New Year DIET

Despite extreme weather New Year DIET turn out was great. 9 teams, 25 people made it to the start. We arrived 30 minutes before the start and learned very exiting info: we are not going back to our cars for transition. That means we have to carry all stuff in our backpacks for the entire DIET. Taking into account single digits temperature, gusting wind, snow and ice we started to fill our backpacks with more dry socks, spare shoes and extra food. The start was at 9 am, but we spent additional 30 minutes to prepare for the tough journey and were the last teams to leave the start area. No stress and good preparation paid off very well at the end. Such late start would be impossible a couple of years ago, when we had very stressful team management :-)
We started on bikes up hill to the trail that was crossing Conway run. Crossing 5 times! We had 2 conditions for crossing: 1st mandatory: bike must stay out of water, 2nd optional: we want to stay dry as well. First 2 crossings we manage to satisfy both conditions. On the third one we spent 20 minutes looking for any dry option and finally just walked across the river in the most obvious place. Our feet were wet from now on and two last crossing were fast. 300 feet before the transition Vlad broke his chain and we spent 120 seconds to fix it, since any longer stop would result in hypothermia. To the trekking section we arrived 4th team from the end. Michelle recommended very conservative approach to the trekking: always stay on road, go around and switch back to get to the last check point. We decided to have fun and went straight to the old cemetery. Apparently, there was a trail all the way to the top. We lost it many times, but it was going our direction and in one hour we made it to the top:

From here the rest of the trekking was obvious with one shortcut at the very end. We were the second team off the trekking with all CPs collected. The rest of the DIET was muddy roads, fire roads and paved roads riding. We past the leaders between CP7 and 8 and finished first in exactly 9 hours.
Thanks to teamhalfwaythere.com and to Michelle for the great training. We had fun and took bunch of photos with our frozen camera. You also can see these photos on Facebook.