This was by far the hardest race I have ever done in my short time doing athletic things. I was so shattered half way thru that finishing was a HUGE accomplishment for me. Parts of the race went textbook perfect, and most other parts fell apart like a sand castle under a wave.
Kitt and I had no issues with collecting all the kayaks, packing or tracking down any of the gear we needed (strewn across our house from multiple trips over the last 2 weeks!) or driving up and finding where we needed to be. In fact Friday was completely uneventful - we even found an AMAZING Indian food restaurant in downtown Cumberland that served wonderful dishes after we swung by registration and picked up our swag bags! This was my second race ever with Kitt and I was having nightmares about making poor navigational choices and just plain ol’ not measuring up. Well, my nightmare came true, but I guess in a good, motivational, reflective kind of way.
Saturday morning came early and down we came from Mt Washington to the start line at Comox Lake. The weather was perfect!! Kitt had said if it rained he would never race a MOMAR with me again, at least that part went well! It was fun seeing familiar faces in the start line craziness, and before we knew it we were in the water jockeying for position. It was great to be in the front pack in the boat, but soon I was running into some issues: within about 10 minutes my left shoulder and arm were seizing so badly that I had tears running down my face, but no one could notice because we were taking some really big hits in the Doubleshot and the waves were washing over my rigid half skirt and soaking me. I have no idea where those swells came from, it was a very calm day with a lite wind! Once we turned around and had the wind at our backs the boat started to really earn it’s keep. With just the right paddling cadence we surfed our way past a few Passats and struggled to keep ahead of our friends Chad and Kevin (which we did! Yay!)
I think we hit the beach in 20-25th place (not bad!!) and we started into the wicked little orienteering section. This was my favorite part! Kitt has an unerring sense of direction and early on (pretty much right out of the boat) I handed him the map and kept hot on his heels. It also worked out well cuz I couldn’t lift my left arm higher than my rib cage so reading and running was smacking of suicide. The trails were beautiful rain forest and we were able to just finish as the huge crowds started to really clog them.
I don’t know what I was hoping for with respect to the mountain biking legs, definately hoping for more Hornby style, less rooty North Shore. My skills are far too fledgling to have ridden the trails with any flow, and I spent 95 percent of this section running and hiking both up and down. This is where it really started to royally far apart for me. Midway up the first steep fire road climb my lungs began to give me some nasty trouble. I had the worst, shallow breathing of my entire life, (totally the remnants of my nasty chest cold) then I would get so worried because I couldn’t take a proper breath I would have a panic attack. That was the first time I have ever had a panic attack in my life and it was super scary. I think all in all I had 5 or 6 of them throughout the race and each time it brought me to tears. Kitt was wonderful, when I had to get off my bike 3/4 of the way up the climb he pushed my bike and gave me words of encouragement. I’ve got to admit though, I was super hard to be around and made Kitt’s life hell. It was real check for me when he said that we weren’t a sponsored team because we were contenders, but because we have fun, and right now I was not being fun. Ouch, but I TOTALLY deserved it. Nothing was working for me and it seemed the harder I tried to force ‘flow’ into my riding, the more I would end up on my butt. In one particularly damp and mushy section as soon as we started to descend I had 2 endo’s right back to back and just wanted to sit on the side of the trail and bawl my eyes out and I didn’t care who saw me. For the experienced riders the trails were wonderful but for me I couldn’t see an end in sight.
My elation at rolling (actually on my bike instead of beside it!) into TA2 and changing into my trail runners was short lived. It lasted as long as it took me to look at the map and realize I had never seen contour lines so close together. The climb I had had to fight so hard for was going to be repeated on much steeper trails but on my own two feet. I kept telling myself ‘at least you have much more experience on your legs’ as a pep talk for the entire hike up. Aside from being amazed at Kitt’s ability to suffer, but put it out of his head, the trek was actually kind of fun. It was one LONG hike up and a fun and flowy run down. The views were stunning and the sunshine made the suffering all go away!
From there it was back to TA3 and back onto the bikes for a short ride to downtown Cumberland, ditching the bikes and back into runners for a fun urban orienteer. This was the shortest section for us, a wopping 9 minutes and we were under the MOMAR banner and onto the food table! I was so proud that we finished but shuddered at the time: 7 hrs 23 min. Without me, I know Kitt would have finished in the top 25 teams overall and I felt like a huge sea anchor that just dragged and dragged. Back to the start line to load up the boats, let a very happy Panda out and onto our condo up Mt Washington. It would have been very funny to see us trying to hobble up the 3 flights of stairs in the condo and try to soak and beautify ourselves with only 45 minutes till the banquet. After the food came the dancing!
As always, the after party was brilliant! At first the band wasn’t playing too many actual dance numbers, and during the first intermission the floor was packed with people shaking it to Lady Ga-Ga and Rhinanna, and I think they got the idea for the second set! Around 1230 I was starting to fall asleep on the dance floor, so I went back to our table, arranged the chairs and pulled up a jacket. I think I had closed my eyes for a minute when someone grabbed my foot (swollen with 4 black toenails) and started to shake my very sore and tired legs. I cracked an eyelid just enough to see that it was a security person with my foot. What the hell?!? Apparently, according to Mt Washington security, you can’t appear to be napping in Fat Teddy’s in case the liquor inspector walks in at 1 in the morning. So I was kicked out! My first time ever and it wasn’t for over-indulging!! Too funny.. So I walked over to our truck and climbed in with Panda to snuggle and promptly fell fast asleep!
Cumberland was really, really difficult, but I’m very proud just to have finished. Taking into account that the singletrack was so very far above my skill level I was shocked that we came in 13th out of 24 in our catagory and 84th overall out of 128. My morale has been pretty low for the last few days since finishing, so I think it’s a good time to take a week off training (I’ve actually been looking forward to sewing and knitting some new things to be used around the house! Don’t laugh, everyone loves a new scarf for Christmas!)
What was the lesson you may ask? Races never going perfectly to plan - that’s why they call it adventure racing. Take joy in the small things, like finishing, or talking to people along the way. Have fun, remember why you got into it in the first place. Just a thought
