Taking on the 'After Dark' 12-Hour Adventure Race

Race day started amazing, we all slept in! AR and beyond, I really hate waking up early, genuinely it’s the worst part of AR, triathlon, running races, taking my kids to their swim meets, I just hate waking up unusually early, being groggy, so starting a race at 9pm was amazing. Race day we woke up, played a card game, watched some sports on TV, and eventually we dropped off our bikes at the TA at 3pm, went and had a pre-race team dinner, then headed over to race HQ at 7pm for maps.

When we got there, 361 and Mark Latanzzi were finishing up a “night time” clinic for newer racers, quite a bit of the field was new to night time so that would be interesting. We chatted with quite a few folks as well, including one racer (Adam) for whom this was only his 2^nd adventure race, and both his first time doing 12-hours long or doing night time. I’m always so impressed by people who jump right into the deep end. In general it was nice to do a race outside the Mid-Atlantic region and meet many racers from a different region. No matter the region, adventure racers continue to be the best groups of people to meet and hang out with.

At 7:30 we got maps, and the course design was interesting right out of the gate. Simply put, Legs 1 and 2 were linear (paddle then trek) to get you to your bikes. Leg 3 was a MASSIVE Bike/Trek Rogaine “any order, all optional” out and back. Then Legs 4/5 were simply reversing Legs 1/2 to get back to the finish, with a few new CPs on the way back. 

As Legs 1/2 and 4/5 were mandatory, we quickly plotted them out and got time estimates on them, we conservatively figured 4 miles of paddling around 75-90 minutes in the dark, and 4 miles of trekking to be another 90 minutes on foot as it had elevation/conditions to deal with and we’d likely be walking. So, if it takes 3 hours to get back to the finish, the entire race plan was centered around: get back to the final TA to start Leg 4 by 6am. That would conservatively give us 3 hours for the last 2 legs and not be late to finish. The reason we were conservative too is the last 2 legs had 2 checkpoints each but you wouldn’t get those locations until you started the legs, so with no idea how “out of the way” of our path back they might be, we wanted to have a cushion just in case. 

Leg 1 – 4mile Paddle to takeout.

This leg was a straightforward lake/flatwater paddle with a mass start old LeMans style “everyone run to your boats when we say go.” This was a BYOB race (bring your own boat) so Aaron and I were in my tandem kayak and Justin brought his solo kayak. Pre-race we tied Justin’s boat to the back of ours as 2 people in a tandem are generally faster. At start, we took our time jogging down to the boats and were maybe the 20^th boat on the water, but we were very quickly near the front with only a handful of boats in front of us.

Paddling is usually my favorite discipline, and I wasn’t navigating so I could additionally just enjoy the sights/sounds of paddling at night which is always a special experience to boot. This is how the first 40 minutes of it went, towards the end of it we suddenly saw a LOT of lightning off in the distance. It was worrisome when cold air started blowing at us, but Aaron assured me the forecast was for it to push and stay south of us, and thankfully it did, we stayed safe and dry. We got the 2 CPs along the way no problem, and the take out was the 3^rd CP; we only saw 4 boats shored up when we arrived and Race Director Shawn was there to greet us, he told us we were only 8 minutes off the leaders, awesome. We’d done leg 1 in only 1hr 2 min. beating our conservative estimate nicely, time banked. 3/3 CPs

Leg 2 – 4mile Trek to Bike TA.

According to the map, this was a 4-mile trek on a road with 2 occasional CPs along the way. Nothing navigationally hard, but our first time to get acquainted with Kentucky’s definition of “road.” This road was more akin to an off-road ATV trail with tons of loose gravel/dirt, off camber sections, room-sized holes full of water and several sections of it likely untouched for some time and spots of questionable elevation grade. We were fine on foot, but it was foreshadowing of things to come.



After 2.5 miles it became paved and we jogged the rest, mostly downhill to the TA and punched the 3^rd trek CP (6^th total), it look us 70 min, again faster than estimated but we verbally made a mental note as a team how much of that trek was downhill, because it would be uphill on the way back. 3/3 CPs

Leg 3 –Bike/Trek “out-and-back” full of CPs.

So now the meat of the race, 25 potential CPs, get whatever ones you want in any order you want. The thing that seemed very clear to us is that this course was way too big for 12 hours. I don’t know if this was intentional, but we mapped the entire route to estimate it and didn’t see time to clear it all, particularly for us, but also probably not for anyone unless you had perfect conditions all the roads were paved and flat… and trekking was super clear woods, etc.

The design of this leg was 2 road loops for biking connected by a gravel road in the middle. The first loop had 2 small trek sections in it, (one north of the road, one south) just before you had to decide if you wanted to go to the outer loop.

The outer bike loop also had small trek section but this one was very CP dense with 4 CPs in very close quarters, and also 3 CPs on the road to get there. So our original plan was to get out to that furthest out trek section and then judge time from there, we’d only skim the first 2 trek sections for “easy” CPs on the way out; but leave getting any more of those based on what time we had left on our way back.

With plan in hand we proceeded to getting “punched in the face” by the roads of back-country Kentucky, hah. Our plan was to complete the 1^st bike loop no matter what as it had CPs along both the north and south halves of it and was plenty doable. The bottom half appeared paved according to the USFS map while the top half was gravel/who knows. We wanted to leave the pavement for the end of the race as it would be faster/easier so we started with the northern half and quickly realized just how this night was going to go.

The conditions of the “gravel roads” didn’t get much better, they weren’t atrocious or anything but just a lot of loose gravel/dirt but particularly painful is that they are built in a manner constantly smashing into elevation gains and drops. I would say we rode 70% of it and hike-a-biked 30% of it due to the constant sharp elevation changes that would surprise you. It was akin to doing a HITT workout, and our heart rates kept spiking like we were doing a HITT workout; and even though it was night time, it was still hot, humid and we were getting very sweaty.  

It took us 1h 50min to do 9 miles of biking to the location of our first opportunity to jump off for some trekking, ugh. For context, I normally do 12-15 miles in an hour on my nearby hilly Virginia gravel road network. So we were slow to say the least. We were happy to trek just to get off the bikes for as minute for these easy CPs, but still wanting to get to the far out trek cluster. 1 CP we were getting looked like it should follow a tree clearing, as on the map it was white line/streak, which on the US Forest Service map layer should note tree clearing, usually this is when you see clearings for pipelines/power lines or something, but instead it was yet another ATV-off road trail with plenty of tree cover!? We then quickly realized this particular white line on the map was covering up other map features… a.k.a. it had been added to the map by the Race Director… 

Map vent for a second… I’m thankful the RD was trying to add info to the map for his racers, but as someone who uses maps all the time as a racer and race director, and also as someone married to a professional map maker: colors and symbols mean things. You can’t just draw/add random shit on a map as expect people to know what it means without a map key/translation. Why the RD didn’t put a black dotted line which is what USFS uses for trails, or a double black dotted line which is what all the other ATV roads were marked as, no clue. Venting over.

Anyways we realized white streaks were likely going to be abandoned trails/roads now too, hah. We got CP17 no problem, and decided to bushwhack down to the next white streak, hopefully another trail/road thingy. We did some gnarly bushwhacking but eventually worked our way to CP 14 and had our bearings for the area but it was thicker than expected. At this point we needed to decide:

This trek section seemed to be very vegetation dense, the CPs were decently far apart, it was taking us longer than expected to bushwhack, but also if we “cleared” these treks, at max we would get 6 more CPs and definitely not have time for anything more.

To get to the 3^rd far trek section, it would be 5ish miles one-way just to the start of the outer bike loop with 1 CP along that stretch;  and then we would do the top of the 2^nd loop of biking,  3 more miles with 3 more CPs and then the 4-CP tight trek section. Then turn back around. So it would be 14 miles out and back on the bikes for 8 CPs vs heavy vegetation for who knows how long for 6 more CPs max if we stayed, we wanted to maximize points so we decided to get back to the bikes and go to the 3rd trek section.

Narrator: they choose poorly 😉

We got back to the bikes quick no problem, picked off an easy remaining CP in this nearby trek and then left this trekking area and off to more “roads.” Initially things were paved and fast, and then we started getting treated to back country unleashed dogs barking and chasing us in the middle of the night, thankfully without major issue. Then came more of the gravel/unmaintained road stuff like before with a bunch more climbing… our exhaustion was setting in...

We got the 1 CP on the road connecting the 2 loops, but by the time we got to the 2^nd loop we knew reality, this took forever vs our plan; and at best we could get 1 of the CPs on the start of the outer loop and then needed to turn back just to make it to the finish in time. This whole sequence of time looks as follows:

• Trek CP17 to CP14: 25 min.
• Trek CP14 back to bikes: 15 min.
• Bikes to last easy “trek” CP15: 15min.

Followed by leaving for the outer loop:

• CP15 to CP 19 (on the connecting road) = 30 min
• CP 19 to CP 20 (1^st cp on outer loop) = 32 min.
• in short it took an hour to go 5 miles…

So at CP20 we turned back to return to the first loop to start the southern half of it = 1 hour

So basically, 2 hours for 2 checkpoints…ouch ☹

From there we went back to the rest of the original plan, we biked the southern half of the 1^st bike loop, it was 90% paved and fast like we thought, there were only 2 CPs on it, but we got back to the TA just before 6am as we’d originally planned, 3 hours to go.

We'll never know what happens if we decide to go with option A at the decision point and stick with trekking, but my guess is we maybe get 3-5 trekking CPs in that section with those 2 hours if we did. So subtract the 2 CPs we got on the way to the outer loop but add in 3-5 more trekking and maybe it nets a positive of +2-3 CPs from what we did do, but alas we didn’t do that. 10/25 CPs

Side note, this TA was being manned by Taylor Larsen from Gritline Adventure Racing who puts on the East Fork Challenge, we had some friendly chatting when he recognized my and Aaron's names as the guys who do USARA's rankings. Again AR is full of nice, fun cool people.

Leg 4 – 4mile Trek back to Paddle TA

At this TA they gave us the location of the 4 new CPs for the way back, 2 on the trek and 2 on the paddle, and it turns out they were mostly “on the way.” We should be fine on time so long as we don’t do anything stupid. This trek back was our 3^rd time on half of the road, so we spent time just chatting, we were in good spirits, and jokingly cursing all the uphill climbing we were now having to do (we knew it was coming via jogging it downhill earlier).

Sounds stupid but the remaining 2 legs of the race we were sort of on auto-pilot, 3 competent navigators needing to return on a path we already did with minor jumps off for CPs. We chatted about many things, other races, our favorite courses where the climbs had actual payoffs, hah, but also wondering aloud about all the teams we saw while biking back earlier, we crossed at least 6+ teams/solos who were heading out for more as we were coming in. We thought we were going to be close on time, so no way all of them had time, so we’re now debating what the over/under would be on late racers…

We got to the first CP and it was easy to find in a very old cemetery site, only except we missed a memo that this one didn’t have a flag on it. Thankfully another racer was there with us and she super kindly shared that we were needing to find and denote a date from the main headstone. Maybe a little too much auto-pilot for us, whoops. The next CP was easy navigationally but required some steep descending, bushwhacking and then contouring around at odd angles to get back out to the road/trail, but we got it no problem. Shortly after we were at TA to get in the boat. 2/2 CPs

Leg 5 – 4mile Paddle to Finish

We got back to the TA and there were still a LOT of boats on the shore, we got there at 7:20am, leaving us 1hr 40min to reverse the paddle which took us just over an hour to start the race, surely we’re a little more tired now but this should be plenty time.

The views were great, a nice peaceful morning, at some point a layer of fog had rolled in, but not in a “we’re blind” sort of way, more of a ‘smoke on the water’ beautiful view sort of way, this was a great paddle, and we pushed to get back as well in case we needed to beat anyone else on time.



The sun was now up and our headlamps were off, we got to just enjoy this beautiful paddle back, Aaron/Justin navigated the water just fine, we chatted with some boats we crossed with, and we got both CPs no problem, and hit the shore, ran up to the finish and stopped our clock with about 23 minutes to spare. 2/2 CPs

We were tired and sweaty for sure but not totally spent or exhausted, I’d say it was a well managed race from that perspective; and honestly we didn’t have any navigation bobbles aside from the one time I confused someone’s driveway for a gravel road at 5am, that cost us maybe 30 seconds and some embarrassment, hah.

This course was very hard physically, much more than we were expecting, and doubling on top of that we’d never done a race by this RD before so we didn’t really know what to expect with the style of CP placements and course design/estimating. The only real question we left with was the decision to go for the outer loop/trek that maybe ended up costing us 2-3 more CPs in total.  Thankfully there was breakfast provided while we waited for results to be tallied, amazing.

Results announced: we were 2^nd in the All-Male division and 3^rd overall, wait what!?

Serves as a reminder that in AR, no one has a perfect day, that’s the point; we all have varying degrees of dealing with the challenges of a course, especially an unclearable course with stupid windy and steep backcountry roads... but when you're dealing with things, so is everyone else, its how well you work with what you're given.

The overall winners (Team Sojourners) “only” got 27 of 35 CPs while we got 20 of 35 so we weren’t touching them even with different decisions. Turned out if we got 1-2 more CPs our overall ranking wouldn’t have changed either, so I think we did about as good as we could have all things considered.  

Honestly the only regret is we didn’t really have time to stay and hang out/meet with the central region’s adventure racers because we had to drive an hour drive to go pick up our bikes still back at TA (more crazy roundabout country roads), and then 7 more hours of driving to get back home, so we hit the road after results were announced. 361 Adventures put on a good race, Shawn and his crew are super nice, the course was a good challenge, and they did awesome for new racers offering not just the race but a night nav clinic before-hand. White lines on maps aside ;), it was a solid event.

All in all it was a great weekend, and I hope there’s more opportunities in the future to do night time races for people, maybe we’ll even try putting on a night race with BROR so the Mid-Atlantic region can have some fun too. 😊