By Andrea Anderson

2024 USARA National Championship Reflections

In many of the adventure races I (Andrea) have done, there is a general thought progression that leads me to some profound realizations. That’s one of the best reasons to race! There’s no guarantee that you’ll have an epiphany out there while shivering in a knee-deep, high-altitude bog, but I promise you will have some things to reflect on that you can apply to “real” life (whatever that is). The thing that struck me during this race is the thought that we seem to always be suddenly out of time. How can this be?! How can it feel so sudden?!

I think about all the times in my life when I have thought just how fast time is flying by. Seeing my kids grow unnoticeably every day and then all of the sudden, they are as tall as I am, driving and now off to college. Even my son with Down syndrome now enjoys drinking a beer. I am sure that all of this happened over night. Why am I the only one who is not getting older?! Ha! Who am I kidding? There’s a reason I don’t exactly love seeing close-up pictures of myself. It’s all going too fast!

So, back to the race. We were crushing it… like seriously crushing it! What a thrill it was to be passing Bend Racing and Rev 3 Pro, knowing WEDALI is not too far in front of us and the likes of Rootstock, TanZ and Strong Machine are behind us. For the first leg of the race, the time estimate was 3-5 hours. We came into TA 1 in 2nd place in exactly 3 hours. We were on top of the world, but Adventure Racing requires sustained focus and endurance at a speed that we sometimes cannot maintain, so we tried to keep a sense of urgency and tried to keep our heads in the game.

We continued on bike and our combination of good navigation, technical mountain biking skills and experience in all sorts of crappy weather paid off. We arrived at TA 2 at about 12:30 pm. We were over the fast estimate by an hour and a half, but we had gotten all of the points and we were pleasantly surprised to see Rev3 Pro at the TA and to find out that we were probably 3rd place. We were holding our own and then some! We made a quick transition, but I was thinking that we might not see the Jesse’s and Amanda (Rev3) again until the race was over. But then… we caught them on CP 23 which was only the 3rd CP on that leg. Woohoo!

CP 23 was among thick foliage and large, moss-covered boulders. We needed to attack more than once, and we needed to be extremely diligent to keep on a bearing. We couldn’t be more than a few feet away from each other without losing track of each other, and the dangerous gaps between boulders and the unrelenting rhododendron, made it VERY slow-going. On a regular day, this area would have been a great discovery. It was a really cool ecosystem, but on that night, it was dark and frustrating. Even so, we got out of the madness ahead of the other teams, including Rev3. We were pumped! We couldn’t believe that more than halfway through the race we were still keeping up with the top teams and likely back in 2nd place! I usually try to temper our collective optimism so as not to jinx ourselves, but even I was over-the-moon excited!

And then came the bog… The navigation continued to be nuanced and challenging, and the points were placed with less-than-ideal attack points. To boot, the trails in real life looked less and less like the map, and we started to struggle. We were tromping through the high-altitude, swamp that was up to our knees in most places, and (as Chip would say) ‘balls deep’ in other places. We were going at a snail’s pace. It was nearing 3 am, it was dark, and it was getting colder by the minute. How many of us would choose to go out for a lovely walk IN the bog on any given day? No one!! But in hindsight, it was a pretty unique experience, and I love that AR forces you to do things you would otherwise consider ridiculous. I’m sure there is a lesson there, too, but moving on…

Then we made a dumb misjudgment. We thought the CP we saw in the distance was CP 26 instead of CP 25, so we went a very long way around to another more reliable attack point just to find ourselves back at the original CP that we thought was the wrong one and… we were worse for the wear. It cost us at least 45 minutes. Near the same time, David’s knee began to hurt, Chip started battling sleep monsters, and I wasn’t much of a help either except to point out that we were now SUDDENLY way past our time estimates. We needed start cutting points and face the reality that the course would not be clearable by us by a long shot.

So, back to the life-lesson of this race for me. The key to meeting your goals in Adventure Racing and in life relies heavily on your strategy. Usually, the sooner you realize you cannot clear a course, the better your result will probably be. But, it is a bit of a gamble. There’s the WEDALI’s of the world, the Strong Machine’s of the world and then there’s the rest of us.

Some teams never question whether or not they can clear a course, and they don’t need to. They are the super stars! For this race, there was only one, WEDALI. They were the only team to get all of the point with an hour and half to spare, making them the winners. Are we surprised? Of course not, WEDALI has won the Championship 6 times. And, they have THE Mari Chandler on their team. We saw firsthand that they stay true to their team’s name which stands for “We eat dirt and like it.” They executed like they knew they could and probably never had a conversation about which points to go after or not.

I think of the people I know who seem like they’ve had a purpose-driven life since birth. They know what they want, and they go after it, and they get it. Even their hiccups along the way seem insignificant because they seemingly have it all figured out. People like that change the world and make it so the rest of us can realize what is possible. It’s incredible!

Strong Machine had just the opposite strategy. They started the race with the thought that they could not clear the course and shouldn’t waste valuable time and effort going for points with lesser “return on investment”. They prioritized the “windows” better than any other team. (Windows were clusters of 3 points that were extra challenging, but yielded bonus points if all 3 were punched.) They stopped clearing the course after CP 3, only 45 minutes into the race. While they were one of the first teams to cut points, they were the only team other than WEDALI to get ALL of the bonus points. Wow! For that, they deservedly-so won the Peter Jolles Award for ingenuity in navigation on the course. There’s no doubt Peter would have been impressed! I certainly was! Strong Machine came in 3rd place with 4 more points than we did.

In racing, most of us end up watching the clock and constantly assess our progress along the way to make sure we get to the finish on time. Rev 3 Pro lasted a lot longer than we did before they realized they would need to cut points to get to the finish on time. Dropping only two points, they came in 2nd place with half an hour to spare.

The only other team I thought I’d mention for the sake of the analogy is Rib Mountain Racing. They are a great team and they have beat us in multiple races including the recent Expedition Alaska, so it was “interesting” to see them misjudge their time. It meant a late finish for them, costing them an 8 point penalty. I can’t imagine how stressful it must have been for them to try to close the gap on the clock.

A few of times in my life, I realized my strategy was off. I was trying to clear the course when I should have been prioritizing windows. I was trying to do all of the things I thought I was supposed to be doing just for the sake of doing them. I was trying to be everything to everybody. I was burnt out and joy seemed elusive at best. The days were so slow, but the years were passing before my very eyes without a sense of fulfillment. I felt SUDDENLY old. I turned 40, got divorced, and I started questioning what I could do to slow this life down and to make sure I “cleared the windows”. I stopped doing almost as many things as I started doing. I began doing more of what I wanted, with who I wanted, when I wanted to. Amazing that it can be that simple. It certainly didn’t feel simple as I was going through it. I think some people who knew me might have thought I changed into a completely different person. Maybe I did. Maybe we are all changing all the time, but it only seems sudden.

I certainly don’t have it all figured out. But, when I look at my own temporal horizon now, I feel like I’m prioritizing the right things more of the time. I try to lengthen my life by adding in truly unique experiences. I ask my future self what I should be doing now so I can make sure I’m doing what really matters to that distant version of myself who is already at the finish line. I don’t want any penalties to take away from the progress I’ve made. I look back at my younger self, too, and I have learned to offer grace to her and to use my missteps to help me figure out if I’m meeting my current time estimates. I want to get to the end of my life with a little time to spare and I want to have the satisfaction that I spent my time wisely.

Even after our realization that we were suddenly out of time to clear, we managed to get what we could. We skipped all of the trek points in leg 5 and continued on to the final bike. We cleared the last window, but had to leave the last two points out there for another day. It’s pretty unreal that you can go from thinking you’re going to clear the course to skipping 10 whole points. Crazy! We never let ourselves feel defeated though and we reached the finish after that grueling uphill bike to the resort with 20 minutes to spare. Phew! We covered 122 miles and 16,860 feet of elevation. Finishing 4th in our division and 5th overall was our best result in a race ever and I couldn’t be more proud of our effort and teamwork!

** If you’re interested in the concept of time, I’d highly recommend watching this TED talk by John K Coyle, an Olympic speed skater. It’s fascinating!
How to design moments that help you live (almost) forever: https://youtu.be/kNhyOYv2ejw?si=CaNTxOqdoV6ZNzL6