I drove over from Boston on Friday night getting close to the race start and Port Jervis NY around 10pm. I pulled into the super friendly truck stop for some food and then cruised over the the PA welcome center threw the sleeping bag out on the grass and starting dreaming Commie dreams....
Got up at 3am and had a sink shower then got into race gear and headed over to High Point State Park. Chris and Don pulled in a little after 4am and we started loading paddle bags and gear bins. We collected up the race maps and instructions and began plotting our plan.
The Segments:
First off was a section on foot/trek/run.... We decided to head south and pick up as many points as we could. We could only budget about 3 hours or so on this because the cut off time was 10am to finish the trek. We started off nailing the points. Gained good confidence and kept on moving. In retrospect we should have probably nailed at least one more point to the north because it was worth 5 points but oh well. We got all points but two.
Back at the transition area we quickly donned bike gear. The fog had rolled in and it was cool with a definite wind. We rolled out of TA1 at around 0945.... The scale of the map on the trek was 1:15000 and we now moved to a 1:50000 which always causes me problems in estimating distances. Also the grid lines were not straight up and down the map which complicates estimating north/south/east/west... That said we played havoc trying to nail the first two points till we got a read on the distances. From there Todd made one navigation error that cost about 10 minutes but actually saved us because the other teams were looking for a point WAY too short and we cruised past them to the exact point... YES....
We continued to motor and at 1330hrs we decided we should begin to head back because it looked like about a 15 mile slog on the road to transition area 2. We needed to be there at 3pm.
We started off and the initial segment was all uphill. We were struggling and to make the 3pm cut off looked dubious to me. We kept trying to hammer it but the inclines kept slowing us down.
We finally hit the main road and it began a long descent to the river.... We picked up the pace. It was going to be close but I was confident we'd make the cut off. Then disaster struck.
We made a turn onto a bridge where we were supposed to walk the bikes across. We were going pretty fast and I heard a scream from behind. I looked back and Don had crashed miserably and had been thrown head first into the guard rail. Chris and I ran back frantically and he was unconscious and not breathing. I thought he had broken his neck and was dead. I struggled to get his pack off him and he actually began to regain consciousness as we got ready to administer CPR. His pulse was stable but we did not move him for fear there was a neck/back issue. We called 911 immediately and they arrived very quickly and took over... Thank God he was at least living.... After they loaded him on the back board and into the ambulance, Chris and I resumed our way to the Paddle section. The race was lost now and we knew we had missed the cut off.
At the paddle section they stopped us. There were tornado warnings out and the rains had come in. There would be no way we could make the 15mile paddle in time......
Shortly a van came and picked us up and we drove back to the start. Very disappointed but also very happy that Don seemed to be okay with word from the hospital.
We shuttled Don's car to the Hospital and then we hit the road for home.... Another weekend of adventure racing......
Here's some photos.....
No comments:
Post a Comment