On Friday the 29th of July I headed to Merrill in Wisconsin to
participate in the longest Adventure race I've done so far: The Stubborn Mule 30hr
Adventure race. The time up to the race had been chaotic, as my original teammate
got injured in a MTB crash when we did the Tri-Loppet the weekend before, but luckily
he had some friends on another team that also had lost a teammate, so they
agreed to take me on the team. I was therefore now part of the
GearJunkie/WEDALI 2 team with some very experienced racers, so I was a bit
concerned if I would be able to keep up.
I drove out to Merrill with Tom, Justin and Kelly from
GearJunkie/WEDALI 1 in their Adventure Mobile a.k.a. The Silver Bullet, where I
got a chance to take a nap on the way.
We got to the hotel around 9pm and I met my team: Dave, Erl and Andrei
and we did some planning for the race.
The alarm clock went off at 3:30am and it was time to get dressed
and get breakfast before we headed towards the start location for the 6am
start.
The race consisted of 6 sections
1) Memory-O (~1 hr)
2) Bike (~4 hrs)
3) Orienteering/Trekking (~4.5 hrs)
4) Bike ( 6 hrs)
5) Paddle (9 hrs)
6) Orienteering/Trekking (4.5 hrs)
Total race time 29 hrs
It was a very hot day with around 30+c degrees, so that also
affected the pace and we needed to make sure we got enough to eat and drink to
keep going.
We got to the paddle section around 9.30pm and it was getting
dark, so the full paddle section would be during the night, but luckily it was
almost full moon and there was a clear sky, so it was actually fairly easy to
see where we were going without the head lamps.
When we got in from the paddle section we knew that we were
among the leading teams, but not sure if the team ahead of us had managed
to take all the check points like us. We therefore kept a good pace on the last
section and were aiming at getting all the check-points. However we were doing
a lot of bush-waking and could only move forward slowly and therefore had to
skip the check point that was furthest away in order to be sure we got back before
the cut-off.
It turned out that only one team ahead of us had gotten the
same amount of check points as us and we therefore got a 2nd place
overall after 29 hrs of racing in the beautiful Wisconsin nature.
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