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Untamed New England 2009
Race Report by Brian Staveley

I just don’t want to look like a 7th grade girl.

That was my main concern going into Untamed Adventure’s 3-day New England adventure race.

Fabric paint will make me look like a 7th grade girl.

I knew what kind of scene to expect at the starting line – teams decked out in matching uniforms with the names and logos of their sponsors running up the arms, across the shoulders, down the back, around the waist, up the chest. There would probably be teams that had sponsorship logos on their poly-merino-tech underwear because they ran out of room on their jerseys. We, on the other hand, didn’t even have team t-shirts. Because I forgot to get them.

So, a day before the race, my girlfriend and I stopped by WalMart where I bought some cheap t-shirts and fabric paint. Jo assured me that we could make some extremely bad-ass uniforms with fabric paint; I was skeptical. Fabric paint does not scream “bad-ass” to me. It screams “7th grade girl.”

Still, there was little to do but bring the paints and the t-shirts to a barbeque where friends, encouraged by a few beers, were sure to have helpful suggestions. This may have worked out if they were someone else’s friends. Unfortunately they were mine.

“Just paint gold circles around your nipples,” Patrick suggested.

“Our team name is UltraBambi,” I pointed out. “The t-shirts should probably reflect that.”

Patrick shook his head. “Nah. Gold circles. Nipples. Way more intimidating.”

By the end of the night we had a couple of t-shirts, one with something that looked like a beach ball and the other with what Harry described as “a dude that fell out of the sky and landed on his head.”

“I told you,” Patrick insisted somewhat lugubriously, “that you should have just painted your nipples gold.”

The next morning Jo pulled our collective asses out of the fire by stenciling our names on the back of thrift-store pinstripe blazers, blazers that made up in pimpness what they lacked in race-readiness.

“Do you think you could manage to the North Face and Mountain Hardware logos on the sleeve?” I asked hopefully, earning me a dirty look.

Still, I was starting to feel more sanguine about the whole affair until I told my teammates that we were going for a Miami Vice look. Steph and Anson exchanged blank looks. “What is Miami Vice?”

This was not the last time I would be reminded that they were evidently born during the second term of the second Bush administration.

The race hotel, the Balsams Super Grand Outstanding Deluxe Resort for the Very Rich and Well-Heeled (or some similar self-deprecating name) appreciated our efforts. There were signs in the lobby that read: “Gentlemen, Jackets after Six, Please.” We were the only racers with jackets. That, I had a nagging suspicion, would prove be our greatest triumph of the entire weekend.

Given these low expectations, I was pleased when we completed race check-in and managed to plot all of our points without straining any muscles or developing blisters. Other teams might be good at the “racing” part of adventure racing, but we were handling the pre-race bureaucracy with some serious aplomb.

If only it were all plotting points.

The race got under way with a mountain bike leg. When I say “mountain-bike leg,” I mean that most people, including Steph and Anson, mountain biked through mud and muck and streams, looking generally pretty tough and competent. Biking is not my forte, however, so I opted to run alongside, dragging my bike up hills, down hills, through streams, over bridges, all the while trying to give off an impression of casual ease.

“I could ride my bike,” is what I tried to project with my body language. “But I have a different race strategy at this point.” Some of the teams may have been fooled. Anson was not.

“Brian,” he pointed out at one point with what, in retrospect, was a good deal of patience. “You should probably ride these easy downhills.”

I made up for it when we hit the roads, however. I made up for it so much that I led a pace line for a team that wasn’t even mine for the better part of a mile. Imagine my chagrin when I peeled off to discover I’d been leading the charge for people I didn’t even recognize while Anson and Steph labored on a quarter-mile back. Chalk up another one for strategy.

Given these minor setbacks, I was pleased to get off the bike for the first paddling leg. Pleased, that is, until we learned that it was whitewater.

“A lot of teams have already ditched,” the volunteer told us.

Another team may have interpreted that to mean, “Be careful, the water’s a little tricky.”

To me, it sounded suspiciously like, “You suckers are screwed.”

I’m pleased to report that we proved the woman wrong in fine fashion, riding out three-foot pressure waves with a casual grace and youthful panache. For about 45 seconds. Then we sank. Anson, who was in the kayak, didn’t sink, but he did manage to take on so much water that we ruined our sat phone – a problem that would come back to haunt us later.

We managed the rest of the paddling leg without incident, largely due to the fact that Steph and I portaged the next rapid that looked at us even the littlest bit funny. Anson, who didn’t know where we’d gotten to, demonstrated some serious grace under pressure and took a nap on the bank until we showed up.

A short bike-ride followed and then: the conservation project. Untamed Adventure likes to give back to the communities it races through in a series of creative ways, and every race involves some sort of conservation project. Oddly, our project was: CLEAR CUTTING. Somehow “conserve” had become a synonym for “chop that mother down!” We were given a bow-saw and clippers and told to conserve everything smaller than our wrist right down to the ground. The three of us conserved vigorously for about an hour, until we’d built up a pile of conserved sweet birch and maple. Satisfied with our work, we retired to the grill, where the race directors had arranged for us to receive a ten dollar credit.

This is where Steph, like Dante seven hundred years before her, lost the true path. Steph is a vegetarian. At least, she was until she saw those burgers and dogs sizzling away in their own grease. I have rarely seen anyone yield to temptation with such spectacular abandon. Steph inhaled her first burger while I was still ordering, put away a second while I was putting the ketchup on mine, and polished off a dog as I as taking my first bite. In fact, I think she finished my burger as well when I looked away for a moment to plot a point on the map.

Fortified by a half-dozen pounds of recently consumed beef and pork product, we embarked on another mountain biking leg that led us to the most vexing CP to date. Most CP’s warrant a simple UTM coordinate. Some get a brief description, such as “North of stream.” This CP earned an entire novella. At the heart of this small literary work was the crux sentence: “At the northeast side of a large clearing.” I was picturing something you might reasonably land a P-51 in. Anson was looking for a clearing the size of a bathroom. And there were a lot of clearings. I was starting to feel like Socrates as we stomped up and down the trail sizing up various clearings, asking philosophical questions such as: Is this large? Large compared to what? What is large, really? The ancient Greeks would have been proud, but the other teams were pulling away at an alarming rate.

After locating the large clearing (about thirty feet wide and seventy long, if you’re wondering), we headed down to the coffee house CP where Anson and Steph spooned in the middle of the hallway to the bathroom while I plotted the trekking CPS. We soaked up the warmth and the paninis for about 45 minutes, until 5AM, when we hit the road for the Crescent Range.

28 teams were in front of us at this point, and the first race cutoff was that evening at 5PM. Things looked bleak for UltraBambi. They looked bleak, that is, if you didn’t know that Steph and Anson have been modified by the US Military to stomp the living shit out of anything even resembling a hill. This was the first trekking leg, so I hadn’t yet seen what they could do on foot. We stormed up the near-vertical trail to Mt. Randolph, Steph leading the way, Anson chatting with her, both of them operating at a level of exertion I associate with drinking umbrella drinks on a veranda. I labored on behind, operating at a level of exertion I associate with mortal combat.

“This is just like ski practice!” they commented cheerily.

“Hurm,” I replied. “Bleah. Plughh.”

Operating at this pace, we put the Crescent Range behind us in just six hours and discovered we’d pulled into 5th place, passing 23 teams somewhere out there in the wilds. We celebrated with Strawberry Shortcake ice cream from the Jefferson general store, then transitioned to the death leg.

The death leg wasn’t supposed to be death. It was supposed to be a mellow paddle on the Connecticuit. No rapids. No strainers. Nothing to throw us off our game. The problem was, this leg turned out to be 24 miles long and upstream. For the next seven hours we paddled and paddled and paddled some more. Ducks passed us. Ducklings passed us. Small blind insects walking along the shoreline passed us. If I had exited the boat and crabwalked all the way to the take-out I would have arrived faster. When we did arrive we were greeted with a mile-long portage. So much for the cut-off. It was, however, some small consolation to know only two teams managed to make it.

As night two fell, my heart decided to go crazy. Regardless of the fact that we had just taken a sizeable rest, my heart rate stayed pegged in the low 150s and refused to come down. This proved disconcerting bordering on nerve-racking, considering the next leg was a remote bushwhack and our sat phone didn’t work. We tried everything – an hour of sleep. Some hydration. Another hour of sleep. Nothing. I didn’t want to tell the EMT on staff because I was worried he’d pull me from the race, but I didn’t want to press on because I was worried I’d fall over dead. Fortunately, my body sorted its shit out by dawn. Unfortunately, about every team in the race had passed us as we sat around. Fortunately, this was another trekking leg. And you know about Steph and Anson on trekking legs.

We arrived at our bikes after some long hours of heinous bushwhacking and some more hours of trails, then set off on a long biking leg for the climbing site. Anson took over the navigation for a while, then handed it off to Steph for a bit, giving me a nice mental reprieve, and we arrived at the ropes without incident, although after the cut-off.

An odd thing was happening in the race dynamic. Despite the fact that we had made all sorts of mistakes, that we had taken ourselves out of the race for six hours and allowed everyone to pass us, we weren’t doing too badly. Teams had been dropping for days and continued to drop, and many of the groups that passed us had made grave errors along the way. At the climb site we saw our trail mail again, and the cheers and exclamations of our so-called friends shamed us into pushing just a little bit harder for the last day.

The end was in sight – just fourteen more hours. Then the thunder, lightning, and pouring rain started. Twice we busted out the shelter and space blankets. Sleep deprivation was starting to take its toll and we were all having lucid dreams while we biked. My voice was gone, for which Steph and Anson were probably profoundly glad. After hours of biking up muddy snowmobile roads, we failed to find CP32. Disaster. This meant that all the teams that just skipped these CPS and went straight to the finish line would beat us. In my brain there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but nothing to be done. We retreated to the road and ground out the remaining 40k or so to the finish line.

My mom was waiting at the finish line and it was a pleasure to see her smiling face. Unsurprisingly, she was more up on the race dynamic than we were, since she’d been there since the day before, grilling everyone who came through. Shockingly, when it all shook down, we were in 2nd place in our division and 8th overall – a far more successful finish than we had hoped. Some of the teams that passed us in the night succumbed to hypothermia and had to be rescued. Some had been shortcoursed days before and we never realized.

Thanks to everyone who supported us long-distance – we really did feel the love. And thanks to Anson and Steph – some night this summer we’re going to have to sit down and watch Miami Vice.