NORCAL AR Quicksilver Sprint

I did a "short" race yesterday - one of the NORCAL AR, a new series in the Bay Area. There was no paddling as the lakes in the area are pretty small. So just a mix of mountain biking and running. It turned out to be much longer and intense than I expected. Only myself and another team (ARNavSupplies) finished the entire course in over 6 hours. It was a bit hot, dry and sunny. Enough to slow you down a bit.

We were only given the first few CPs at the start. We started with a run of about 8 miles or so. The hills were steep but I ran them all anyway. I though I was going so fast I would have an insurmountable lead by the time I got to the bike TA. I was wrong. The top teams were only a few minutes behind me! Maybe because it was a short race, or I am not in as fast as I used to be.

At the bike TA we had to copy the rest of the CPs onto the map. The rules were a bit complicated as the next section involved biking for a few CPs, running for a while, then biking again. I screwed it up. My map was folded poorly and I forgot to grab one of the CPs that was an out-and-back of a few miles. Shit. When I got to the run TA I realized the error and decided I would take the penalty instead of going back, it would have taken me longer than an hour to fix my mistake.

Then we had a short run to grab 3 CPs in loop. After the last CP there was a definite advantage to taking a cross country route and skip about a mile of trail. Unfortunately for me it was a bushwhack through some very fresh and potent looking Poison Oak. Luckily back at the bike TA they had some Tecnu and I scrubbed as much of the Oak off as I could.

On the final bike back I decided to go get the CP I missed because it was not far out of the way. I already had the penalty but I wanted to go get it anyway so I could feel better about myself. This caused me to take a different than expected route to get to CP15, which I could not find. As it turns out, it was in the wrong place but was easy to find if you took the straight-forward route to get it. Since it was in the wrong spot I did not get a penalty for missing it. Luckily I did not spend much time looking for it.

After all of that I finished about 25 minutes ahead of ARNavSupplies. I had expected to do better against them so that was a surprise. I think it was more because of them being faster than they used to be. The race director gave me a 30 minute penalty for the missed CP instead of an hour because I did at least try to go back and get it. So I came in 2nd place.