Indy Rootstock :: Mike Garrison

Until Saturday I had never been on a team that flat out won one of the local races. PA Urban, PA Sprint, IndyAR etc. We'd won our division a few times, but never the whole enchilada. Saturday at the 2009 PA Urban Sprint John McInnes, Sumitra Ghate and I managed to finally do it. (At least, it was a finally for me, not sure about them.)

I can't say it went down exactly how I would have expected though. I'm probably in the best shape I've ever been in and figured that would be pretty important to a strong finish for my team. After feeling good on the opening O section (I even towed John for a bit, physics be damned) and fine on the paddle*, I proceeded to feel pretty darn lousy until we were within spitting distance of the finish.

*For the record, I did not feel fine when we managed to flip the canoe. That was a first for me, maybe all of us. I'm thinking the ensuing dousing in White River water may have contributed to how I felt for the majority of the rest of the race. Also, whatever paddling prowess John and I managed to display at the Midget race in July had evaporated as we staggered about the White River like drunken sailors. All Sumi could do about it was sit there and get hit in the head by John's paddle...

As soon as we got on the bikes I had no kick in my legs at all. Thinking I just needed to loosen up I let John pull on the bike for a bit. Turned out that "bit" ended up being the majority of the next 3 hours of the race. I don't think I slowed us down any, but I sure didn't do much to help to push the pace much. With all of the riding I've been doing I was really hoping to do some work on the bike for this race. But, the only work I ended up doing was call directions from the back of the pace line.

And that right there is the beauty of adventure racing. It's a team sport and when a team is working well together it's possible to overcome someone having a bad race. Both of them were constantly asking me if I had eaten enough, drank enough and was taking my electrolytes. (If you're not at least somewhat annoyed by the frequency of these questions from your teammates, they're not asking them enough).

Despite not knowing where the heck we were relative to the other top teams due to some confusion with the opening O, we pushed hard and stayed steady. By the time we completed Stage 1, we departed onto Stage 2 definitively in first. No other teams had started that stage yet.

This is where I finally started to find my legs. After 4+ hours of just hanging in there all it took was a little adrenaline brought on by the approaching finish line to get me going at least a little bit and help push the pace. We saw a couple other teams out on the roads but weren't exactly sure how they were doing or how much of the course they had done so we just raced like they were right on our tails. Even the final 3-4 miles after solving the word scramble*, we continued to push the whole way to the finish.

*For the record, although we were in fact trying to "solve to win", we felt that "loves to win" was pretty appropriate too. (Huh, Jay and the volunteer at CP32/33 might be the only ones that get that...)

I haven't done a whole lot of racing in individual sports. Never done a tri, only a couple of marathons and half marathons and one cycling road race. I do know that the few times that I've felt awful while racing are pretty darn miserable. Encouragements from fellow runners/riders can help, but it's not quite the same as a teammate that's determined to keep you focused and in the game.

I frequently see "tweets" and facebook statuses (stati?) and blog posts about how someone blew up or melted down or failed epically at a triathlon or running race or whatever. Had I been by myself Saturday, I'd probably be writing something similar. But, since AR is a team sport I'm not. And I think that's pretty cool.

A little bit of reluctance to give up and some teamwork and you can turn a crap day into a pretty good day. Heck, you might even come in first...

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Mike Garrison

Monday, August 17, 2009

First the hard way

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