Odyssey Endorphin FIX 2008

Name of Race: Odyssey Endorphin Fix
Website: http://www.oarevents.com/event.asp?id=100&catID=1
Date of Race: April 24-27, 2008
Location of Race:  New River Gorge, West Virginia, USA
Type of Event: Adventure Racing
Distance/Length of Event: 3 Days

Team Running Free once again went down to West Virginia to tackle the Endorphin Fix to start out the 2008 season.  Boasting HUGE elevation ascents (42,000ft total) and 300+ km’s the “toughest 2-day race in the country” just got tougher with the additional day and expedition-style course. 

The team consisted of Ottawa athletes John Ranson and James Galipeau, along with Toronto area residents Denise Rispolie and me.  None of us had raced as a foursome together but had many races between us in some combination of each other.

We traveled down Wednesday April 23rd, loading up the minivan and making the 10 hour drive straight to race HQ at Pipestem Lodge, in Pipestem State Park located in the southern region of WV.  Prior to the race, we discussed our options of going supported or unsupported and chose the latter, mostly because we’re hoping to gain some experience for our next scheduled expedition adventure race, An Turas Mor, in Ireland in late June.  It was a decision that would cost us a lot of luxuries and time but would end up providing a lot of unsupported knowledge.

After check-in, John and I did the maps while James and Denise prepped our gear.  We only had about 2 hours to get all this done before race briefing and we hurriedly marked the maps with the CP’s, measured some distances and did a quick double-check.  The race would be rogaine style, with optional CP’s throughout the race.  Since we thought we were a pretty strong team, we strategized to go for everything until near the end, where we could skip some if need be.  We loaded up our gear in the provided U-hauls and were shuttled to the race start on the New River, about 90 minutes away from Pipestem.

The race start would be a guided 12K whitewater raft, shared with another team.  3 corrals of 6 boats with a randomly drawn 5-minute staggered starts would ensure everyone’s safety.  We were the first team called into the first boat, first corral with a team we were already friends with from other races called Towanda/Racing With Giants.  Cool…  Our guide was eager to help us with the race, indicating he was going to take all the fast lines instead of the typical tourist lines on the boat (how about the safest lines?!?!?).  He was more concerned with us reaching CP1 than any of us!  A swim LeMans start (thanks for doing that James!) and away we went.  The race was finally on!

The rafting was very fun, however, the river wasn’t without flatwater where we basically redlined our efforts to maintain our lead in the water.  We held off every team and arrived at CP1 in first place, although only 90 minutes or so into the race.  From here we transitioned to our canoes for another quick paddle downriver for only 6K or so.

Once at CP2 we loaded up our canoes onto our newly bought canoe wheels and headed up a dirt road toward the first TA.  This was going to be a 6K portage.  After 20 minutes up, we ran into Ronnie, the course designer, who indicated everyone was going the wrong way and we were supposed to take an old railway bed marked by the UTM’s provided in the instructions.  Our UTM’s didn’t match up at all with the railway bed, nor was this mentioned any time in the briefing or instructions, but we turned around, along with every other team and headed back to the take out where we caught the old railway line and headed back up to the TA.

Once at the TA we hopped on our bikes and took off into night one of the race.  We had an approximate 75K ride, with 3 CP’s to the next bike/trek TA.  After finding the first CP without any issues, we followed a rail trail to where we expected the next CP, on a bridge over a creek.  We also noticed another team – ATP, also looking in the area for the CP without much luck.  After looking around for 20 minutes we decided to recheck our UTM only to learn we had plotted the CP incorrectly.  Once we had our proper UTM, we proceeded north for another couple km’s to find the CP hanging on a rail.  It was still off our newly plotted UTM, but close by nonetheless.  We navigated our way through the roads and eventually found our way to CP6/TA2. 

We figured with our plotting blunder we’d lost more time to teams but, to our amazement, we pulled into the transition in 2nd place.  We quickly changed into our trekking gear and ran off in search of our next CP’s, including a rappel.

Our route was pretty straightforward, with mostly roads/trails and some bushwhacking.  We found CP7 without much difficulty, which included the rappel.  We all rappelled down the provided 180ft cliff.  From here we were supposed to take a faint climbing trail to the next CP.  Unfortunately we veered off the trail for a bit at a river crossing, wasting almost an hour, while trying to get to the cliff rim.  Once on the trail again another team had caught up to us – Checkpointzero/Inov-8, who had made up that hour quickly since the rappel.  We also met up with the first place team, ATP, who also were having problems in this section.  We trekked together for a bit, but eventually ATP left us, only minutes before Checkpointzero/Inov-8 and us had found the elusive CP.  ATP was no where to be seen so we punched in and took off.  From here we hiked together with our new co-leaders to the next CP.  After a 10K hike we came out to where the CP was supposed to be – only to find out (again) it was not where it appeared.  After some deliberation with the other team and a local ranger, we decided to head back on the trail and luckily stumbled upon some orange flagging with OAR (Odyssey Adventure Racing).  We followed this to the next CP and decided to pull away from Checkpointzero/Inov-8 with a steep run/bushwhack down the gorge rim.  Another 10K or so of hiking and running led us to CP10/TA3, about 2 minutes ahead of our rivals.

It’s now daylight again and we’re back on the bikes for a long ride 50K along a scenic rail trail along the rim above the New River.  This section was pretty straightforward and we kept a slightly slower pace than Checkpointzero/Inov-8 thereby conceding the race leadership back to them.

We transitioned into CP12/TA4 where we now moved onto the riverboarding section.  We fuelled up and made the 7K walk to the put in at CP13.  Once at the put-in we riverboarded back to CP12, which doubled as CP14/TA5.  I was an awful riverboarder partly due to my inexperience and partly due to my calves continually cramping up from the last 24 hours of racing.  I flipped several times and my team patiently waited for me in the eddies.  I eventually got the hang of it, but I had lost us many “easy” minutes in this section.

Once back at the TA, we were shocked by all the teams that had suddenly caught up to us and were within an hour or two of us.  So much for our nice cushy 2nd place!  This TA proved to be a long one for us, due to all the changing, gear transfer and new maps we were to receive.  Having support here specifically would have saved us so much time, but we slowly got through it and headed out for another trekking section, trying to get to the first O (orienteering) part of the race while there was still light.

We eventually made it to the first CP within the O course, but light would not allow us anymore – we’d have to do this all by night.  We slowly worked our way through the correct trails and to the first several orienteering punches.  During this section we had our first big misstep.  We had been searching for a CP within a re-entrant only to discover after wasting 1-2 hours the CP was on a ridgeline (only 50m from where we’d been searching for so long).  We also had our first nap of 15 minutes to help clear the frustration with this CP.  We obtained another and quickly made our way to CP22/TA5 at Bragg.  Not surprisingly, we had dropped 3 more spots and now held a 5th place in the race.  The sleepmonsters were in full effect so we quickly grabbed our bikes and found some good lie-down space near (but not at – too many distractions) the TA, where we bedded down for a full hour.

Once up, John and I briefly went over the upcoming monstrous bike section we were now facing.  Although not far from the TA, we could see teams scrambling around back and forth on our road, which seemed odd because according to the map, the road east of us should lead over I64 and onto the main area of cycling.  We soon found out the road just ended at the interstate and we needed a way over/under it.  After some bikewhack we discovered a culvert underneath the highway and made our way underneath.

We biked for a short while and made our way up and down many hills before an epic descent onto a river road for some flat road riding.  Unfortunately it was here that some sort of pollen flew into my right eye and within minutes my eye was almost swollen shut and very red.  We decided to take a quick break in the town of Hinton, where we’d re-supply on food, water and maybe get something for my eye.  We must have looked like quite the site while invading the local pharmacy of coke, water, eye meds and junk food.  Every local wanted to see what we were doing, where we were going and where we’d been.  This ended up being quite a long delay because we also needed to move the mapboard from my bike to John’s since I didn’t feel comfortable navigating with one eye and the town itself was 5-10 minutes off route.  Eventually we made our way out of town and back onto the bike.

From Hinton we headed southeast to some of the more significant hills in southern WV.  About 8 bike CPs were scattered in a clockwise route.  One by one we knocked them off, some with more difficulty that others, ALL with major climbing and descending.  It was very slow going just because of the amount of climbing and distance.  After the first 4 CP’s it started to thundershower and we took some cover on the side of the road under some trees to wait it out.  About 15 minutes later, it eased up and we continued on.  I was getting extremely cold and wet now and the 25C temperature we’d had all day had since dropped to somewhere around 7C I would guess.  We stopped for another quick break under a church porch and John, who was encountering some serious sleepmonsters, took a quick nap.  I tried staying warm thanks to Denise’s emergency blanket.  At this location a stream of teams suddenly appeared and gave us a kick in the pants to get moving.  Nighttime moved in and we were on the final night of the race while still trying to get to the paddle TA.  For many more hours we biked, this was the longest section of the race for everyone because we all were battling sleepiness, more ascents and me so cold.  It was a tough situation for us – we needed to stop because we were falling asleep on our bikes, but I was so cold I needed to keep moving.  My teeth chattered non-stop and I was grateful to see any hills and dreading the downhills just because of the windchill!  After 20 hours since the last transition, we eventually got through it and finally made our way to the CP/TA where we slept immediately once off our bikes in the back of the U-haul.  We set our alarms for a full hour sleep for the final press in the canoes and trek.

We awoke about an hour before dawn and set out.  We needed to get to the paddle/trek TA before noon or risk being short-coursed, however, the paddle featured optional rogaine CP’s, which would help our ranking.  We did some math with our paddle pace, ease of rogaine CP’s, etc. and obtained 3 CP’s before making our way to the paddle/trek TA/CP 40 minutes before the noon cutoff.  From here it was a 14K hike/trail run along the Bluestone River to another CP at the trailhead, cross the river and then up to the top of the canyon to the finish at Pipestem resort.  Pretty simple huh?

We hammered the run, wanting to possibly pass a couple teams ahead of us and keeping some distance from teams we knew behind us on the paddle, such as ATP.  We had no clue where everyone was ranked, how many paddle rogaine CP’s they reached, but we decided to leave all our last efforts on this final run.  When we got the UTM where the CP was to be located we saw other teams scrambling around indicating there wasn’t a CP or river crossing to be found anywhere.  Ugh.  Although we were there by 1:30pm we needed to keep in mind the 5pm finish line cut-off.  If we finished after that we would DNF.  We wasted 2.5 hours looking around while every other team caught up from the paddle.  Eventually we found the CP, about 1K upriver – WAY OFF from both the instructional hints and UTM.  While we’d probably been 3rd off the paddle going into this part, we were now 3rd last and only had 1 hour to make the 5K hike straight uphill to the resort.  We knew we had lost some spots with this last little screwed up CP but we summoned any last bit of energy we had and shuffled up, as fast as we could. With about 20 minutes to spare, we passed the finish line and celebrated our tough efforts.

At the resort we chatted with other teams and Ronnie dealt with some ticked off teams.  We mentioned how far off the last CP was, but left it at that.  Other teams had completely skipped that CP because it was so far misplaced and Ronnie was now DNF’ing them.  They were obviously really unhappy.  With no clue on how everyone finished we settled into a normal 8-hour sleep (!) and awoke at dawn, packed up and made the drive back to Canada.

Overall we were pleased with how our team performed and we felt we did well considering our lack of bike training due to the long winter and this race being our first for this foursome.  The final results indicate only 8 ranked teams (out of 34) and we finished 4th overall, 3rd in the premier mixed 4’s.  We also know that we have the ability to compete with some pretty good teams and if we had minimized our many little mistakes, we could have easily won it overall.

Results, photos, blogs and more can be found here.