Extreme Heart Challenge

July 29, 2005

I hope a lot of race directors read this report, because the Extreme Heart Challenge provides a case study in something that I've argued (often ineffectively) for many years: errors in the course do not "wash out" - they disproportionately penalize the best teams. Because the race was so messed up, I'm going to forgo the usual sarcasm since it could easily be misinterpreted as bitterness. It's true that I'm not at all pleased that I wasted my weekend on this race, but I'd like something more constructive than a bitch session to come out of it.

Also, I want to be really clear from the outset that I am not trying to invalidate the efforts of LBC/High Gear or Iowa Active. They are both quality teams and it's not their fault the race was messed up. The sad thing is that all of the race management errors were very easy to correct. Some of them were correct, but then changed. The race had the potential to be one of the best I've ever entered. Instead, I'll remember it as one of the worst.

We take the start at 4PM. We have to finish by 10AM or get hit with big overtime penalties. Along the way are 24 mandatory controls and 20 optional controls. We're told that the course is potentially sweepable, but we'd better leave at least 2 hours for the final run to the finish.

The first section of the race has us carrying an inflatable kayak to the Missouri River. We don't know how far we have to carry it, but we take the pre-race comments from the course designer that we are "nowhere near" the river to mean we'd better settle into an easy jog and not worry about the speed of other teams. Up ahead, we see many teams trying to match the pace of last year's winners, Iowa Active. As the miles tick by, they fall off the pace and by the end of the 1-hour carry we are in fourth, about three minutes off the lead.

At the transition, we get a second boat, paddles, PFD's, and our maps for the rest of the course. We get through the transition quickly and put into the river in second, just a minute behind Iowa Active.

The boats are designed for two people, but the paddling position is pretty cramped. That, and the tricky currents of the river, makes keeping the boat straight a challenge. We seem to deal with it better than most. When we get to the takeout we've caught Iowa Active and put some time into the rest of the field.

We want to get to the fourth section (orienteering) alone so we won't be followed on our best discipline. We are first out of the transition and set a hard pace on the bikes. The biking is all on dirt and gravel roads, so we setup the "train" rather than relying on drafting. In the train configuration, we are all bungeed together. I ride in the lead followed by David, Jeff, and Carrie. On the fast sections, David rides up closer to me to get more draft and take tension off my tow. On the slower sections, he drops back so that some of my effort gets transferred back to Jeff and Carrie. It's a good setup and it gets us to the orienteering section with about three minutes lead.

Iowa Active shows up and, since they've already plotted their points for the O section, beat us onto the course by a couple minutes. We can do the points in any order, so we decide to take them in the opposite direction. About halfway through the course, we meet them coming the other way. We give each other genuinely friendly hellos and note that we've got quite a race going here.

The navigation is easy, so neither team makes any mistakes. When we get to the end, Iowa Active has just finished, but are now dealing with a flat tire. We mount up quickly to start the long biking section. After a mile or so, we look back and see them coming.

You may be wondering at this point what could possibly be wrong with this race. It sounds like a great battle between two evenly matched teams. That was pretty much our take on it as well. Unfortunately, as night falls, things are about to go terribly wrong.

On the way to #12, we pass a van that contains race volunteers. David asks if that's the control (the manned controls do not have a control marker). I respond that if it is, they're a mile out of place. We get to where the control should be, but find nothing. We ride a little further until it's clear that we're past the spot where the control is. Could it be possible that the van was the control? We turn around to head back and see the van coming our way. We ask if they are the control. No, they're just trying to get some pictures. They do assure us that the controls are not hidden off the road (we had spent some time poking along the ditches). We give up and push on. About a quarter mile later we hit the control.

I give the details of that story (which is almost identical to the experiences of Iowa Active, except for the bit about the van) to contrast that with the experiences of a team that is not navigating well. They would just keep riding along the road until they found the control and lose no time at all. Lesson to race directors: Misplaced controls hurt the best navigators much more than poor navigators. Poor navigators get to the general vicinity of the control and then start looking. They are just as likely to find a misplaced control quickly as one that is placed correctly. Good navigators go directly to the spot where the control should be. If it's not there, they lose time.

The next control we hit is an optional control. At the pre-race meeting, we were told that the map was wrong here and we should follow the streamers. Maybe they said more than that and we missed it, but that's what we got. At the first road junction, we find streamers telling us to move on down the main road. At the second, there are streamers at the junction, but we can't see anything further down either road. The junction we want (the only one on the map) is at a sharp kink in the road. As we are on a relatively straight piece of road, we continue on the main road. We get to the kink, but there is no junction. David wants to go back, but I'm afraid that we'll just go a long way down a dead end and find nothing. After putting around on the main road for another ten minutes or so and finding no more streamers, we go back and take the second junction. It turns out to be right and we find not only the control, but also Iowa Active. Lesson to meet directors: coin flips do not enhance competition. If you're going to fix a problem with the map by using streamers, make it REALLY obvious what you intend people to do. Otherwise, some will guess right and some will guess wrong.

Blowing a lead is never fun, but since we got the lead due to their flat tire, we're not too upset about being back in a dead heat. We get through the next two controls more or less together and then get to the biggest decision point of the race. The bike course has been carving a big crescent on the Nebraska side of the river. The final mandatory control is near the river. From there, the map indicates that we'll have to basically retrace the entire crescent (minus the optional controls) to get back to the boats. It occurred to me that there might be a way to get through along the river, but, with the exception of control E, the map has been quite accurate, so I figure that dead end means dead end and we'll have to take the long way around. We're running low on water, so we decide to go to the last mandatory control first and get some water from the river. We'll then get the last two optional controls on the return trip. Iowa Active, heads off towards the optional controls and we're alone again.

At #14, we take about 10 minutes to purify a gallon of water (Jeff's Aqua Star is quick, but only handles 32 ounces at a time) and eat some food. As we head back, we're surprised we haven't seen Iowa Active yet. We meet them at the optional control and although they don't say much, it's obvious that they're not too happy about something. Shortly after we part ways, we find out what it is. The next control is MISPLACED BY A FULL MILE! As it's misplaced towards us on the road we're traveling, we aren't really slowed by this, although it is a bit disorienting to come upon it so quickly. Coming from the other direction, Iowa Active must have been completely bamboozled. Lesson to meet directors: misplaced controls may have no affect on some teams and great affect on others simply due to the way the control was approached.

The rest of the ride back is uneventful, but when we get to the boats we're surprised by the level of activity. There are teams milling about and bikes already loaded on trucks for transport. At first we figure that many teams have skipped optional controls. Further investigation reveals that the road from 14 to the exchange was not a dead end and that all the other teams are taking the shortcut. Iowa Active is now an hour ahead of us, despite all the time they lost on the misplaced control. After the race, several people commented that they saw the road heading out that direction at the exchange and figured it might go through. So did I. that's why I looked on the map, saw the road and confirmed that (at least on the map) it only went about a mile before dead ending into private property. Lesson to meet directors: if a road is mapped as a dead end into private property, expect at least some teams to respect that and take the long way around.

We're devastated. We've been racing for over nine hours and the actual performance difference between the top two teams is probably less than five minutes. But, because of all the problems with the course, we're separated by an hour. We don't even know how many other teams are between us, although it seems safe to assume that several are. We take a long time in transition just trying to get our heads back in the game.

We hop back in the boats for a nighttime paddle. After a short stretch on the Missouri, we portage a little less than a kilometer to a lake. Now we are on an aerial photo which is none too easy to read at night. Just before we put in, David calls an impromptu conference. He spent a good deal of time going over the maps at the last exchange and doesn't think we'll be able to get to the run by 8:00 AM unless we drop something. It seems too early to bail, but David has a good point: paddling is our weakest discipline so we should drop controls there and make it up on foot or bike. Besides, the course designer made a point of telling everybody that the last bike leg is where the big points are (two of the optional bike controls are worth 4 points each; the three paddle controls are worth a total of 7 points).

Since we skip all the controls, we get to the takeout quickly. There, the race director does seem a bit upset that we were screwed on the dead end road. Of course, there's not much he can do about it at this point. He does tell us that they've removed some of the optional controls and that we should reconsider dropping the paddling controls. We do go back out and get one of them, but this is actually really bad news for us. Our only hope was to hammer the foot and bike sections to catch back up. With the high-point optional controls gone, we've skipped two controls for nothing. Lesson to race directors: don't change the course after people have already made decisions based on that information. The good teams are very good at estimating how long it will take them to complete a course and can make those adjustments. Shortening the course after such adjustments are made penalizes the teams that are good at planning and bails out the teams that would otherwise have been in trouble.

The foot navigation uses the same aerial photo we had for the paddle. We zip through this section - this is, after all, what we're supposed to be good at. One of the controls is misplaced, but it's visible from where the control should have been, so we don't lose time. We get to the bikes and it looks like we are one of the first teams there. It's 5:40 AM, so we have a bit over two hours to complete the section and still have two hours for the run. David gives me back the maps and asks if we can do it on time. With the two high-point controls in, it would be tough, but possible. With them gone, it should be easy.

On the bike leg, we get news that Iowa Active is ahead of us, having skipped some of the land controls. We're surprised by this, but are pretty sure that they'll still have a higher total than us. We get through the bike with no difficulties at 7:30 AM.

The final leg is off map relying completely on streamers. We make good progress and recognize a few major landmarks that indicate we will easily be in on time. In fact, as we get close our spirits sink as we realize that the "run" (we actually walk most of it because it's tough footing) is much shorter than advertised. We finish at 8:50 with easily enough time to get all the controls we had skipped. Lesson to race directors: giving teams conservative estimates rewards the teams that get themselves in trouble and penalizes the teams that properly make skip decisions.

This last blow is particularly frustrating because the original format had this problem solved. It mandated that teams would have to meet time cutoffs throughout the event or suffer penalties. If all teams had been forced to be at the start of the final trek by 8:00 AM, it wouldn't matter that the trek was short. By changing the rules at the last minute, the bad information became significant.

We knew that Iowa Active had us beat on both time and points. We had no idea that LBC/High Gear (who finished 15 minutes behind us, but with more points) was also in the hunt. When they are announced as winners, we have a hard time concealing our shock. I feel a bit bad about that because I'm sure it was obvious to everybody that we were stunned and we certainly didn't mean to give the impression that we didn't respect them.

I stated at the outset that LBC/High Gear and Iowa Active are good teams and they deserve places. But with decent information about the finish, all the teams would have been forced to go for the sweep. It sure would have been nice to see if they could hang with us through the only tough nav section (they both skipped the technical night controls). The misplaced controls are inexcusable - this is simply something that you have to get right if you are going to host even a local race. As for the map for night biking section, it was a photocopy of a county map. How hard would it have been to draw in the missing road before putting the map on the copier glass? At the very least, a comment in the course notes or pre-race meeting was in order.

These things are so easy to fix that I would really like it if the race management took them seriously. It could have been a great race. If they cross their extreme hearts and hope to die while promising that they'll make these fixes, I'd happily try the race again. If not, they have no business calling their race a nationals qualifier. So, how about it, folks? Can we count on these things being fixed next year?

Epilogue

I offered the race staff a chance to respond to the above report. My naive hope was that they would agree, at least in part, with the complaints and pledge to do better. We'd then go back next year and hopefully give them some high marks. The response we got was less than apologetic. They defended their course and basically said we were being poor sports about the whole thing.

Fair enough, but when I posted it I received a series vitriolic messages directed at the race staff from other teams in the race as well as a few who weren't there. I don't really have any desire to be an intermediary for such messages, so I took down the response.

In a nutshell, they see things differently and we won't be going back. If you really want to read what they said, drop me a note and I'll send it to you. If you want to then respond to them, fine, but we have moved on.