My usually partner in crime, Matt Brauning, had been on a search for his true self and in the process was bitten by the adventure race bug. He entered a race with some friends in West Virginia and didn’t suffer overly much. After that race, he started looking for an event to do locally and chanced upon the Big Blue Lake Tahoe 24-hour Series. It was a national qualifying race for the USARA National Championship and usually done by people who have been adventure racing for years and are all at least semi-sponsored. He signed up for it and sent out a broadcast e-mail looking for partners that didn’t mention any of the above details; just that it was a race. Knowing Matt and his need for sleep/comfort, I volunteered without checking out the race info, thinking ‘how bad could it be…’ We were going to have a female third member, but she decided to attend the semester abroad instead of playing in the mud with us – imagine that. As race day neared, we were unable to find a coed member and/or anyone else to willing to get a little dirty, so we entered the race as a team of two.

About a week before race day, Matt called with some last minute details. Normally, I handle all the trip/adventure logistics when we go out to play, but as this outing was his idea I was glad that I didn’t have to worry about the food, transportation, travel time, lodging, or remembering the hot cocoa for once. I should have worried… Anyway, he sent me a list of needed personal and team items that I would need to bring. After one look I knew he had taken a big ol’ bite of what was looking like a mean bull of an event. I went right to the web and looked up the race site. Crap… Almost immediately I saw the seriousness of our planned endeavor. Our weekend was to be filled with LOTS of running, paddling, biking and navigating. It was too late to rent a real bike so I used Matt’s ex girlfriend’s “mountain” bike. It had a 33cm frame (I normally ride a 54cm) and it looked like I was riding a kid’s BMX bike with my knees hitting my chest while I peddled. All that was missing was the kick-stand and the rainbow handlebar tassels. I figured that it would be OK and I would gut grunt through the hilly sections here and there. In hindsight, that was poor planning on my part. I should have found a bike that was my size.

We drove up to Carson City, NV the day before and the race started at 9:35am one bright Saturday morning (we started fifteen minutes later as I needed time to plot our course). After 17.5 miles of serious uphill hike n’ bike (that means that the hills are so step that you have to push the bike up and ride it down and in the flats.) and a really fast hour long blast down hill we arrived at the kayak transition area. Brauning had trouble securing a rental kayak for us, but at the last minute found a guy that was real accommodating and even agreed to drop the boat off at the race for us. I called on the road up because I was worried about the kind of boat that would be waiting for us and Harry, the rental shop owner, assured me that it would all be fine. We arrived at the kayak stage second to last and the boat that we found was NOT fine! The other teams had beautiful Kevlar and fiberglass decked kayaks with rudders and spray skirts. We had a bright red sit on top tourist model with a flat bottom and no rudder. We were Uber-fucked!! We should have made up some time on the kayak stage as we are both fairly strong and I love paddling, instead it took us three hours to paddle eleven miles. I fought the boat, the current, the wind, two-foot swells, and it was Brauning’s second time ever in a kayak.

We hit the beach at the end of the paddle in dead-last place and the open boat, amount of exertion, blowing wind, and cold water left us both freezing and shaking during the transition back onto the bikes. We wolfed down some food and water, changed into dry clothes, and took off with frozen fingers and toes on the bikes for another ten-mile uphill hike n’ bike. The second transition area was at a lake at what would have been a killer campsite if one had the weekend to lounge around. The guy running the station and his son had soup and hot cocoa for us as we attempted to plot our coordinates for the next check points. Of the two compasses that we brought for the race, both decided to crap out on us at that transition area. We would have been screwed if the guy hadn’t taken pity on us. Seeing that we were in last place with absolutely no chance of us beating anyone, he just gave us the location of each check point.

Being new to the adventure race scene, we thought we had to do the check points in order (apparently you don’t unless the rules that you get at the start of the race spell it out) so we raced to Snow Valley Peak and on to the fourth check point – every other team saved the peak for last. At some point on the trail up, Brauning started feeling sick and began to stumble. He sat down for a bit and it subsided. The check point turned out to be a very cold, windy, and lonely volcanic pinnacle. We couldn’t find the flag anywhere and Matt hunkered down behind a rock to get out of the gale while I continued to search. When I came back to him he was fast asleep. I could see another group coming up, so I sat down beside him and waited for them, thinking that they might be able to find the stupid check point flag – Nope, it stumped them too. All we could think was that the wind had blown it away. We agreed to vouch for one another and moved on. The next leg was a five-mile hike/run through a valley to the head of a lake. Brauning was good at the start, but went downhill fast; falling asleep while walking, feeling sick, and hallucinating a Starbucks coffee cooler. He was barely on his feet when we walked into the fifth check point/aid station. We were done and I informed the check point manager that Team Dry Heave (we won the prize for best team name) was officially out of the race. There was no way Brauning was going any further. There was a fire and we wrapped up in space blankets and laid down beside it for a couple of hours. I tried really hard to sleep, but the ground was so cold and it just seemed to pull the heat from my bones. I ended up sitting up and watching the fire while Brauning slept.

My watch alarm went off at 5:00 am and I got Matt up and walking back to the transition area where we left our bikes – five miles away along an old 4X4 road. The sun came up on us just as we got to our bikes and after wiping the frost from our seats, we hopped on and started what, for us, was the last leg of the race. The ride out was 95% down hill and took us through the most amazing aspen groves. The leaves were changing colors to a dark yellow and falling, littering the path and making it so that there was no sound from our tires on the trail as we rode by. The frozen dew shimmered in the new light of morning and within the aspens there were small evergreens dotting the groves that almost glowed forest-green. Any one of them would have put any Christmas tree that I have ever had to shame. It was one of those scenes that should be in a Kurosawa movie with samurai quietly dueling among the gently falling leaves…

After a fast hour ride to what we thought was the finish and we sat in the Spooner Lake parking lot for about 10 minutes alone, cold, tired, hungry, and waiting on people from the race to show up and tell us it was over. Before too long someone walked up and said, "Hey, I think that race you're doing has a finish just right over there." It was about 50 yards from us and after a ten-second ride we were greeted by the race coordinators, some of the racers, another fire, hot cocoa, breakfast burritos, juice, and applause.

In total, we went 53.7 miles, gained 8,913 feet in elevation in 22 hours. Not bad for newbies, but the winner did everything that we did plus four more check points on foot and three more on his bike before barreling across the finish line in a little over fourteen hours. The Big Blue was my last long adventure race for a while. If I get the bug to do such an event again or am similarly led blindly into another, I will make sure that it is a shorter course, that the competition is not world class, and you can bet you last dollar that if there is a kayak involved it will be faster that a hooded Klansmen running through Jamaica on Bob Marley’s birthday.