The 2011 CheckPoint Tracker National Championship was hosted at Lake Barkley resort in Cadiz, KY. The race was covering northern part of the wonderful Land between the Lakes national recreation area. That was my first trip to Kentucky, but I did my homework and downloaded all possible maps of the area to my laptop. I also checked some previous editions of Bonk Hard Racing events and realized that navigation will be the key of this year national championship. Here is what I learned about Bonk Hard Racing O-courses:
1) Distance between CPs is 1 km or more. That means it is very hard to attack one CP from another.
2) Very complicated land surface combined with 20 feet contour lines makes it very difficult to follow any small or even medium size features.
3) Most of good attack points are located on roads, but running on roads increases the travel distance by factor of 3 or even 4.
With this knowledge, Google Earth and bunch of maps in my laptop I started late night quiz on the race strategy. We got maps at 9 pm, race start was scheduled for 7 am next morning, and every minute I spent on the maps was deducted from my night sleep. Fortunately, we got maps and rules of travel only for the first half of the race and I squeezed 5 hours of sleep into this tight schedule.
Race started with a short prologue, followed by 3 CPs O-course, and 1 hour paddling leg. Very fast and easy, except the fact that we came in 4th in coed-2 to the main O-course transition. I was surprised by the level of the competition. We had great season with Michelle this year and team Orion was the only one that managed to beat us at Equinox Traverse a couple of month ago. This time it was different and we were not in the lead any more… at least for now. I prepared very solid strategy for the o-course and the first half dozen checkpoints were acquired with no mistakes or delays. That next one was tricky, and we did a mistake trying to attack it from the merging point of two creeks, instead of the road. Merging was not a point, it was 400 feet wide area of dense bushes. Attacking from there didn’t work well and we missed our re-entrée. We lost 40 more minutes looking around and finally gave up this CP. Now, when we were behind the schedule, we decided to skip 3 remote CPs, and move closer to the end of the O-course, where many easy CPs were located. Here I beat my personal record and navigated 1.1 kilometer straight line from one CP to another within 10 meters precision! Last 2 CPs (out of 29) were located on the opposite side of the lake and we had only 1 hour and at least 6 miles of travel to find them. That was very challenging, especially after sunset, and we couldn’t find the second one on time. We ran back to transition and made the 10 hours cutoff within 5 minutes! Our total losses were 5 missed CPs and soar legs from 10 hours of running.
In total dark we transitioned back to canoes and paddled north, to biking transition area. That’s where we got maps of the rest of the race. We spent 10 minutes plotting CPs and possible routes of travel: the biking leg was HUGE; more than 60 miles, mostly in dark, and mostly on technical single track! And all this in 13 hours till the finish cutoff that includes 5 miles of paddling back to the finish. It was tough. Michelle liked the biking leg, I didn’t… So read her race report about the biking leg of the race, since I am going to skip it here. I couldn’t believe we are going to make it on time until our canoe hit the sandy shore of the finish line. Only 10 minutes left till the 30 hours cutoff and any additional mistake would send us behind many teams. Likely we did no more mistakes.
This year I had really great season and the best teammate. I learned a lot of new stuff and my navigation is much better now. The season is over, but we have great plans for the next year. See you then…
Dima
Results of the race are here.
All our photos are here.
Vlad’s photos from the championship are here.
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