Venture Quest This!

Tales from the 2007 Venture Quest Adventure Race

Well, it was the end of September again which could mean only one thing – time to avenge team “Bobcat Trail Candy” at the annual Venture Quest adventure race at Fountainhead Park in VA. For those of you who may have missed our tragic post on last year’s race, Mical, myself, and our esteemed comrade in running madness, Michelle, were bullied like the new nerdy kid at school by Venture Quest last year as it basically “who’s your daddy”ed us to a big ole DNF. Unfortunately, Michelle was unable to join us in our quest for vengeance as the course, scared of our team’s resolve to crush it this time around, hired Jeff Gillooly to take a hit out on her foot, Nancy Kerrigan style. This nefarious attack on our team unity only served to steel Mical and myself in our quest for VQ blood and to “Represent!” our fallen teammate. (Michelle of course put this off time to good use, riding the wheels off of her bike in preparation for her next assault on Shockabilly.) Mical and I were to be technically separate “solo” racers this year, meaning that we would have to kayak and check into the checkpoints separately, but could still race together by choice.

After riding the trails at Fountainhead twice during the fall and Mical running the Women’s Half Marathon there as well as having previously run Bull Run (in addition to last year’s VQ race), Mical and I felt that we at least had a decent handle on the terrain that the race could throw at us, unlike last year’s blank slate. (It’s kind of like the scary monster in your bedroom closet. Once you realize that it’s really just a great big hairy jumping spider, with great big fangs and beady eyes, it’s really not as scary, right? Oh wait, no, it’s still scary.) Just so we wouldn’t get too cocky, I decided to instill confidence in Mical concerning my abilities by flipping over my handle bars and landing on my bad knee twice during practice rides in the last two weeks leading up to the race. As Napoleon Dynamite says, “girls only want boyfriends (teammates/husbands) that have great skills.”

The day before the race! Uh oh, there’s a problem. My gears jump around a little on the bike when I’m shifting. I’d better just do some last minute mechanical work here, no problem for a crack mechanic like me! Hmm….. suddenly my gears won’t change at all and the bike chain is trying to commit suicide by jumping into the wheel spokes. “It Can’t Be Fixed, The Race is Over! Oh, The Humanity!” Enter Mical as voice of reason: “Take it down to HTO and get them to fix it.” We take it to our local HTO, Sam (local mechanic) works on it while we wait. We get to the racing briefing on time and the gears on the bike shift “like knife through hot butter.” Sam is a god.

At the briefing the day before the race they give us the racing passport which gives us the basic layout of the course. The race will start off with a run down the road to the marina and back, followed by a prologue where the teams pick one of three checkpoints to get to and then return to the transition area to head off to the mountain bike loop. (Teams can either run, use a kayak/canoe, or an inflatable tube to get to these checkpoints. Interesting…) After the first (full, 8 mile) mountain bike loop the racers then trek (or paddle) to 6 different colored checkpoints in any order. Then return to the transition area, (before the time cutoff), and do another full mountain bike loop (before the second time cutoff). Then portage your canoe/kayak down to the water, go to two more checkpoints (before the third time cutoff), dump the canoe for a challenge, and then trek back to the finish.

We wake up at 4:30 the next morning, throw our equipment in the back of Adventure Van, and head down to VA for the race. Unlike last year, where it was already 100% humidity and 78 degrees at 4:30 am, today will be beautiful with no humidity and highs probably in the mid 70s. Great weather for a race, and we arrive at the park in the dark. We get the map showing the race course at 6 am, and pour over it by headlamp. The race does not cover as large of an area this year. The part that you absolutely have to paddle is only about 4 miles, compared to the 11 we would have had to do last year if we had finished. The trekking does not take us as far from the transition area this time either, although there will still be plenty of running with the prologue, color checkpoints, and run back to the finish. And of course, there’s always the biking, with Shockabilly nagging at you like the rock under your sleeping bag that won’t let you relax. Yes, we’ll have to figure a way down. Twice.

Looking at the map we plot our course. For the prologue point we decide on P1, which is out on the Bull Run/Women's Half course (near the Do Loop, for those familiar). It’s a good distance away, but of the other 2 choices, P3 involved trekking over undulating ground and P2 is across an inlet we would have to skirt. We know that the fast teams will sprint down to the marina and back to grab the limited amount of inner tubes at the turnaround point (only 30 innertubes and there are over 200 racers signed up for the race), and there is no way we are portaging the kayaks down and up the hill any more then we have to, so we’re not going to P2, even though it’s the closest point by far. Of course, the reservoir is 10 feet low this year because of the drought, maybe skirting around the inlet won’t be so far out of our way after all? Mical and I agree to check out the reservoir during the run down to the marina and make up our minds then.

8:00 am: Starting time! The herd takes off at a sprint. Mical and I take it relatively easy, with most of the racers passing us. As we round the bend in the road down by the marina we see that the water in the inlet is extraordinarily low and that P2 is even closer than we thought. We immediately revise our plan and decide that P2 will be our prologue point. As we come up the hill back to the start we see many racers running back to the water with their precious inner tubes. However, many teams also picked up their canoes and started running back to the water! Mical and I are amazed by their determination to portage their heavy boats up and down the hill to the marina several times, and wonder if it will come back to haunt these guys with the bittersweet bite of lactic acid buildup later in the race.

We run back down the hill on the road towards P2. I joke to Mical “Wouldn’t it be funny if all that mud around the inlet is like quicksand?” We break out of the trees and see streams of runners coming from different trails in the woods, all with the same idea as us. Also, flotillas of racers are crossing the inlet on the inner tubes or their canoes/kayaks. With the early morning fog it’s actually quite dramatic. We start skirting the inlet, forced up on a rock embankment by the water. Farther round the inlet then us we see a racer jump down from the rocky embankment onto the muddy flat that in a wetter season would be covered with water, but in this drought is a shortcut across the inlet. The racer disappears! It IS quicksand! The unknown racer surfaces a few seconds later, spitting out mud and has to basically swim back to the rock embankment, where his teammates fish him out (covered from head to toe in mud) with some pieces of driftwood. Suddenly P2 doesn’t look like such a great idea, but we’re committed. We run around the deceptively serene mudflat, wise to its deadly charms, and join the unruly mob of racers running up the hill to P2, check in with our e-punches, and run back through the woods to the transition area. On the way back we pass a team which obviously contains a husband/wife duo, whom are arguing. Wife (who is correct): “The transition area is this way!” Husband (who is not correct): “No, that’s too far in that direction, it’s this way!” Wife: “I’m telling you, it’s this way!” Husband: “No, it’s not!” (We later saw this team finish, much, MUCH later. I could imagine this conversation playing out many more times throughout the day.)

Get to the transition area after ~ 30 minutes of racing. There are more bikes still in the transition area then I expected, so that’s good sign. Jump on the bikes and head off to the mountain bike loop. Immediately get stuck behind a team that does not know what they are doing on the bike. I’m fine with people of different ability levels on the trail (Lord knows the majority out there are better than me), but when people come up behind me who are clearly capable of passing me I get out of the way. Not only did this team refuse to yield to the growing line of bikers behind them, they also short-cutted switchbacks! When I voiced my displeasure about the shortcutting, one of them made a joke about reporting/disqualifying their teammate. I replied that I didn’t care about the race, it wasn’t good for the trail!

After passing the “I give mtbers a bad name” team, Mical and I got into more of a groove, with Mical going down some gnarly downhills. I was especially impressed since it was very dusty, which resulted in bad traction and some really soft shoulders on the trail that would just suck you into them and not let you out. After making it half-way through the mtb loop Mical suddenly realized that her front fork was locked out. She had been riding the whole time with no suspension! This made her performance on the rooty downhills of Fountainhead even more impressive. Of course, we were very happy when we passed the scene of last year’s chain break with no incidents. :)

I had been debating the whole time as to whether to ride or walk down Shockabilly. While you ARE taking your life into your own hands if you decide to ride down it, I had often found walking down Shockabilly to be asking for a sprained ankle. So, at that last minute, in the spirit of the race I decided that a quick death was better than soft tissue damage. At the top I asked the volunteers “So, is there and ambulance waiting for me at the bottom?” “Nah” they replied, “Just body bags. We just zip ya in once you land at the bottom and then dump the bodies in the lake.” With that encouragement I bombed down Shockabilly. Nailed it! Feeling very pleased with myself I watched Mical come down (she walked) and then headed forward to the transition area. We had completed the mountainbike loop in 1 hr 25 min, a full 20 minutes better that our previous course PR. We rock! Yet somehow there were many more bikes in the transition area then I expected, signifying that more racers had finished that biking section before us. No matter, I had a secret weapon: Mical can run! Time to let her loose and whup up on the competition.

Mical and I took off and started knocking off the checkpoints one after another. Hit CP green at the intersection of two streams. Hit CP orange on the top of a hill. Make up time on a nice trail on the way to CP purple in a ravine by the lake. Mical says “I’ll be happy as long as we get back to the transition area by 12” (1st time cutoff is 12:45). Pass an annoying team on the way to CP white, which was going to just let their navigator run out to the CP while they waited at the trail, but then changed their mind when they saw us. Uh, oh, where is CP white? Shouldn’t it be in this little gully? Where are we? Mical proceeds to figure out that we should be in the next gully, and we find the checkpoint. I then proceed to take us right through the middle of a large section of deadfall, which slows us down even more. I do pick the right trail on the way to CP blue though, which allows us to set a good pace to that CP. Skirt around our friend the Quicksand Mudflat Inlet from this morning and get to CP red. Run back to the transition area by 11:30! We are now well ahead of the 12:45 cutoff, and know we no longer need to worry about having enough time to make it through the second mountain biking loop unless we have major problems. Plus, there are still a large number of bikes in the transition area, which means that most likely we passed a lot of people in the trekking portion of the race (in fact, looking at the splits, we did kick some butt on that section compared to other teams).

We successfully make it through the second mountain bike loop without incident. 2 solo chicks pass us (waa!) but they appear to be pretty competent bikers so we don’t feel (too) bad. In weird surrealism worth of a Stanley Kubrick film we come across a lone racer, dragging a kayak across the middle of the bike course, obviously very lost. Moving straight ahead, never deviating from his bearing, blatantly ignoring the fact that his eyes are telling him he’s on the biking course and not in the reservoir, so unwavering is his belief. He is probably still dragging that kayak, thinking “If I just go a little farther, I’ll get to CP7!” As we progressed towards the end of the loop some “real” full suspension mtbers started catching us. It was funny to see the “how did these people get in front of us?” looks. Plus, most of them look plain tuckered out at this point while Mical and I were still fresh as daisies. I was feeling pretty full of myself as I bombed down Shockabilly past some of these full suspension dudes, so I sprinted up the last hill to the transition area. Uh oh, I could feel the lactic acid buildup in the quads, that hubris might not have been such a good idea… But still, we finished the 2nd loop in about 1:35, not bad at all!

Portage the kayaks down to the water. Mical and I were able to help each other out, one in front and the other in back carrying both kayaks to the water at the same time. We moved onward at a good pace with just a short discretionary break. However, after going about 4 miles in the kayak my butt is starting to get really sore. I don’t know why this happens when I kayak for extended periods of time, it just does. By the time we reached near the next checkpoint we were in the middle of a virtual armada of racers. And you know what happens when a bunch of racers get together: mob mentality. One of the racers in the front of the flotilla mistakenly picked the wrong inlet for the next checkpoint and it’s the blind leading the blind – the whole gaggle goes in. People are beaching their boats left and right and running all over. No one can find the checkpoint because, of course, it’s not there! Mical and I realize that it’s the wrong inlet before we get out of our kayaks (much to my dismay because I REALLY want to get off my sore butt – next time I’m bringing one of Lorrin’s Korean Seat Pads!). So the whole flotilla heads off to the next inlet, at which point I beach the boat at the nearest available landing, just so I don’t have to sit anymore! Mical is smart, and pulls up much closer to the checkpoint and on the shady side so that she won’t have to run in the sun like me.

Off to the next checkpoint. Mical and I help each other portage the kayaks up a gentle incline to the dropoff point and then head down to the challenge. The challenge is paddling an innertube across Sandy Run, without getting your torso wet (which would cost you a 5 min penalty). I learn that it is not easy to paddle the innertube across the water, you have to take little strokes otherwise all of your stroke energy just goes towards spinning the innertube like a top and you go nowhere.

Mical and I get to the other side. From here on out it’s just a ~ 3 mile run to the finish! Mical and I take off, along with all the other racers from the flotilla. People comment that they are impressed that we’re running. Mical responds “That’s what I do”. Now I get to pay for my mountain bike hubris – my quads start to cramp up on me! I pop several salt tabs, they seem to help but the cramps don’t fully go away. An all-men team in orange shirts plays leapfrog with us for a little while and Mical’s knowledge of the Bull Run/Women’s Half course helps us during a moment of confusion. Then the orange team gets ahead of us at a bad time for them. We plotted a shortcut on the map, they didn’t. They continue up the trail while Mical and I go cross country for a very short distance, cutting off a big loop of the trail. We feel sorry for the orange team, and wonder if we should have told them about the shortcut. We then continue running. We see the road in front of us – almost there! Mical and I run down the road, congratulating ourselves on our successful beatdown of Venture Quest! We e-punch at the finish line – 7 hours and 39 minutes! Not bad for a team that DNFd last year! Results are on the Ex2 site, and Will Ramos was out taking lots of pictures. Our few pics are here.

We actually finished prior to the awards ceremony. Mical is the 4th place girl and scored a medal and gift certificate! We both stick around for massages, and wonder… who all can we sucker into joining us for another attempt at VQ domination next year?

“Indy, what is VQ?”
“Fortune and Glory, kid. Fortune and Glory….”
-Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (aka VentureQuest)