Eastern Mountain Sports Team Blog
presented by EMS

We have always had a lot of respect for the WeCeFar course designers. They design an accurate, thoughtful, challenging and honest course that somehow always seems to leave us scratching our heads for way too long in the swamps (see our DNF at the 2005 USARA Championships!), but this year we got it right. Joe and Dave put their heads together on the navigation, while the rest of us just tried to keep up! This time the swamp voodoo swung in our favor and we spiked nearly every CP.

The race started with temps about 28 degrees (wait...didn't you say this was Florida??) with a grand prix start of 49 teams in the Withlacoochee River. After a 5 minute round of playing bumper canoes, teams established some spacing and we were off and paddling. But about an hour later, I became aware that something very strange was going on up ahead in the river. One by one, there were cows(!) crossing the river. They were clearly panicked by the mob of canoes, but this was not going to deter them from crossing. It was like watching a bovine edition of the game Frogger as one by one the cows took on the river and the paddlers, nearly ramming them in the process. Like everything else in life, this too did pass, and we continued on what would end up being a solid 10 hours of paddling, with only brief excursions outside of the canoes to run into the swamps to collect checkpoints and bonus points. On one of these, two racers had to run on foot while their teammates paddled both canoes to meet up at a location up river. During this foot section, the foor racers were given the opportunity to collect an extra bonus point for picking up trash on the way, with the possibility of winning a premium prize for bringing in really "good" garbage.

Dmitry immediately took this task to heart, dubbed himself Trash Man, and the next thing I know the two of us are running in a truck tire, a rusty folding chair, plus an assortment of cans and bottles. We were rewarded with beautiful SmartWool base-layers for coming in second in the ARFE sponsored contest (we lost out to a team that hauled in a milkcrate filled with cans, two buckets, and a safe (yes... a safe).

On the last section of the paddle, and out and back, we took delight in seeing that our friends of Team ARFE were in the lead, with CheckPointZero hot on their sterns, and Bill Jackson AR not far off the back. We were content to see we were in a comfortable 4th place and less than 20 minutes off the front. Our strength, the bike and the foot navigation was yet to come...

We transitioned to our bikes and made a quick pitstop at the mystery event where each of us needed to climb a tower, collect a clue and rappel down. We would then combine the clues to help us locate the next CP. We quickly did and were off on the bike orienteering leg. We made fast work of the course, but had no idea how we were doing in contrast to the rest of the field as the CPs and bonus points could be collected in any order. When we pulled off the road to don our rain gear on the way to the foot section, team CheckPointZero passed us, so we knew we must be pretty close to the front.

It was raining hard by the time we got to the foot section, but we shoved off with our headlights blazing hot up against the misty raindrops, and nailed the course. Crossing the fields to the TA and the Red Bull banner, we all started to feel a little more alive, having all taken a turn feeling sleepy, weary or both during the darkness. Discovering that we were now in first place, we all livened up a bit more. We remounted our bikes and started turning the cranks towards home.

But just after we hit the first checkpoint of the last section, disaster struck. Jeff's bike blew a flat and we were unable to get the UST tire to properly reinflate. We eventually got about 20 pounds of pressure into the tire, did a dance to the tire gods, and rode the remaining 32 miles to the finish line cautiously and constantly looking in the rearview mirror for another team to pounce from behind. Jangled nerves, suffering backs, exhaustion, and the bonk monster pursued us those final miles, but in the end, the voodoo stayed in our favor to the end and we crossed a jubilant mob of eight happy racers.

A gear special mention thanks goes to Teva for the X-1 trail runners. They were the perfect shoes for this race as we never worried about stepping in water. Besides the unparalleled traction these shoes always offer, water drains out of them like a sieve.

An honorable mention for an amazing performance was put in by Dmitry Drozdov in his second adventure race ever. A star runner, this was only his second time mountain biking off road (he bought a bike the week of the race), his third time holding a paddle, and he had never rappelled before. He was a star, even pushing JenShu on the bike by the end of the race. No Russia, you can't have him back.

Thanks to Jessica, Shawn, Kip of WeCeFar and the numerous volunteers who pulled off another simply amazing race. We can't thank you enough for your dedication to the sport and the racers. Thanks to all of the other teams for all of your camaraderie and making us laugh out on the course. You are what makes this sport what it is.

Full breakdown of results is here, http://www.wecefar.com/swampstomp2007/SS07Results.xls