Soggy Bottom Boys Race

Our trails are still covered by snow and training conditions are tough. That's why we couldn’t miss Soggy Bottom race organized by our friend Mark Montague. South of Richmond, close to James River all snow gone and almost all trails were dry. Dima and Karen left DC 4 am on Saturday, picked up Monika in Arlington and arrived to Pipsico at 7:20. Monika raced with Mark Lattanzi, Jenn and Susana, while Dima and Karen presented team Calleva in the longest 12 hours course. Our official start time was 8:10 and we got 3 hours to finish the first O-course. We decided to go counterclockwise and picked up all, but 2 check points. We manage to stay dry and switched to bikes around 11 am. We used our 15 minutes credit to plot 30+ biking navigation check points and started another counterclockwise loop. Only to 10 or so CPs were possible to bike up, while the rest required getting off the bike and bushwhacking. Many trails and small roads were not on the map and navigation was challenging. We spent about 20 minutes searching a Light Tower in the middle of a very dense forest, before realizing that provided coordinates were wrong, we dropped our bikes in somebody’s backyard to hike to the checkpoint that was hidden behind the house, and we had 15 minutes fun of searching misplaced CP in private junk yard:



Just before 6 pm cutoff we arrived back to transition for the night Rogaine section. Hot food and 20+ more CPs to plot shorten our remaining time to only 2 hours. We found 3 CPs, but got credit only for 2, because couldn’t find the puncher for the re-plotted CP in the forest. In this section we were supposed to get wet and to feel the real taste of Soggy Bottom, but we moved too slow and had hard time to navigate at night to make it on time to the swamps. We finished the race in 11 hours 51 minutes. Results of the race are not published yet, but in any case we had good time and excellent training opportunity. Thanks Mark for this great event!
More photos from the race are here.