At one point during this year’s Gold Rush I suddenly began laughing aloud to myself. Really, I chuckled, how do we end up in these situations? More importantly, why do we end up in these situations? Our team, Barely Legal/Yogaslackers, was hike-a-biking up a 45° slope that was optimistically marked on the map as a trail. Currently it was a river of mud, and for every step we took up, we’d slide a half step down. Our bikes were essentially cumbersome flashlights because there was no way we could ride most of the time. Every now and again we’d come across a hundred yard section that was rideable. Everyone would get excited, hop on the bikes, think “maybe now everything will just better from here;” then fifty feet further and we’d be off the bikes slogging in mud again.

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I was laughing because earlier, much earlier, we were trekking and Daniel complained that we certainly hadn’t got very dirty yet. Paul and I agreed, wishing for more mud before the end of the race. And now here we were with all the mud I could ever want times ten. Once, I dug a very large hole in my parent’s backyard. When it got to the point where it was hazardous they told me to fill it up and I decided that if I were going to fill it up I might as well enjoy a five-foot deep mud bath in the process. Previously I thought that that mud-bath night epitomized “muddy,” but tonight topped it all. Even for those brief stretches that we could ride, the manzanita was so close to the trail that it would pull you right back down to the mud. If I hadn’t been freezing cold, soaked through, tired and hungry that might have been kind of fun.

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Our race started smoothly enough. We made it to the start – that was a major accomplishment. Last year we wrecked the van about a half hour after the pre-race meeting and a long drive away from the start, so we spent the weekend hanging out with cops, car dealership salespeople and a tow truck driver in Oakdale instead of racing. Anyway, this year we managed to avoid wrecked the van and many other teams congratulated us on this admirable accomplishment.

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The race started on a small lake in Pinecrest, about an hour east-ish of Sonora. The morning was chilly, but not too cold, and the sun was promising a beautiful day ahead. Our crew, Katharine and her friend Julie, hurried us around getting ready and before we knew it it was 7:45am, time to head to the starting line. I love adventure race starts. The race director calls everyone over for a roll call, everyone comes over and says “Here, here, here, here,” and then the R.D. looks at his papers one last time and says “Okay. Ready, go!” And everyone goes. None of that singing of national anthems or long drawn out pre-race talks like they do at other sporting events. Adventure racing keeps it simple.

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We headed out of the start with twenty-one teams running for CP1, which was on the other side of the lake we were at. We overshot CP1 by about a half mile due to navigational misunderstandings, which lost us about forty minutes. On the way back to it we developed a secret code to let each other know when one of us spotted the CP: “Where the f*** are we?” This way if other teams were around they wouldn’t be clued into our discovery. All of us really wanted to get to say the code phrase, so we were looking very hard for the checkpoint. Finally Paul was sitting on a rock waiting for Daniel and me to scramble down from the high route we’d taken. Paul jumped up, “Where the fuck are we! Where the fuck are we!” If the other teams in the vicinity did hear him, they were probably more confused by Paul’s apparent joy over being lost than fooled by our secret code phrase. Whatever, we moved on.

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After CP1 our nav was spot-on. I should say Daniel’s nav, really, since he navigated the whole time. Every now and then he’d ask for our advice, and we’d give it, but really, Daniel was the nav hero of this race. And I thank him for that, because if he hadn’t been so on it our night in the mud could have been much, much worse.
CP2 was a breeze; we ran most of the way (anything that wasn’t rock scrambling or straight uphill) and made up a bit of the time we lost finding CP1. At CP3 we picked up bikes that Katharine and Julie left for us, and powered out for a short bike leg. Due to our little miscalculation with CP1, we were 19th out of 21 teams at this point, but we felt great and were on a roll.

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The first bike leg followed a drainage flume for a number of miles. This, in my opinion, was one of the race highlights because it involved a number of periodic sections where we had to walk on 2×12”catwalks over the flume. We decided that (a) flumes are cool, and (b) the Yogaslackers should invent a new sport to make use of the coolness of flumes – it’d be called fluming, of course. By the time we reached ACP2 we had moved up to 12th place, and we transitioned for the next trek in under twenty minutes, thanks to Katharine’s military-like hustling and Julie’s helpfulness. This trek was a long one and the rappel was in the middle of it, so our packs were full with lots of food and climbing gear.

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Again, we ran most of the time. We ran down a steep power-line hill (I spotted a sled and really wanted to slide down on it, but it was cracked up so I left it alone), then down the rest of the hill mostly on the road, cutting through the switchbacks every so often. Then we crossed a dam and followed the river downstream for a ways to hit CP9 (which was in a cable car that went across the river!) and continue up a big hill to CP10 where the rappel was. The rappel, well, we had mixed feelings. It felt rather silly to trek all the way up just to be able to have a rappel section down. And the down was all slab with nothing exciting and vertical. But then, this is the Sierra Nevada, not the canyons of Baja. After the rappel we scrambled down another 400 feet to the river, which we then crossed and ran alongside for a few kilometers to Sand Bar Flats campground, where we found CP11.

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From CP11 we had another big uphill to the top of Crandell Peak, where we got CP13. Along the way we heard a lot of rustling in the brush, so we made up a song entitled, “Don’t Eat Me Tonight, Bear.” Unfortunately I don’t remember the tune. In this section there was a lot of bushwhacking potential, and if it had been light out we probably would have taken advantage of this. As it was, dusk had just set in and it was beginning to sprinkle, so we played it safe and kept to the fire roads except for one bushwhack that turned out to be the most beautiful whack I have ever bushed because it worked out perfectly and we never felt lost. Down from CP13 there was a muddy mess of trails and Daniel was ever so meticulous with the nav. It was raining full on now and we had donned our wet weather apparel; still, the rain soaked through, making us very wet and cold. Paul kept telling us that he had forgotten what warmth felt like.

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CP14 was stocked with about seventy million cans of Pepsi, so we drank a few. Then we pushed on, and took a wrong turn somewhere in the trail mess, but luckily Daniel set us straight before too long we didn’t really go any extra distance. Eventually we reached an improved road and trekked down it for a ways while we talked about how very tired we were of this trek with its wetness and its coldness and its longness. Finally I spotted some lights, but they turned out to belong to a Christian camp so we sped up the pace and continued. Not too much farther we found CP15/ACP3 at the bottom of a hill and the end of a valley.

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Katharine and Julie had the transition area set up beautifully with a tarped area to keep the rain out (sort of). We stayed for about an hour drying off, eating, warming up and mentally psyching ourselves up to return to the unpleasantness of the night. We left on the next bike leg right as the rain began to pick up. Lovely, I thought. For the first half hour it was okay because we had dry(ish) clothes (Katharine lent me her dry rain jacket – yay!!!) and we were biking up a big hill on improved road, so we could actually ride. But after a while the rain soaked through our new clothes and we were just as cold as before. Then we hit the mud.

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Once we stopped being able to ride much it was so cold that Paul claims he was shivering straight for ten hours. We got CP16 and CP16a fine, but then we made a slight wrong turn and needed to go back to nab 16b. This is where Paul & Erica vs. Daniel began. Paul and I were both nearly hypothermic and wanted to high-tail it back to ACP3. This bike leg was long, we’d made it through about a fifth of it in four hours and the trails didn’t look like they improved farther down the line. So we wanted to forget about 16b since we’d already missed it, then keep going to 16c and from there head down to an improved road that we could ride back to ACP3 instead of continuing on the trails to CPs17-19 and ACP4. Daniel, on the other hand, wanted to go back for 16b and then go on to ACP4. There was a brief standoff in which we all knew what each other wanted to do, but nobody wanted to make a decision. At last we decided to head back to ACP3 because we were so cold that even pedaling briskly uphill we were still shivering. Also, Paul’s rear shock was broken, which made his bike difficult to ride.

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This turned out to be the right decision, I think. We ran into Mark (race director) as soon as we hit the improved road, and he seemed to think we made a good choice too – the lead teams still hadn’t made it through this section (they ended up doing it in 11hrs) and they had started it before the rain made the trails quite so horrible. In addition, going past CP16c was a point-of-no-return journey and we would have had to make it all the way to CP19/ACP4.

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It was now about 6am, and the sun was coming out. This, Daniel claimed, would warm us right up. Not so, although it did provide a very welcome relief from the thirteen hours of night we’d suffered through. We shivered for hours, even after baking ourselves with heat lamps once we got back to ACP3 and cuddling up under sleeping bags, space blankets and down jackets. Then on the drive home we woke up in a van that was 110° with the sun shining in and the windows rolled up. No more shivering after that – we were even warm enough to go home and drink multiple rounds of milkshakes…

Leg 0: Getting to the Start Line
Early in the year we decide as a team that we are going to do the Baja Travesia 2007. We aren’t sure how, but we know we have to. In September we’d had a taste of success with our first race together, the SoCal 24, followed by a lot of bad luck with the Gold Rush in November. So now it was our time to shine, and to really see what we could do by tackling our first expedition-length race.

They say that getting to the start line is the hardest part of a race, and this would have been true if it were any other race: Daniel’s bike frame snaps due to metal fatigue three weeks before the race, and he has to scramble to get a warrantee frame from Ellsworth in time to construct and test before he leaves UCSB. Getting the rest of the mandatory gear is also more troublesome than we’d hoped. We have to find waterproof strobes, as well as decent racing kayaks. This race is to have some epic paddling and the race directors cautioned not to bring bathtubs (canoes), which is what we have done at most races. Then we look high and low to get the some 70,000 calories that we calculate we’ll need for this adventure, coming just a few thousand short. We pack it all into our gear boxes and just as we are about ready to leave, our ride to the start-line (our old high school teacher) calls to say she can’t go anymore. Luckily our loving parents step in and manage to wrangle enough car space to transport our 3-man team with gear, boats and bikes down to Ensenada.

Once there, we go through the pre-race checks, having tremendous fun in the playful surf south of the harbor and remarking to each other that the paddling should be a blast. We have no idea what is in store for us.

Later that night we go down the street to the “Gigante” corner mart and buy ourselves some tostadas, refried beans, and a few mangoes. We eat, sleep, do tricks over the pool and joke about how stupid we are for being in this crazy sport.

When we get up Tuesday morning and put on the only clothes we have left. We portage our kayaks to the start line, where we check in and put in to the wonderfully sheltered Ensenada harbor. While waiting for Paul (the race director) to give us a final go-ahead, he asks us if our spray skirts are up to muster (they aren’t), and if we have strobes (we do). He didn’t have any extra skirts lying around, so we wondered why he even asked. Feeling a little worried about the purported perfect storm going on outside the shelter of the harbor, we wait at the start line for the race to begin.

Leg 1: 56k Paddle
We get the go-ahead and make our way out of the harbor. Erica and Daniel, in the double, put Paul on tow and we exit the harbor together. The initial waves tear the towing system to shreds so we give up immediately on that. Just a few feet out of the harbor, there are swells nearing 6 or 7 feet high, giving all of the racers a run for their money. “This is going to suck,” we tell each other as we begin the long paddle towards CP1, on Todos Santos island about 15k away.

The further we get away from the harbor, the stronger the waves and wind get, and the more and more we realize that we’re not moving very quickly. We have to spend as much time as we can facing into the wind so that we don’t capsize (like many of the other teams around us), and this doesn’t lead us directly to the island. It’s also tough just to keep the kayaks straight and upright, and we battle into the wind for about 4 hours, making painfully slow headway towards the island. At this point, we see Paul in the official checkpoint boat making his way towards us, gesticulating wildly in the direction of CP2. He tells us, “Go to CP2, I am CP1, you’ve made it.” Overjoyed and given a whole new lease on life, we turn our boats perpendicular to the waves and pass around the point in the direction of La Bufadora. But turning away from the wind and waves makes us an easy target for the swells, and our necks get sore from watching warily for large swells to our right. By now, there are some swells that are so large we are almost in freefall on the way down the backsides – they must be sixteen or seventeen feet.

We all swear to ourselves, “This is it, at CP2 we’re done.” There is no way we are letting this situation get out of hand to the point where we feel unsafe. Once in the protection of the little bay, we make our way to the checkpoint and land our boats. We dump them out, as several leaks have made them very difficult to maneuver. Several other teams have elected to drop out here, but many also chose to go on. Despite out previous thoughts, after some serious team discussion and some assurances from the race directors, we decide to press on through the ridiculous ocean conditions.

A few minutes later we are cursing ourselves (and the race directors) for making that call, but we don’t want to turn around back into CP2, so we push across the practically open ocean towards the next point along the shore. Watching both our progress by landmarks to our left, and the enormous swells to our right, Daniel tries to keep Erica looking dead ahead, because neither side is encouraging or comforting. The point steadily gets closer and closer, and as it does we realize that it is nothing but rocks and steep cliffs. There is no safety in the shoreline here, and offshore, massive 2-story-house-size waves are breaking against underwater reefs. We navigate between these two hazards, but in the middle of it Paul is capsized by a rogue whitecap. While furiously bailing Paul’s cockpit with a bailer that seems like a dixie cup, Daniel vomits all over himself, Paul, and Paul’s cockpit. Paul, however, sees this as a blessing because the vomit is warm and he is cold. With still quite a bit of water in Paul’s boat, we have to move on because we are drifting dangerously close to the waves and the rocks.

After watching the Mexican navy rescue a seemingly empty boat from the swells, we finish the paddle and land at La Bocana beach just as the sun dips below the horizon. We have spent an entire day battling fierce open-water conditions to arrive at the transition area as the only two-boat team that finished the entire paddle.

Leg 2: 50k Bike
After warming up, eating and switching gear, we start in on the first biking leg of the race. Happy to be on firm, dry ground, we navigate our way for a while, finally giving up on traditional navigation and going by instinct towards our goal, a waypoint, followed by a checkpoint in a ghost town. We push through the night to arrive in the early morning at TA2, where we banter with our friends in Team Equinox about how they beat us to TA2, got out of TA1 after us, and didn’t pass us. We will always be amazed at the clever stunts Barry and his gang pulls.

Leg 3: 18k Hike
Still excited from our success on the paddle, we bushwhack up a hillside for a few hours until we finally find a trail, which we follow to a cactus farm nestled between two valleys. We trek out, passing teams Venomous Ducks, Baja Total Fitness and Equinox, and finally reaching the transition area in a park in a dusty, out-of-the-way town called San Vicente.

Leg 4: 68k Bike
After a few confusing turns and some advice from locals, we make it to the pride of this particular leg: a 1km bushwhack up the side of a barbed wire fence. At the top, we stupidly follow a few teams down the wrong side of the mountain only to find ourselves in a land of strange cactuses and a complete absence of tracks. After realizing our error we remind ourselves to run our own race, and turn around to continue on to the long climb that will eventually take us to where the turn-off was supposed to be. After stopping for a much-appreciated 30-minute sunny afternoon nap, we continue up to where the checkpoint was supposed to be. There, a few support crews point us a few kilometers down the road, to where the new location is. So we depart again, and a few kilometers in to this final stretch, Daniel’s left crank falls off, because of a missing part. The rest of the team makes fun of his bike, but he pedals along just fine with one leg to the new TA. There Team Thin Air greets us as our new support crew and helps us get prepared for the next leg. They even managed to line up a new bike for Daniel.

Leg 5: 10k Hike
This peaceful night-hike is a lot of fun in the beginning, calmly trekking between endless fields of sand under the light of the moon, talking about the race, our lives, and how good it feels to be hiking again. By the end of it, though, we are so tired we can barely stand, and we head to bed as soon as we enter the TA. We set our alarms for an hour and a half nap and pass out, all under Daniel’s sleeping bag. Two hours later (alarms didn’t work), we are awoken by the sound of Paul vomiting.

Leg 5.5: Paul’s Journey
In the TA we try to get Paul to keep food and water down, but nothing sticks. So Erica and Daniel have a chance to sleep, while poor Paul endlessly tries every combination of foods and drinks he can imagine. In the morning, Team Equinox suggests an apple, which he manages to keep down for a pretty good amount of time, but he’s not feeling a whole lot better. More teams roll in and out we begin to talk about Erica and Daniel splitting off and continuing with another team. In the end, it’s not even a question though – we’re a team and we stick together. But we’re not calling it quits either. There’s still time, and we decided to wait out Paul’s illness. After the brilliant suggestion from Paul Romero to try dissolving Hammer Gel under his tongue, Paul begins to show marked improvement, and Antonio and Kat finally give us the O.K. to continue.

Leg 6: 28k Bike turned 40k Bike
We begin this leg well and make great time to the first intersection. Due to an absolutely idiotic map-management mistake, we find ourselves in the completely wrong place. We had taken the wrong turn, knowingly, and assumed we were on the right track. We consider a 3km bikewhack to the real trail but decide against it, because it would have been hell. Instead we enjoy the downhill back to where we started, and we take the correct turn now. After getting to Checkpoint 13 and almost reaching the TA as night falls, Paul begins throwing up again. But he’s a trooper and is willing to continue with very few breaks. Erica carries his pack, Daniel pushes his bike to the top of the hill, and we rolled into the TA around 10PM, a few hours later than they were expecting us, due to the navigation error and Paul’s sickness

Leg 7: 18K Mountaineering
Here we face the second-to-last cutoff for the race: we have to leave this TA by 6AM tomorrow morning. Erica and Daniel feel strong, but Paul still feels horrible, even after an hour nap. We decide to wait it out again, and end up leaving the TA early in the morning.

After scrambling up a few thousand feet to near where the “Top of the World” checkpoint should be we spot a column of smoke, which we assume is some sort of smoke signal from the checkpoint, since they are expecting us and we are late.

We follow the smoke and, after overshooting the actual checkpoint by nearly a kilometer, find ourselves in the middle of a forest fire. It is a small one, and we put it out as best we can, but we are a bit worried since we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere not sure how to proceed.

Daniel radios in the fact that there is a fire, and we return to where we know the checkpoint should be. There we find an abandoned tent with a note inside, telling us to go on down the canyon. So we radio in again to check that everything is OK in the canyon still, and then we start down.

Initially we drop elevation incredibly quickly, and we reach the first canyon checkpoint just as night falls. But we are still 1000m away from the checkpoint at the bottom and our pace has fallen to 50m/hr since nightfall, despite the bright moon and comparatively easy going thus far.We know that the rest of the canyon is supposed to be even more challenging than what we’ve done so far, and we also know that there is a cutoff at 7AM the tomorrow morning. We do the math and figure that it will take us more than the 10 hrs we have between now and the cutoff to get down. So we decide to camp instead and enjoy the canyon fully the next day. We know that we are giving up the finish, but we decide that this is a much better decision, especially since in the hour we traveled after dark each of us had an embarrassing accident or two that would never have happened in the light. Happy to be resting, we set up camp and tried to start a fire. Both of our lighters are busted (probably during the paddling leg), so Daniel tries to light the remaining butane with sparks from his shorted-out headlamp battery, to no avail unfortunately.

In the morning we finish the canyon, at first taking great lengths to stay dry but in the end settling in to the reality that there’s no way to avoid getting wet. We rappel, boulder-hop and down-climb the remaining 1000m by 1PM, and then we are whisked off to the race finish in San Felipe by Mexican Halcone Rescue guys. Not too sleepy, but totally sore and happy to be finished, we ride though the desert to the blasting tunes of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and other American classics. We arrive as the last team on the course at the finish, lick our wounds and call it a very long day…

Veteran’s Day Weekend got off to a good start when Paul bruised his ribs while trying to slide up a railing. Our adventure racing team was going to do a 24-hr race in the western Sierra Foothills, a ways up from Oakdale. We were excited because Paul, Daniel and I felt like we’d make a strong team (even now, with Paul’s painful ribs), and in years past this race, the Gold Rush, has had excellent courses. Paul and Daniel drove up to UCSC Thursday night, so Friday we loaded up Daniel’s mini-van and drove to Oakdale for the pre-race meeting. Katharine and Nic, who also go to UCSC, came along to crew for our team.

We arrived in Oakdale for the meeting early, which has never happened before. Usually our team scurries in and catches the last five minutes or so. With so much time we didn’t really know how to handle ourselves – we lounged around carbo-loading on lasagna and bread, we filled up the van with gas, we took time and put the canoe we were borrowing on the van carefully, and we organized gear. All of which normally happens at a lightning-quick speed that doesn’t allow any of it to get done correctly. I was enjoying this new, stress-free sort of pre-race.

When we got our maps and plotted the checkpoints we realized this race was going to be amazing. It had a killer paddling leg that included a spot where you had to ferry your bikes across the lake, not to mention extensive trekking and biking legs. Looking at the maps we were psyched and ready to race.

So we left the race meeting feeling good, especially since the race directors assured us that it was only an hour and a half drive to the race start area, and we wouldn’t get lost. That’s what happened last year at this race – we got lost trying to find the start in the middle of the night. But this year would be different, we could feel it.

About ten minutes outside of Oakdale Katharine remembered that we needed batteries. We didn’t think we’d be able to buy them anywhere else in the next nine hours, so we turned around and headed back to the Save-Mart in Oakdale. While Daniel, Paul and I bought large-quantities of batteries and Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, Nic decided he and Katharine should re-tie the canoe, just to make sure it was secure. Ten minutes later, everyone was happily munching on Reeses and we were headed for the race start again.

Daniel, Paul and I were stretched out in the backseat, and Katharine was driving. All of a sudden Daniel yelled, “Watch out, babe!” and we all saw a red Chevy truck in front of our van. Of course Katharine slammed on the brakes, but so did the driver of the other vehicle when she realized there was about to be a accident. Since we were driving perpendicular, her stopping resulted in us T-boning the truck straight-on. As we headed for it, time slowed down and all I noticed was that there was a little boy in the passenger side of the truck staring at us in horror. “Oh please, don’t let the canoe shoot off the roof and kill the kid, please don’t,” I prayed.

The impact wasn’t as bad as I expected, although Nic says it was a lot worse in the front seat. But in the back it didn’t feel serious at all, and I figured we’d exchange insurance info, check to make sure everything was okay with the people in the truck and then keep on heading for the race start. Sure, it was a bummer to have this happen, but Daniel’s van is a POS car anyway and another little dent wouldn’t be so bad. All this was running through my head when I saw Katharine, who had gotten out of the van and walked around to check out the front end, mouth the words “Oh shit!” We couldn’t hear her, but it was clear as day what she’d said.

Now, Katharine may exaggerate sometimes, but I had an unfortunate feeling that this wasn’t one of those times. The rest of us got out and noticed that not only was the van smashed in the front, it was also leaking fluid all over and steaming. Not good. Even worse, the other driver was an unlicensed girl who looked like she was about fifteen, and the only other passenger was her brother, who must have been about six years old. Luckily, the girl’s cousin appeared out of nowhere and helped straighten the situation out. We spent about forty-five minutes talking to the cousin, the girl’s mom and, later, her dad before we finally called the police. The cousin was nice, the mom didn’t really speak English, and the dad was a bit of a jerk. All he’d say was, “You gonna fix my truck? Huh?” When the only damage to the truck was a slight dent in the door (which didn’t prevent the door from opening), and when it was his unlicensed daughter who had run a red light and caused the accident. Meanwhile our van was definitely not driving anywhere in the near future and we had a race to get to.

Once the police came it was a lot easier. In Oakdale there doesn’t seem to be much for the cops to do, because we had a succession of four or five squad cars roll by in addition to the two that were there actually taking care of the situation. After half an hour or so talking to the cops, the girl and her family left. We, on the other hand, had no means of leaving so we hung around making small talk with Officers Wyatt and Johnson. Daniel told them about our race, and how we still wanted to make it somehow. Paul jokingly suggested the police officers lend us their SUV, or better yet, crew for us in the SUV. They thought that was pretty funny, but not funny enough to say yes, especially after one of them spotted the “John Kerry” bumper sticker on the van and pegged us for liberals (“Gotta be careful out here, kids, “ he told us, eyes narrowed).

Eventually one of the cops got around to asking where we were going to spend the night. “Dunno,” I said. “In the park,” Paul said, pointing across the street. “Ha ha, well that’ll get you arrested – sleeping in the park,” Officer Johnson said. He thought we were still joking, even though we weren’t. “I can give you guys a voucher for a motel room if you want,” he offered. Well, of course we wanted a free hotel room. So we gathered some stuff and the cops gave us a ride back to the station, while Austin the tow truck driver took the van to the local Ford dealership for the night.

Despite the fact that our van was wrecked and we probably wouldn’t be doing this race after all, riding in the back of a squad car was fun. The Officer Johnson also gave us junior officer stickers, which were even more fun. Then he drove us over to a place named Jerry’s Motel. “All right kids,” he told us before he let us out of the car, “First, don’t judge Oakdale by Jerry’s. Second, don’t leave your room tonight, just stay inside and you’ll be good.” With these comforting words he drove off and we were left outside of Jerry’s office door.

Jerry was an Indian man who did not say a single word to us. Paul walked in and told him the cops gave us this voucher. Jerry motioned for Paul to pass it to him under the glass, then he passed Paul a slip of paper for Paul to write some information on. Paul passed the paper back, Jerry passed a key out, we left, Jerry began to laugh maniacally as we did so. When we heard him laughing we hurried very quickly over to room 6 and bolted ourselves inside.

By this time it was 1:30 in the morning. We were all tired and bummed about our race situation. You invest a lot in doing an adventure race. Not just in terms of the entry fee, but also in training and mental preparation. To come so close and not be able to do the race kind of sucked. We’d called the race directors numerous times, but they were apparently out of cell phone range, so we left them numerous messages. In the mean time, we figured we may as well get some sleep.

Jerry’s was not especially conducive to sleep, or anything else for that matter. It was quite possibly the sketchiest motel I have ever spent the night in, including the one next to a nuclear power plant that my parents and I stayed in. There were stains all over the floor, holes in the walls, dead flies and a shower in the kitchen. Luckily we had sleeping bags, and no one needed to shower. So we all got a few hours of sleep before Katharine woke us up at five and told me to try calling the race directors again. I did. They still didn’t answer. At eight o’clock we cheered for the race start from the skanky kitchen of Jerry’s motel while eating Reeses for breakfast. Kind of a bummer.

At nine we walked down the street to Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the only place in town, and found out that there was no way we could get a car to get back to Santa Cruz since we’re all under 21 years old. Then we went to the Ford Dealership and affirmed that the van wasn’t going to get us home anytime soon. Since it was a holiday weekend, we couldn’t even get the van looked at until Monday, when we all needed to be back at school. While we figured out what to do, we hung out at Haidlen Ford with Austin the tow truck driver and Robert the Ford Salesman.

Nic turned out to be our savior. He’s from East Bay, and his parents offered to drive down to Oakdale and take us back to Santa Cruz – an offer we were grateful to accept. The only catch was that Nic’s dad, who picked us up, wanted to watch the NCAA water polo championship game that Nic’s high school team was playing in, and the game was Saturday afternoon. So we made a detour to East Bay on the way back to UCSC and watched the water polo game. Funnily enough, it was Daniel and my first real high school sporting event. I guess going to a school like High Tech High can do that to you.

Anyway, we got back to Santa Cruz fine, but Daniel and Paul still needed to get to Santa Barbara. It would’ve been easy if they didn’t have mountain bikes and gear, but they did. For about five hours we entertained the idea of riding to Santa Barbara, then driving back up to collect gear. That was a little extreme though, considering we all had lots of schoolwork to take care of. So in the end we put Daniel’s and Paul’s bikes in some cardboard boxes that we scavenged from the dumpster and duct-taped the hell out of, and Sunday morning we hauled the bike boxes and their gear down to the bus stop.

We figured we’d have to take the city bus downtown to the Greyhound station, but then Katharine, Nic and my geology professor, Casey Moore, drove by. He stopped at the stop sign by our bus stop, saw us, kept going, did a double-take and rolled back to where we were standing. “Hey kids, where’re you headed?” We told him we were off to the Greyhound station and Casey Moore offered to give us a lift, “I just need to pick something up from my office and then I’ll come back and give you kids a ride, okay?” Yes, that was definitely okay. Thanks to the ride from Casey Moore, getting to the Greyhound was easy, and we had time for Jamba Juice while waiting for the bus. Which was an hour and a half late. But that’s another story…

Well, me and my buddies (on Team Animal Tested), just completed a 24 hour race. Phew.

The Story:

A week ago, we find out our planned 60hr race in Downieville is cancelled. We’re pissed, we wanted to race and frantically look around for a race. We found a 24 hour race in Big Bear, just a week away, for an amazing $50. We contact Team Sole, who is putting it on, and they let us do it. We run through all the pre-race prep in a huffy, figuring we can rent Kayaks in Big Bear. We pack up the car, ask some of our parents to crew for us, and we jet. We get to Big Bear at 4:30, and realize we still have to pick up the kayaks. By the time we get there, “Captain John” is gone, and we are stuck… so we “picked them up” (stole them), and left a note on his desk. Uh oh.

We make it to the race meeting in time to eat some pizza and paint our faces like something with whiskers (we’re the Animals from Team Animal Tested, see?). At the race meeting they tell us what a crazy race we got ourself in to. We wondered to ourselves, did we miss the “Expert Only” note on the website? 11000ft of elevation gain? Tough navigation? Desert heat and alpine cold? Did we actually read anything about this website? Do we want our money back? Hell No! We get the maps and checkpoints, and plot the points on two extra-large MyTopo.com maps. As we are working with our maps, we notice Team Dart/Nuun sitting next to us doing the same: cool. In Cycling you never get to prep next to Lance Armstrong! Adventure Racing is sweet because it’s small, and you can actually get tips in person from the best in the business.

Once finished with the maps, we hop in the car and get close to the race start which was 2 hours away. It’s basically 12AM before we bed down in a Humane Society outlet store. Ugh. We would have camped out on the roof, to avoid the light, but we got some nasty looks from our support crew (Dan’s mom and uncle). We get up at 4AM (yes, we only got 4 hours of sleep), and we make it into Pioneertown. We start at 6AM, and we embark. Here is a map of the course, but to make it quick: 31 hours, 7000 calories, and dozens of sleep-monsters later, we make it into the YMCA camp that is the finish. We roll in 5th in our division, 8th overall, ahead of over a dozen teams who dropped out. We were tired, happy, and glad to be able to play in the hills with some of the strongest, most determined guys and girls in the world.

Many thanks to the course directors Karen and Paul of Team Sole, for putting on a hellacious and long course that pushed us like crazy.