2009 Planet Adventure Sprint Race
Jackson Washington SF, Brownstown, IN

This years PA Sprint was supposed to be the first race that Cristal and I would get to do together. Unfortunately Cristal found out the Tuesday prior to the race that what we thought was a neuroma in her right foot was actually a stress fracture in her third metatarsal. Needless to say no race for her. (She was less than thrilled to find out she'd be spending four weeks in a walking boot.) Fortunately for us Whitney Diggs of Mystik/Gray Goat was able to fill in and we would still be able to race as a coed team. (On a side note, if any of you want to know how to NOT find a substitute for your wife, shoot me an email and I'll hook you up...)

The day of the race turned out to be awesome with a cool start. The pre-race briefing went by quickly and we learned that the standard course teams would have three additional checkpoints on their opening O course that were to be plotted "on the clock". We would not receive the UTM's for these points until after completing a quick special challenge where we would have to retrieve our teammates shoes that had been removed and placed a short distance from the shelter at the start. Shawn volunteered for this figuring the enormous size of his shoes would help with our finding them. Must have worked as Whitney found them quickly and we were off to get our UTM's.

We got the points plotted, our map checked and were off for OP2. This was our first mistake in my opinion. I really like races where you have to make route decisions on the fly. You pretty much have to go by your instincts and experience without a lot of analysis and consideration. My first instinct was to avoid the big climb to OP1 and hit OP2 first. In hindsight I'm not sure this was the best choice.

The rest of the O course went pretty well and we pushed the pace pretty hard. Made a little slip on 5, but probably didn't cost us too much time. OP7 was a doozy, at the top of a monster hill. Little did we know that monster hills would become a repeat theme for the day! We came off the O course within seconds of IndyRootstock.com and the two man Mystik/Gray Goat team.

The next leg would be a hilly ride to Starve Hollow Lake. On the way out of the campground we had to stop for a balloon launch challenge where the goal was to launch a water balloon through a hoola hoop at about 30 feet. Although I have to give Shawn credit for some serious distance on his two attempts, and I came close on my throw, we ended up having to sit a three minute penalty for failing at the challenge.

Back on our bikes and on our way we were met with a pretty serious climb on paved roads along Skyline Drive. After the effort on the O course this additional effort started to take a toll with the heat of the day, (the warmest day of the year so far!).

The relatively short effort on the paved roads led us to our first trail riding of the day. The opening sections of the trail were muddy and pretty tracked up by hoof prints. With Shawn and I on semi-slick tires this slowed us down right off the bat. Luckily the trail cleared up fairly quickly and we were able to make decent time.

This section was essentially a bike O with three points to be obtained in any order. This was our first introduction to how brutal the bike portions would be on the day. We found ourselves pushing bikes up some pretty steep uppers and even walking a downhill or two as there were a couple crazy technical downers. To make matters worse I had a flub on the nav that cost us somewhere around 10 minutes as we had to bike-whack a small portion to get back on the right trail.

It was on this section Whitney executed the first of three rather spectacular crashes that she had on the day. Luckily she escaped all of them relatively unscathed and uninjured! My poor bike didn't fair so well though as I managed to snag a stick in my rear derailleur and shred the cable. Fortunately the bike still rode (others weren't so lucky during this race), but I was reduced to two gears, medium and medium/high.

After leaving this section of trail we had a short shot on paved roads, then back into trails that surround Starve Hollow Lake. The first section was fast singletrack and some gravel. The last section of trail between us and the paddle was some seriously brutal hills that reduced us to a little more bike pushing. This may have actually worked for us as I was having a really hard time climbing with my reduced gears.

Even though we spent a lot of time pushing the bikes we were still pushing the pace, and the quick splash through the stream near the put-in felt great. We rolled in to the CP in second place overall, about 10 minutes behind Mystik. Although the flub on the bike-O cost us, we hadn't lost a lot of time since then. We copied the paddling CP's, hopped in the boat and were on our way.

The paddle went well and pretty quickly. The last CP was manned, with a special challenge where you were handed a pie pan with a piece of twine strung across it and a small magnifying glass. The instructions were to burn through the twine and return to the volunteers. Although I'm proud of us for succeeding at burning through the sting with the magnifier, we were all a little embarrassed when the volunteers pointed out that we were not told that we had to use the magnifying glass, and matches were part of our mandatory gear... Oh well!

After completing the paddle we had to rewind the brutal hilly bike hike on our way back to the road that would take us to the finish. We were completely out of water at this point and Shawn and I were both just barely keeping the cramps at bay. We managed the trails and upon returning to the pavement took out some aggression by picking up the pace.

We got to the last special challenge just short of the finish line and learned that Mystik was still about 10 minutes ahead. We wouldn't catch them, but a good effort nonetheless. We knocked out the last special challenge and rode to the finish where we all proceeded to drink as much water as we could get our hands on!!

The final results would hold with us finishing 1st place in the coed division, and 2nd place overall. Not too shabby. All the teams out there agreed that the course was incredibly challenging, but everyone seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. There is something about beating a course that's tougher than normal that makes the whole experience even better!

Thanks to Jerry and James for a great course and as always a HUGE thanks to all the volunteers that make these events happen. You guys rock!!

Mike Garrison
Indy Rootstock

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