That was the location of the surprise gear check. The volunteer manning the station checked to see if we had some of our mandatory gear: we both needed knives with a locking blade and our ball. If a team is missing something, they would get a time penalty at the end of the race (twenty minutes, if I remember right). To the average observer, it’s a missing knife. To a racer, it could be the difference between first and seventeenth place. We showed the guy our gear, then Brent ran over to the van in the parking lot because he had to mark the location of another checkpoint we’d need to find during our return to the main TA. Meanwhile, I was messing with the seat on my bike. It was set lower than it should have been, putting a lot of extra pressure on my quads, right above my knees. It was already starting to hurt, but pain is temporary. The pride of finishing the race and writing about it afterwards is forever.
We immediately set off running onto a trail that led into the park. But we made a decision several years ago: trails are for losers. For the people who lose adventure races, anyway… Maybe fifty yards in, Brent used the compass to find out which direction we needed to go and we bolted in that direction. That’s when the racing went downhill in a flash. I don’t mean “there was a steep slope that we almost fell down.” I mean “there were a lot of nettles that felt like they were shredding our legs even though we were wearing tights at the time.” Remember what I said about pain being temporary? These nettles hadn’t heard of that saying before.
We found checkpoint after checkpoint, all the while running through these little plant-like monsters that were apparently very protective of their territory and didn’t appreciate intruders. There were a few times when we had to cross a river—lemme tell ya, cold water had never felt so good on our legs. Sure, when it’s 110 degrees outside with 110% humidity, you feel like you’re going to melt, but at least the sun only burns your skin—it doesn’t try to remove it, piece by piece by piece. It felt so good, in fact, that when we had a long distance to cover that was basically just downstream, we decided that the water was our friend and stayed in there instead of suffering through the nettles for a while.
What we didn’t realize at the time was that the river wanted to be our friend as well. More specifically, the river bottom. As we slogged our way through the water, sand was slowly building up in the bottoms of our shoes. By the time we got back to the bikes, each of our feet was carrying an extra very happy and loving two pounds. Meanwhile, even though we were moving downstream, we were also moving faster than the water, so the river seemed to be taking the example of the nettles by resisting our efforts to move through its territory as well. Some friend it turned out to be… At that point, it was a coin toss: feel the constant burn of little slashes all over our legs or push harder against the water that would keep our legs cool all the way up to the waist. Except for the time it wanted to cool off Brent even more.
We kept pushing our way forward until the sand suddenly decided, “Hey, Brent’s shoe looks so cool that I want to keep it for myself!” A small pitfall opened under Brent’s foot and he simultaneously had a massive spasm in his leg—the combination dragged him down past his waist into the water and he hollered, “Shawn, help me!” If I hadn’t been to provide said help, he might have been swallowed up by the river completely. Or if he’d been really lucky, the sand would have been satisfied with just the shoe and he would have been hopping for the remainder of the race. But at least he wouldn’t have had to tell me how slowly we were moving anymore.
Finally, we had moved far enough and our leg muscles were screaming loud enough that we decided to get back on shore and start searching for the checkpoint. The map showed it sitting at the edge of the shoreline right where the river flowed into the larger St. Croix River. We saw another team standing at the point, getting a bearing with their map and taking off away from where we’d approached. Well, heck, if that was the spot where they were looking at their map, that must have been where the checkpoint was, right? WRONG. We spent ages walking up and down the shoreline, peeking into an old rusting barrel that had washed up onto the sand… nothing.
Brent finally took another look at the map and realized that the “edge” we were looking for wasn’t actually the edge of the St. Croix. We moved away from that river and towards a tree-covered hillside. As we got closer, if you moved your head in just the right direction, you could see… Dan. He and a couple other guys had been watching us running around like chickens in tights with our heads cut off, but not saying anything because we were supposed to find the checkpoint on our own. Plus they probably thought it was really funny to watch us running around like chickens in tights. The flag was a little ways up the hillside, so as I scaled it to find the word on the checkpoint, Brent learned two things from Dan.
First, when they plotted the course two weeks earlier, the area where we were standing was almost completely mud. If we’d tried walking out towards the point where that barrel was, we would have been wading through heavy sludge instead. And much like the sand on the river bottom, it would have wanted to be our friends and possibly steal our shoes as well. Because things had dried up during that time, the shoreline on the map and the actual shoreline weren’t the same thing. But the second and more important thing Brent learned was that we were the first team to find the checkpoint.
