Bluffwoods Night Rogaine

March 19, 2005

One of the problems of being an endurance athlete that you lose the council of all but those as nuts as you. Upon admitting to friends and co-workers that I was entering both the 3-hour and 9-hour events in Kansas City, I got the usual "why would anyone want to do that?" response which I naturally ignored. Except, of course, from my fellow competitors who all thought it was a fine idea. They were wrong.

We decide to drive out the morning of the event (I shoot down David's inordinately reasonable suggestion of driving out the night before with the logic that the longer we're up, the better training it is for adventure racing). That means leaving St. Louis before 6:00 AM to make the start. Along the way, we pick up Aaron Aaker in Columbia.

We get the 3-hour maps at 10:40. Weston Bend is a fairly long and narrow map, so the 20 minutes allocated for course planning are quite sufficient.

At the start, I lead to the first control. David and Aaron are with me as is Michael Eglinski, defending the hometown honor. After a few controls, Michael and I are alone, but David (who took the southern pair of controls in the opposite order) rejoins us shortly. We stay together while we head north along the west side of the map. Most of this section is road running and I find that I'm having no trouble matching the other two on pavement, but they are both decidedly faster in the woods.

David gets a small lead on us heading to #14, only to get stuck behind a southbound train. Michael waits at the crossing while David and I run north along the tracks so we can cross sooner. After crossing, David puts on another surge and gets clear of me so we are all alone.

The next few kilometers are quite sloppy for me and I wind up giving away several minutes to the other two. Michael ultimately catches David and they have to sprint out the finish. David prevails with a big downhill burst on the way to the last control.

I clean up my navigation for the second half of the course, but my woods speed is still off. I finish in 2:19, a full ten minutes behind David and Michael. Aaron also sweeps to finish fourth. Charlie Shabazian from the Chicago club is the fifth and final person to get all the controls in under three hours.

Michael is gracious in defeat and doesn't complain when we invite ourselves over to his house to rest up for the evening event. The Eglinski/Jones household looks like any other suburban tract at first glance, but for a visiting orienteer, it is a veritable treasure trove. Inside are literally thousands of maps from around the world. There is even a map of the quarter-acre premises drafted by no less a legend than Mikell Platt. The trophy room is actually the downstairs bathroom which is plastered with just a small fraction of their total haul, the centerpiece being a matched pair of his and hers National Champion medals. Augmenting the collection are the anecdotes happily retold by the home's occupants, Michael and Mary.

By the time we get there, pizza has already been delivered, the first round of the NCAA tournament is on the TV, and Mary has reset and labelled the secondary bathroom clock as St. Louis time (which is the same as Kansas City time).

David, who still seems strangely preoccupied with sleep, has a bit to eat and then goes off to rest for a while. Aaron and I spend a leisurely few hours shooting the breeze with Michael and Mary.

At 7:00 PM, we head off to Bluffwoods Conservation Area for the 9-hour. After a nav error sets us back about 15 minutes, we get to the site just as the maps are being distributed. The area is not that large, but they have printed both a north and south map.

We don't bother measuring the course as it's obvious we'll go for the sweep. It looks to me like six hours is doable unless the woods are really thick. As with the earlier event, the basic shape of the map limits the route options, so we have no trouble agreeing on a route prior to the 9:00 PM start.

As this is an endurance event, we will go in teams. David and I pair up while Aaron joins his usual adventure racing crew. Several other adventure racing teams are also present. We expect our main competition to be Charlie Shabazian, who has paired with Chicago's Joe Sackett. We'll also need to worry about our St. Louis Teammates, Rob Wagnon and Gary Thompson.

We get off to a rather auspicious start as we take the wrong trail away from the start area. Although it's a minor error, it takes us a bit to get our bearings back. Relocation is further confounded by the realization that the map is rather rough. After a few controls, we have our bearings and, by sticking to big feature navigation, start clicking off controls at a good rate.

About an hour into the race, we come across the Iowa Active adventure racing team. They have all four of their members and appear to be moving well. We are in the very southern part of the park and since we took a reasonably direct route, we have to assume that they are basically matching us so far. We decide to "put some hurt on 'em" and pick up the pace through a particularly nasty section of vegetation. We start to get away, but then have to stop when my headlamp wire gets snagged and unplugs my light. By the time we have it sorted out, they've beat us into the next control. Hmmm, this is serious. We up our jog to a bona-fide run and pass them on a road. We then push hard up a hill to #29 and by the top we've lost them.

The vegetation is not pleasant in this part of the park, so we take the long way around to #15. When we boom #36 for a few minutes lost, we see their headlamps coming again. Their persistence is getting downright annoying and we push the pace again.

The next six controls go without a hitch taking us to the southwest corner of the map. About this time I start to realize that all is not well. We reach the water stop between #43 and #5 at a few minutes before midnight. Figuring that this is as good as place as any to fix internal problems, I tell David we'll need to stop for a bit while I use the restroom. Five minutes later we're back at it, but I'm not really feeling much better.

Having had ineffective results with normal peristalsis, I try sending the contents of my insides back the way they came on the climb up from #5. I repeat this process on the climb up from #18. And #44. And #38. On the climb up to #23 there isn't anything left, but that doesn't stop me from trying.

Obviously, David has taken over all the navigation duties at this point. I merely follow along offering helpful advice. Most of our conversations go something like this:

Eric: Is it over there?
David: No.
Eric: Is it down there?
David: No.
Eric: I guess you know where it is then.
David: Yes.
Eric: Then you go punch it while I stay here and barf.

At #7, we are only a few hundred meters from the finish. David makes a comment that sounds like he might be inviting me to pack it in. As much as I'd like to, I honestly reply that there's no way I'm going to endure this and go away empty handed. We may not win, but I'm surely not going to accept a DNF.

The north loop had originally looked like a little over an hour to me. It ends up taking two, with puke breaks at #30, #16, and #13 (I actually get up the final climb to #12 without stopping). On the way in from #12, we see Charlie and Joe coming the other way; which we take to be a good sign. We finish in 6:48 (3:48 AM) to find everybody at the start/finish asleep. We take this as another good sign, but would like to get some official confirmation that we're the first ones in. We bang on the windows of Dick Neuberger's van and he emerges asking "What part of 'check yourself in' did you guys not understand?" Sorry Dick, we missed the pre-race briefing.

We crash in David's van for about a couple hours and then manage to haul ourselves up for the awards ceremony. Although I'm still not up to eating anything, I do manage to get down some water. Gary and Rob are the only other team to sweep. Charlie and Joe finish third, just 10 points ahead of Iowa Active (who win the mixed division).

We invite ourselves back over to Michael and Mary's house for more tales of heroic days (and nights), showers, and breakfast (which in my case is a cup of Gookinade). One of Aaron's teammates had to be at work at 5:30 AM, so his team was only out for 4 hours. Thus he gets saddled with driving back to Columbia. By then, David is rested enough to take it the rest of the way. For me, the 15-minute drive from David's house to mine is about the limit of my endurance. Sleep, it seems, is actually a good thing.

Left to right: Eric & David, Gary & Rob, Charlie & Joe (photos from PTOC)