March 22, 2014
Fairy Stone State Park, Martinsville, Virginia
On March 22, 2014 Odyssey Adventure Racing held
its first event at Fairy Stone State Park near Martinsville, Virginia. The park consists of 4,700 acres of wooded
terrain surrounding the 170-acre Fairy Stone Lake, which is adjacent to the
2,800-acre Philpott Reservoir. Fairy
Stone Lake is formed by an earthen dam across Goblintown Creek, which spills
over into the reservoir on the Smith River.
The undulating local topography results in lakes with innumerable
twists, turns, coves, peninsulas, and islands providing plenty of opportunity
for navigational quandary and scenic checkpoints.
For this race, Team Calleva was a 2-person single
gender team of Nick Josties and Steve Hall.
The 24-hour race consisted of 8 mandatory and 37 optional checkpoints,
many of which were accessible from both the water and surrounding land,
offering plenty of opportunity for strategy.
The course was generally arranged in a cloverleaf pattern and other than
a few logistical exceptions, the checkpoints could be obtained in any order and
from any mode of travel. The three
exceptions were:
- a trekking prologue with return to start area for additional CP coordinates and plotting
- a 6-1/2 hour open window to complete the paddling section
- a trekking o-course with bike drop area
Teams and solo racers in both the 6-hour sprint
and the 24-hour race lined up together at 10 a.m. for a trekking start to
collect one mandatory and 4 optional checkpoints in the first leg of the
race. At the starting gun, racers
sprinted in an adrenaline-fueled rush toward the far side of the lake. In true Ronny Angell fashion, the race maps
immediately proved to be hilariously inaccurate as the entire column of running
racers piled up at a former bridge location, now just abutments on a steep,
overgrown hillside. Some racers
immediately dove into the water and swam across, others began scrambling along
the slope, and the rest stood around scratching their heads in confusion. Team Calleva was in the second group and
managed to get around the end of the lake without too much delay. We grabbed all 5 prologue CP's and returned
to the start to plot the remaining points and determine our strategy for the
rest of the race.
Since the paddling window was now open we decided
to get that done right away. There was
only one mandatory CP on the paddling leg, approximately 5 miles of open water
away on a peninsula in Philpott Reservoir.
We paddled this section, including portaging the earthen dam, in a
little over an hour of steady paddling with the wind at our backs. The return leg against the wind took a bit
longer, and we stopped 3 times to jump out and pick up CP's, returning to the
beach with 30 minutes of open paddling window to spare. Then a quick run back to the start area to
drop our paddles, change into dry footwear, and pick up our bikes and we were
back on the course.
The rest of the race consisted of biking for a
while, then orienteering / trekking for a while, then biking some more,
etc. Most of the CP's were relatively
easy to find and on the trekking o-course we started to get a bit cocky when
suddenly, at around daybreak, we discovered that we were not where we thought
we were. Headscratching, looking around,
"this has to be the trail" uttered several times, "we have to go
east!", "is this a Fairy Stone?", "let's try this
way", then finally, "oh yeah, we've been here before" and we
made it back to the bike drop.
Unfortunately, we left 6 of the 9 CP's undiscovered on the o-course, but
got back to the bikes in time to pick up the remaining 3 mandatory CP's and had
time to get 3 more optional CP's. In the
end, we finished at 9:30 a.m. with all 8 mandatory points and 29 out of 37
optional points, putting us in a respectable 1st place in our division and 7th
place overall.
Thanks to Ronny, his staff, all the volunteers,
and Odyssey sponsors for putting on a fun race in great new location. We look forward to seeing Fairy Stone again
in the coming years.
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