Peterisoba event report

Peterisoba Race Report July 18-19, 2009
Team Verve (Christi Masi and me)
Murray Maitland (team psuedojournalist)

Peteris Ledins, the race director and namesake of the Peterisoba Adventure Race, might be considered a little overzealous in his course design. This thought came to mind several times during the first half of the event. I was thinking this again at 7:45 pm Saturday evening. Christi and I had already been mountain biking for slightly more than 13 hours. Now, in front of us was a ROGAINE map with checkpoints that covered 50 square kilometers. Maybe “enthusiastic” is a better word since it had been a very nice day so far, and Peteris probably wanted us to enjoy as many spots as we could. We had hiked up streams, over ridges and divides, rappelled 100 ft off a cliff face, and mountain biked up and down some 4000 ft of forest roads.

The Peterisoba is an annual, invitation only, adventure racing event that is the equivalent of running’s Fat Ass races. Peteris expends considerable time and effort to scout the area, make maps, and inject his creative, fun-loving personality into the course. There were 9 of us taking advantage of the excellent (free) opportunity for an outing.

Training should simulate the “real” thing, so the Peterisoba was perfect. You need to try different things, make mistakes and get a reservoir of experiences. Sleeping in the back of my SUV on the side of a dirt road was a good way to start. Poor quality sleep before a 24-hour race is very typical. Hell, I generally pity people sleeping on the sides of forest roads.

The race started on time, although team Nuun-Feed the Machine (aka Ryan and Aaron) did not. The rest of us meandered leisurely on our mountain bikes over the first couple of miles of forest road.

During the first 5 minutes, Colin noticed his front tire getting flat so they stopped to fix it. Such a little item became team Colin and Connie’s Achilles heel for the race, and eventually caused them to miss a mandatory checkpoint. Later on that day, we saw them stopped by the road. Tire patches weren’t sticking. Slime was everywhere. As conciliation, philosophically speaking, I pretend that this is a good experience now, rather than in a “real” race, but I know how frustrating it can be.

Checkpoint #1 wasn’t at the stream mouth where it was supposed to be. The “A team” and me (solo for now) milled around deciding if we should start up the stream to checkpoint #2, or look for a while longer. Just then, Ryan and Aaron caught up and ran by. They turned the river corner, and continued. My thoughts were confused. “What are they doing?” In orienteering, navigators try to set a “backstop”, which is a geographic feature indicating they have gone past their planned destination. In this situation, Ryan and Aaron had gone well past my “river-turning-corner-with-cliffs-above” backstop. Something to keep in mind for later. So without any more hesitation, I started wading up the creek to checkpoint #2.

My brain was not working right at times. I stood right beside checkpoint #3 but didn’t find it for a couple minutes, ran right past #4 twice, looked right at #13 without seeing it, and had the wrong bearing to #15. More good learning experiences.

Christi was in charge of the rappel at checkpoint #7. The rappel started in an easy slope and then finished with a vertical section down to the road. Everyone thought it was a great addition to the course. There wasn’t any loose stuff, and the route made sense. Christi helped all the teams to go through before we coiled ropes and stored gear. Then we proceeded together as team “Verve”.

Logging road ascents by mountain bike were sweaty hot. They weren’t all that steep, but they were long. At first, Christi was critical of me removing my helmet for the ascents, and then she decided that this was the right move. Several times, we got off the bike and pushed them uphill to give our legs a relative rest. After the ascent, the viewpoints were spectacular, partly because all of the view-obstructing trees were clear-cut in places. At one ridge crest, we looked from Mt. Rainier to Baker, and all the way to Puget Sound.

The mountain bike descents were either fast and fantastic, or situations where I was much too timid. Nuun went by at about 30 miles per hour in a spot where I gingerly braked every few feet on loose gravel. “Need more practice!!” At other times, we were descending at 30 mph on hard-packed dirt. It was about 8 times faster to descend compared to the ascent.

Back to the ROGAINE… Our strategy was to put points on the board right away, so we ran and walked to the top of Fuller Mountain - an 800 ft bump directly above the transition area. This turned out to be a good strategy for us since Nuun left it to the end of their race, and then decided not to do it. Otherwise, our strategy could have been better. Despite deciding we would stop our race early, to save my legs for the 50-mile White River run the next Saturday, we didn’t change the order of our checkpoints. Had we either used up more time, run/walked 3 km more, or changed our checkpoint order, we would have won the ROGAINE and the entire event. Another good learning experience.

My feet were irritated from being wet all day combined with run/walking on the rough gravel roads. I should have used Hydropel. It was time to stop at 2:30 AM even though we should have gone to the race end in another 3 hours. I immediately propped myself against a rock at the TA/finish line and drifted off to sleep. Within minutes, I shivered myself awake. My body was hypothermic from the mild cooler temperatures because of dehydration and lack of food. I quickly put on my extra clothes from my pack, and Christi and I biked to meet Peteris for a shuttle up the road to our cars. Christi would finally get her macaroni and cheese that she had been dreaming about for half of the day.

If only the weather was much worse, it would have been a better learning experience. But you can’t have everything.

Over a week has past since this year’s edition of the Peterisoba Adventure Race. It’s about time that the race report gets blogged, and the race activities can be entirely completed. My blisters have healed in time to get more blisters and my legs recovered enough to complete the 50-mile White River race. Next year, Peteris is off to Latvia to get married, so we’ll need to think of something equally fun. Ideas?