Sliding Doors: Don't Go into the Darkness!

by Brent Freedland

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​What a weekend, and, not for the first time, I find myself reflecting on lessons-learned and wishing, really wishing I could pull a Marty McFly and go jump into TA2 to offer one phrase of advice to the Rootstock Racing team. “Stick to the plan,” I’d whisper to me, Abby, and Matt as we quickly transitioned from bike to foot for what would be one of our worst unravelings in almost 130 races.
 
That said, before I go further, let’s jump to the end with a massive congratulations to our second team at this year’s USARA National Championships, an all-women’s team with regular Rootstockers Nicki and Karyn teaming up with biking legend and long-time AR competitor Britt Mason. We had a feeling they were going to do well, and they completely crushed it, finishing fourth overall out of nearly 80 teams, the best finish for an all-women’s team ever, improving upon the sixth place finish our all-women’s team had in 2022. We couldn’t have been more excited crossing paths with them throughout the race and cheering them on, even after we officially threw away our own chance at a bit of Helene-soaked glory.
 
So, so awesome to watch them crush it. It was especially awesome to see thirteen other teams competing in the all women’s division with two teams in the top ten overall (Rootstock and the defending champs, Women of AR turning in their own impressive showing) and another just outside of it in 13th.
 
And then there was the fun of watching a number of new teams jumping on the Nationals podium. Ours is a difficult sport to elevate in, and seeing our longtime friends from Strong Machine take home third, ThisAbility taking fourth, and Ozark finishing fifth in the mixed division was inspiring and a testament to those teams and the thoughtful, smart racing they demonstrated throughout the event.
 
And finally, of course, a huge round of applause for the legends from WEDALI and the Rev3 Endurance Pro Team who flexed their AR muscles and outpaced and outraced everyone all day, finishing first and second overall, with WEDALI being the only team to clear the course. We weren’t sure it could be done (by anyone), but we knew that if anyone could, it would be WEDALI. If my math is correct, that’s 14 championships now between Brian, Justin, and Mari. There’s a reason, or 789 of them, for why they are so good.

Sliding Doors

​OK, so not for the first time, I’m left imagining a host of different scenarios and marveling at how much nuance plays into our sport. All sports have their idiosyncrasies, but none have the sheer volume of factors, many of which are beyond a team’s control, as AR. For this race, we had several moments. Call them dominos. Call them mistakes. Unforced errors. All apply. Ultimately though, my mind wanders to the concept of Sliding Doors and butterfly effects. A moment unfolds and you have to make a decision. AR isn’t like your typical sport. It’s not about a missed shot, an untimely stumble on the five yard line, a missed call by a referee, or a careening hockey puck.
 
AR is about nuanced analysis and strategy, planning thirty hours of adventure using ten sheets of paper with no firsthand knowledge about hundreds of miles of potential wilderness-based routes, and then being able to adapt to the inevitable challenges you confront while out on the ground in real life, and in this case, in fringe-of-a-hurricane weather. Words simply can’t describe the unique challenge that comes with AR. Considering that Michelle and Liz, from Adventure Addicts Racing, are known for their creative course design that favors strategy ad navigation, we knew we had to be on top of our game, and usually this part of the game is something we do well. 

Door is Closed

​We pored over our maps, we analyzed the time estimates, we leveraged our relatively newly-developed time formulas, and we then did it all again when we learned the paddle was officially canceled an hour before the race started. By our estimates, we would need several hours more than the allotted 30 hours to complete the whole course, so we studied the maps further and identified a few chunks of the course to drop.

1. The opening bike points. There was reason to wonder how slow the biking might be on the trails for the first few points. We aren’t quite as strong and fast on bikes, especially technical sections, as some other teams, and we might be in those trails with many more teams. Dropping the first three points would quickly allow us to dive into the big bike out to the overnight trek, usually a strength. We ran the numbers and determined that if we cleared the first trek in three-ish hours we might go for them. If we were closer to four, we’d move along.

2. The first three points of the overnight trek looked rugged. Some notable distance, some big terrain, and hints that the nav in there would be hard with warnings that mapped routes might not exist. Standard hints from RDs in our sport, but targeted to this section in particular. Skipping these three and moving on would give us a shot at clearing most and maybe all of the rest of the course depending on how early we started the trek.

3. The biking window on stage four, while not ideal to skip, would also save us a chunk of time, and the window of three CPs with its bonus was worth less than the final two windows of CPs and their associated bonuses.

​We didn’t want to leave these points, but we could.Ultimately, we decided we likely would have to skip two of these three chunks of the course, and maybe all three. We sorted our maps and gear, packed up, and headed out into the foggy, windswept mountain air.

Door #1

​We had made good work of the prologue and the first stage, methodically knocking off the CPs and moving well. And then we dropped in to attack the final CP of the first window. I honestly cannot explain what directional or logical vortex we walked through, but for the better part of half an hour or so, we floundered, unable to locate point C. We did finally find it, but we rolled into TA a bit behind our self-imposed time cutoff: Stick to the Plan, we noted, and we sped off, dropping CPs 8-10 and getting a jump on the field.
 
We weren’t the only team to skip those points, but there weren’t many others ahead of us. We had the long stretch of single track largely to ourselves, and we rode well, picking off the points and holding off the field until the last couple of hours of the stage, at which point WEDALI caught us. That said, they weren’t able to pull away, and for the next couple of hours, we exchanged places, ultimately wrapping up the Queen stage of the race, as the RDs called it, within a few minutes of each other. Strategically, this was a big boost for us and validated our pre-race analysis.

Door #2

​For eleven hours, we ran our race perfectly, minus our lost time on CP C. We continued to analyze time throughout the bike ride, and then…well… we all seemed to briefly forget about it. All of it. The pre-race discussion. The options we had literally written down on a sheet of paper. The in-race analysis confirming our time projections (spoiler: even after this moment, our projections proved to be spot-on). Despite all of this, somehow, someway, no one thought to say: “Now, aren’t we supposed to skip 21-23 too?”
 
And we set off into the night. To our demise.
 
Based on the race map, we headed back down toward the river we had crossed while exiting Stage 2, looking for a junction. WEDALI was a bit further down the road, also exploring. We didn’t find anything, and Michelle’s warnings from the pre-race briefings came back to us: “A lot of the tracks aren’t there.” This is standard in our sport, especially when using US topographic maps.
 
“No big deal,” we thought. We bushwhacked up from the road and quickly found the old railgrade, now largely crowded with rhododendron and other forest-led reclamation projects. WEDALI soon popped up behind us, and together, we plowed through the vegetation, pace-counting our way along to our attack point. From there, we headed up the mountainside toward the CP. We reset our altimeters before climbing, and we even found the faint remnants of a mapped trail we didn’t expect to actually find. Thankfully, this trail was clear enough to allow easy progress through the thick undergrowth.
 
I had Abby watching her altimeter, and I gave her a measurement that would more or less place us due south of the CP, and I even erred a bit high with the idea that if we missed the clearing where the CP was located, we might hit an old road bed that was on the map… though we didn’t expect it to be there since we didn’t find the junction out of TA. We hit the mark, took a north bearing, and went for it. And the wheels... well, they didn’t really come off… they exploded. Completely shredded, like skin and gear in an endless field of rhododendron…
 
We found ourselves in a brutally thick sea of vegetation. I took us north, trying to drift northeast as well. We pace counted. We turned off our lights, looking for the light of a clear patch of woods. We kept our eyes out for old road beds. We watched the altimeter. All in all, we painted a picture for ourselves that we were east, north, and eventually well above the clearing. We therefore turned west and worked our way down the ridge toward the clearing. (to be fair to my teammates, I probably did most of the rationalizing).
 
And we didn’t find it. And we never would… because we weren’t close to it. In hindsight, and with the help of Instant Replay… or online tracking review… we puzzled out that we had fallen victim to bad altimeter readings. While we had purposely gone farther than we thought we had to for that very reason, we still dove into the rhodo too soon, and the dark, shin smacking, eye-poking, labyrinth of vegetation just proved too disorienting.
 
While not a classic parallel feature, we effectively also fell victim to one of those, reading compass directions and side hills that lined up with where we THOUGHT we were when in fact, we had missed the CP entirely and were now wandering on a different sidehill than we should have been, all the while trapped in a maze of ruthless vegetation. In retrospect, our most notable and inexcusable mistake was not turning back after 5-10 minutes. A classic AR blunder in which the team insists on forward progress, while not being willing to admit that the wasted time cannot be salvaged.
 
And that was our race! We finally bailed on the CP, turned east and “bee-lined” up the ridge to the Allegheny Trail. Except, that took about three hours of bashing away, Abby wondering if we should use the trackers to ping for coordinates, Matt wondering if we should pull the cell phone.
 
They politely told me we were lost. I… not quite as politely… told them we were not. At least not by my definition. While our hypothesis for missing the point was not entirely accurate (we knew the bad weather and faulty altimeters had something to do with it, but the rest of our theories -- no existent roads and being too high -- proved wrong), we turned out to be exactly where I suspected we were once we started working up the ridge to the trail. Not ready to go unofficial with a cell phone check or request for coordinates, I kept smashing through the rhodo until we finally, mercifully found the ridge-top trail.
 
Of course, we wandered right over it in the dark and lost twenty more minutes searching and debating, eyes wide in the never-ending nightmare. Finally, we found it. Dejected, exhausted, race shot, we continued on.
 
And then we lost another 45 minutes looking for a rather challenging CP (Thanks, CP23).
 
And then we skipped just about everything else to get to the end of the stage.
 
And then we skipped an important bike window. And then another trekking window.

The race over from a competitive standpoint, we cruised along, finding ways to continue to engage as a team, work on perspective and attitude, and still work through the CPs that made sense. We rooted for our other team when we saw them, we cheered for our friends on other teams, we laughed and commiserated with the many racers we bumped into, all having a tough one out there in The Mon.
 
Toward the end, we faced a final decision after clearing the final bike window. Do we go for CPs 34 and 35? We had stopped for 15 minutes on the final ride to help a team in distress, and we also just didn’t quite have the climbing legs or time to commit to the trail climb to 34. Even with climbing legs, we probably didn’t have the time. So, we made the final call to skip them, ride to the finish, and cheer for Karyn, Nicki, and Britt as they finished their dominant performance. 

The Other Side

​It took me 48 hours to truly start to process what COULD have been. Our sport is amazing in its nuance. We sometimes focus on the big things and the big mistakes at the expense of the smaller decisions that can compound over the course of the event. Yes, we lost four hours of time for nothing, going for CP21. Whether we were “lost” or not comes down to perspective, but we didn’t nav that one perfectly, and we made the classic mistake of not cutting bait and retracing our steps. Once that happened, our entire race was blown.
 
But the real mistake was not sticking to plan, and that’s really when our strategy collapsed. We had nailed our time projections and poured so much energy into essentially perfect pre-race analysis. Had we skipped those first three CPs on Stage 3… as we knew we should have… we would have had loads and loads of time to tackle the rest of the course. I’m not sure what would have happened, but I THINK we had time to clear the rest. What a different outcome it would have been.

Sliding doors. We had a huge one. And not one of us thought to even pause before walking through it into the cold, dark night of those West Virginian woods. AR. A humbling sport that never stops trying to teach you something. Why is it so difficult to listen?