Back from an awesome weekend of Bushwhacking, canoing, and mountain biking. The weary team returns with sore muscles and smiles on our faces.
We arrived Friday late afternoon and set up camp at Morrow Mountain State Park group campground and dropped off our trailer before heading down to God's Country Outfitters to check in with the race director.
We met up with one of the guys who was renting one of the extra canoes that we brought down for other teams (we brought 2 extra and rented them at $40 a pop). He was racing the 12hr like us in a 2 man team and we got to talking since he looked like he had been around the racing circuit before. He was from Pennsylvania and we knew that we wanted to talk to this guy a little longer as soon as we heard him say..."Yeah, we wanted to get in one more before we went to nationals". He also said that he mostly does 24hr races and made himself out to be quite the hotshot . Team shirts and all, you get the idea (We had a hard time justifying why they were staying in a hotel friday night). Our other favorite quote was..."You guys have altimeters on your watches right"? We must have asked each other about 100 times during the race.."TIM! whats the altimeter reading? I think were almost there!" They were nice guys really, fun to talk to.
Anyway, we hit up the Walmart Super center for dinner supplies and powerbars and a whistle for Tim to finish up our required gear (which was never checked), headed back to camp, ate and did some last minute rigging and packing of food, water and boats. Racing started at 6:45am.
We were up at 6am and after the pre-breifing, with a blow of the horn, it was a mad dash to the top of Morrow Mt. to get our maps. Very steep switchbacks for about 3 miles and we were the first ones to the top. We felt good biking in close formation up the mountain passing other packs with ease (and maybe pushing a little hard so early on). We joked later that the newbies were saying "holy shit," while the old guys were calling us newbies.
We plotted our points and headed back down to the get the boats, cross the river and got to the transition area with out incident. Our first stop was CP2 (mandatory) where we completed the "special challenge", a high ropes course. The course was pretty easy but waiting in line for 15min. to get on the stupid thing was hard. We were all feeling really good, NEXT.
Off on the bike we hit all the waypoints designed for the bike (near a bike or jeep trail) and it was 6 hours of HARD biking over extreme grades and rocks with breif moments of jogging through the woods to the CP. We did have to backtrack once after getting a little exited on a downhill run and blowing by 40 points but we decided to go back for it. We finally finished the bike course with about 5:30 hrs remaining. We got in the boats again and went for the canoe points.
We decided (for some reason) that we could hit the canoe check points faster by landing and running through the woods to them instead of paddling up to them so thats what we did. We landed and started running. We were off by about a 1/2 mile on the first one and it took us a while to figure it out but we got it (it was hanging off a limb over the water, imagine that). The second one took us pretty far off course but we did find it (well Adam did) literally he just happened upon it walking toward the river. The return to the boats took us onto to a road where we jogged for a while before taking a creek bed back to the canoes (A pretty major detour) By this time we were down to 1hr and we needed to get back to base camp.
We made it across the river post haste and hurried up the trail to base camp and turned in our map with about 15min to spare. This is the part where you are supposed to start the Orienteering course so thats what we did. We threw everything down, got the "O" map, located the first point and ran for it. We made it back and finished together with about 1 minute to spare and 5 more points added to our score for the first O point.
We got some mad props for our "never quit" attitude and found out that the hot shots from PA didn't get any of the "O" points which we thought was kind of weird since when we finished they had already showered and everything so they must have thrown in the towel hours ago (not very NORSA'esque)
Pizza, Subways and gatorade awaited us at the finish line (a welcome sight) and we ate...a lot while we talked to Altimeter guy and his partner comparing routes and strategies that we used. The awards followed immediately afterward and though we didn't get top 3 we were still really happy with our days accomplishments. There was a raffle of sorts also. Tim scored a $30 floor pump, Mike got trail guide for Uwharrie forest, Adam got a bottle of electrolyte powder and I got another event T-shirt.
We slept well that night and woke up around 8am. We left the camp ground at 9:30 and made it back to Raleigh by noon. The whole trip ended up costing us about $10/person plus the $90/person entry fee and thats not including all the free stuff we got. Not to shabby.
Great trip, awesome adventure. Another one for the NORSA record books.
