Green Mountain Adventure Racing Association Frigid Infliction 2009
Race Report by Anson Moxness

So that Friday I drove with Katie, one of my teammates up to Bolton Valley where the race started and where check in was on friday night. At this point the panic was slowly creeping into my head. Hopefully I didn’t let on, but I had no clue what I had got myself into. We arrived and met up with Brian and his girlfriend (we drove separately) and went into gear check. After some deep breaths I started calming down. We went through gear check, waited around for some of the kids from Brian and Katies school to get organized (they were on seperate teams) and got ready to rumble. And by rumble I mean go to bed for 3 hours, yes a whole three hours. We got up at 3am to make a 5am (I think) start at Bolton. Somehow I got enough rest and somehow I wasn’t completely delerious on the way. We go to the start line and I start to get jitters about if I’m ready to actually do this. And then my athlete brain kicks back in. Sadly, Nike has captured it best – you just do it. Put aside the sniveling, the doubt, the nervousness, and you give it all you have and just do as best as you can on that day. So then the race began.

The race started with snowshoeing up to CP1 (CP = Checkpoint). It was up a river and at the meeting of two streams. We decided to not follow the path up the valley a bit aways from the river but to make sure we didnt pass it by going up the river. In the end it didn’t really matter we were 3rd place, only a few minutes behind the leaders: Untamed New England (sponsored by a larger race to get the word out). From there we could get CPs 2-5 in any order, so off we went and got one of them and sidehilled over to another, we got behind Untamed going up this river bed leading to the lake. As I sprinted across the lake to get the CP, the Untamed team accosted us for following their trail. Yes we really had another route to the lake besides the river leading to it…

Needless to say we didn’t follow them anymore. We got all 4 CPs in pretty good time save number 5 which was quite the stubborn CP hiding in the clif bands. We returned to CP1 (also CP6) to find that we had moved to 2nd place behind Berlin Bikes, with Untamed nowhere in sight… But we were 20 minutes behind, not a whole lot of hope if they were to continuing being this strong a team. We moved through CP7 to TA1 (transition area). This involved a tyrolean traverse, which we all did pretty quickly, I had some problems at the end but managed just fine. Man that was really hard though, not the rest I was expecting it to be. Apparently Untamed had been there before, but didn’t read the directions correctly and didn’t go back to CP6/CP1… whoops… We rolled through a last snowshoe CP then moved to TA3 (TA2 was at the end of the tyrolean), where we got our skis :) . So we skied off about 30 minutes behind. We found the next couple CPs pretty quickly, I would race off (since that’s my thing) to get them and punch the passport (card for punching). We got to the end of that ski section only 10 minutes behind Berlin Bikes, quite to our surprise. We then started the posthole, which was kind of unfair to Berlin Bikes since they plowed the way for everyone, we caught up to them right at the transition zone back to skis.

This is where we started to do really well. We moved into the lead very quickly as BB had one very weak skier and I was able to pick lines through the goat trail that were the fastest for my team. To everyone at the start/finish/new map area we came in to get our new map with 7 new checkpoints in first. We were the underdogs and no one (not even us) were expecting UltraBambi to do that well. We got the new map and Brian knew where to go right away, navigating to the farthest off points first to get them out of the way when we had the most energy, we knocked off them relatively quickly (still worrying about BB behind us). The hardest point was at the top of a hill we snowshoed up, we put on our skis and I was able to lead our team off trail down the mountain much more efficiently than had we taken the trail (there would’ve been a lot of falling by all of us). I think we gained a lot of time by doing this because I assume BB walked down the hill due to their relative lack of skiing experience.

We ran through the easier rogaine points (the extra ones) pretty quickly, but we were getting very tired. The last point was very close to the start/finish. It was down in a river that instead of dealing with my snowshoes I just postholed down a steep clif (mostly just rolling) and then ran 100m up the stream bed in waist deep snow to get the last point. I then ran back up threw on my skis and the three of us sprinted to the line. Handily we realized that Berlin Bikes was infact not right on our tail and we had some time to relax, cheer on teams coming through, some finishing, some heading out toward some of the closer rogaines. After changing into street clothes we hang out at the finish line until we drove down to our hotel for some rest before the big dinner.

After stuffing our faces with large amounts of pork, chicken, and other highly caloric goodness we retired to our hotel room for some relaxation in the hot tub and storytime with the numerous alums I found myself surrounded by. A good night's sleep later, we drove back to campus where I was utterly useless to do any work as I was so exhausted. Not a bad weekend at all.