But eventually morning came along with the busses to the start line upriver to begin our paddle.

Due to some placement games we were to start in the second wave of teams 3 minutes behind the half-dozen or so teams constituting the first wave. As we watched them run down the road to the canoes I started feeling the adrenaline start to pump. This is not a good thing: we have 12 hours of racing ahead of us and adrenaline does not last that long and leaves you tired when it wears off. So our plan then is a reasonable jog down to the canoes.

Which we achieved arriving at the canoes towards the front of the pack but certainly well within our limits. Experience proved out with us getting onto the water in short order: even passing up all but two of the teams from the first wave.

Then all hell broke loose when we arrived at the (moderate) whitewater section. There was a ledge drop river right so we picked the more flowy wave train river left split by a couple rocks. We followed a boat by a decent distance but they ended up getting pinned sideways blocking off our path. We tried to swing to the other side and fortunately avoided hitting them but then couldn’t get the canoe to turn fast enough and bounced on the rock behind them, highsided immediately, and flipped. And saw our stuff floating away!!!!

I spotted the map so I dropped the boat and my paddle and swam the rapids to retrieve it and later my paddle. Our packs were retrieved by the only boat downstream. Paul brought the boat in, we righted ourselves and went back to try to unpin the original boat without any success. All the while I was kicking myself for presumably not strapping in our gear and apparently hallucinating¹ the memory of doing it. When we got back to the canoe I was vindicated: I had indeed strapped everything in and the thwart itself had snapped free.

Humbled and eager to make up time (as more and more teams were passing successfully) we pushed onwards. We went down a couple more rapids successfully but each time taking on some water. We started bottoming out in the shallows and having to push a lot. Somehow all the other teams seem to have guessed correctly and rarely had to scrape. Eventually we stopped and drained the water which solved that mystery: we were just too heavy!.

The rest of the paddle was less eventful. Towards the end was a section where we dropped off Paul who ran through a couple checkpoints while I paddled to meet him. This was a particularly fun section where I steered the canoe through a tiny gap in a partially submerged tree and flattened myself in the bottom of the boat to get through.

Fast transition to the bikes and then some MTB. This was perhaps some of the nicest actual mountain biking I’ve done in an adventure race. Very flowy trails at an actual bike park. We made up a lot of ground here: bike navigation is mostly a function of (1) being able to read your map while you ride and (2) being confident in your decisions so you never stop moving. It’s gratifying to blow by teams stopped at intersections peering at the map.

We then moved onto a bike path for more flat pedaling. For one checkpoint we tried executing a shortcut to swim to a peninsula rather than go the long way on foot. We misjudged the distance so ended up with worst of both worlds of swimming but then also doing most of the hike too. Oh well. Highlight of this section was getting ice cream cones at a checkpoint in the town. Due to lactose intolerance I had to pass but everyone else seemed to have a great time.

Some more road biking to a hike-a-bike. It started as a trail which quickly turned into a clearly abandoned trail where we’re lifting our bikes over trees and pushing through brush. Then a push uphill with only a vague gradient suggesting there was at one point at path. Definitely have had worse but the demoralizing bit was getting to the top and realizing that the trail that marked the end of our toils wasn’t really rideable either. But we pushed on and got rewarded with a nice fast descent.

By this time it was roughly 8 hours into the course; we were back at the camp and could spend the remainder of our time rogaining where you try to get as many checkpoints as possible in any order before time is up. We had a grand plan to make a huge loop and capture the maximum number of points. The only thing we didn’t consider was the rhododendron. I am used to underbrush on the west coast; rhodo is underbrush and overbrush and aroundbrush. One particularly unfortunate section was completely inundated with the stuff essentially forcing us to crowdsurf our way through it taking about 45 minutes to get perhaps 200 meters. Needless to say our grand loop got shortened into a slightly smaller loop; but still quite robust.

One consequence of the race being delayed so we ended up finishing in the dark; I had bought a cheap headlamp to satisfy the mandatory gear requirement: it did not survive getting dunked in the river. This meant I was effectively blind for the last 20 minutes or so especially when crawling through rhodo. But I could follow Paul’s voice (his headlamp had no hope of piercing the rhodo) and make it through.

As we got back to camp we jogged past a team and chatted a bit before overtaking them. One the final hill We walked up the hill to save energy; and they came jogging past us. A brilliant display of resiliance and human spirit so we cheered them on for the good effort (thinking they must have been a couple CPs behind us on the rogaine). We finish and get to the epunch download to find we were in 2nd by 10 seconds: that team had gotten the same number of points!!

Chastened we ate our dinner, cleaned our gear, and went to bed plotting our triumphant and decisive victory for the next day.

Day 2

It became quite clear early on that this day would not go as planned.

The first section after the prologue would be mountain biking on a narrow trail: ripe for bottlenecks. To avoid this we powered hard on the prologue running through camp to collect two checkpoints. It paid off with us being the third team out by seconds. However on the ride to the trailhead my bike launched my filter bottle shattering the lid off. Not good since I was going to rely on filtered water the whole time; but I could still sorta suck through the filter so it would have to do. I didn’t have much time to mourn it’s loss because we soon had bigger problems.

There were a ton of creek crossings on the trail and in one of them Paul slipped and slashed his shin on a very sharp rock. It was pretty bad; about 4 inches long and pretty deep. We did our best first aid washing with alcohol and bandaging him up. Most of front of the field ended up passing us.

Paul was a little disoriented but we kept going. We missed a CP due to lack of focus and at our next trail intersection we treated his leg again since he bled though the earlier bandages in the past 30 minutes. Not a good sign; and when we removed the dressings it looked way worse and there was a substantial swelling. We were probably done for the day (and race) but going forward to the TA was our best way to get him medical care for and the original route was still decently direct. We wrapped it with a compression bandage and carried on gingerly. We still stopped to get CPs as they were generally right on the path and it let Paul do some more first aid while I picked up the points. He was still not great cognitively so we had a couple nav bobbles. I should have picked up the nav but it gave him something other than pain to focus on.

At the TA we got the staff to look at it and suprisingly it looked substantially better. We would go out on a paddle next and Paul could keep off his feet so we kept going. By this point were well in the back of the pack (though not by far) but on the paddle we were unhindered and passed a half-dozen teams. It felt great to be back in the race even if only temporarily.

After the paddle we had an easy ride back to camp. Our original plan for the day was to venture forth and collect more rogaine points. With Paul in pain on every step that was not in the cards. We did go do some climbing and I conquered the string course (you get ziptied to a string and follow the string through the woods under over and around obstacles; check the video and ignore my wipeout!) and then called it a day. That night we had the EMT take a look at Paul’s leg and deep clean it. We would sleep on it and see how it went in the morning.

Day 3

In the morning we again were surprised: Paul’s leg though inflammed and still painful was fine to continue albeit again in a limited fashion. Thus we walked the prologue: still somehow finishing before the last quarter of teams. The route for the day went higher into the hills to another camp where an orienteering course was set. We had some worries about hike-a-biking and, of course, we were not going to go out on the o-course at all. So we decided to get two tractable bike points then turning around and heading to the final lake paddle and bike finish.

And with a short day the day before and not much else in our future we got on our bikes and ripped up the fire road out of camp. We got to experience the bottlenecking we had worried about before but with little competitive consequences it was more fun than anything. I set the challenge to myself to say on the bike the entire time as we kept passing teams trudging uphill pushing their bikes. The time passed quickly and soon we passed the trudgers again; this time on our way bombing down the hill after collecting our checkpoints. It felt good to be moving fast and confidently.

We took our momentum into the paddle putting some power into it. Lovely day out on the water: the checkpoints on the lake we tucked away into small backwaters and creeks. As the first time out there (by hours) we snuck up on turtles, hawks, and a family of deer as we glided along on glass smooth waters. Not that they would be peaceful for long; on our bike ride back into camp we ran into the front of the race: three teams roughly five minutes apart each pushing hard for the days’ victory. We almost thought about turning around and following them onwards just for the sheer spectacle. But onwards we went and we finished broken in body but not in spirit.

That’s sort of how these things go; you start with eager intentions ready to race and push. The miles go by and fatigue sets in; misfortunes happen and you adapt; and by some point it becomes less of a competition against the teams and more against yourself. Starting this race I wasn’t sure that it would feel like a true expedition race: 12 hours sounds like a long time but with the all consuming nature of the racing and navigation they fly by all too fast and by the end you’re wishing there were more points to explore. By the end of an expedition race you feel complete: the hint of a secret “bonus” stage would be dangerous to the race director’s health. Even despite our limitations I felt this met the bar for an expedition: we had experienced a true adventure, overcame adversity, and spent our ourselves fully (well for one day). And could sleep for longer than 3 hours a night!

I’ll be racing with Paul again next year at the Magnificent in New Zealand. We’ll be up against the biggest challenge of our racing careers thus far. I’m proud of how well we worked together both racing and surviving. Along with our other teammates we’ll be bringing our best to the Kiwis.