Frozen Foot Adventure Race Report
A race report for "just" a 5-hour adventure race 🙂
Short story: do adventure races with your kids!
The short story is: do adventure races with your kids! A perfect activity for quality uninterrupted time with them; plus the opportunity to be reminded how awesome they are.
------------Longer Version------------
This past weekend was the Frozen Foot Adventure Race , there were 10-hour and 5-hour options, and while I’d usually race the longer race with the Broad Run Off Road team, I opted out of this one for 2 reasons: 1st - I just had surgery in December right around the time the BROR crew was deciding to do this race, and I genuinely didn’t know if I’d be ready or able to keep up with the team’s pace yet. I needed a test outing to see what shape I was in first.
2nd - Our oldest son Xander (13) has recently discovered he can participate in AR/orienteering with his friends, and doesn’t have to be bogged down by uncool parents 🙂 After doing some orienteering meets with his friends he asked me if he could do Spring Bloom Adventure Race with his friends as a youth team this April. I’m all for it, I think it’s a great relatable sport/skill set to build, but while he’s done a few adventure races with me and handful of orienteering meets on his own, navigating without a parent/safety net is a big leap, especially having other parents’ kids in tow. So wanting to get him a few more runs of lead navigating meant Team BROR raced the 10hr without me and I was on team “Got Any Grapes?” taking on the 5-hour race.
I set the expectation to Xander that he was doing all the navigating and decision making. I’d occasionally throw ideas his way, but he was ultimately leading like he’s going to need to be for his team. He was excited to boss me around.
We arrived at 6:30, first on site, rockstar parking right next to the TA. We got some clarifications we needed from RD Nick, and from there I told Xander I wanted to split up tasks: I’d take care of checking us in, getting the bikes, bibs, bags and gear all ready while he took first run at planning the maps/route on his own and we’d regroup after. Trying to show him how splitting up tasks is efficient for a team. The only advice I gave him was that generally he should estimate about 10-15 minutes per CP. From what I saw I didn’t think we had time to get all the checkpoints because it looked like the 5-hour race comprised 80% of the 10-hour course, but with only 50% of the time meaning we needed to pick what parts of the course to get. I was curious to see what he came up with because with orienteering meets the order of CPs is usually prescribed, where in most adventure races you decide what order to go in.
I got to work on the bikes/packs and even took a detour to say hi to all my AR friends in the parking lot and chit chat with team BROR a little bit. When I got back to the truck Xander had already highlighted his route on the maps and had a strategy in mind that he wanted to ask me if I was ok with, a true stroke of genius.
The race was built in 2 legs. A Trek leg and a Bike Leg. To start: get as many trek points as you want, then at any time go bike out and back for Leg 2, when you are back continue getting whatever trek checkpoints remain. Two additional twists. First, varying point values for checkpoints some worth 1, 2, or 3 points, and also the trek had mystery “dogbone” checkpoint pairs, where you found checkpoint A, and instead of a punch it had a map showing you the location of a corresponding B checkpoint. You only got credit for the pair if you found both as the punch was on the B checkpoint. The reward however was that all the dogbone pairs seemed to be worth 4, 5 or 6 points as a pair, while the biking had several 1 point checkpoints. Xander did the math while I was gone on trekking vs. biking and here was his proposal: “let’s do the entire trek leg before doing any biking.”
He was right, there were roughly 80ish total points up for grabs, but 50+ of those points were in the trek leg. In addition the high value bike points required you to bike very far away while all these high value trek points were relatively close to start/finish so you could capitalize on them easier and also “call it” easily if you needed to get back to the finish. I love trying different strategies in a race and the logic made sense so I was sold, excited to try his idea out.
Just before the race started, RD Jesse added that there was a fun challenge teams could do anytime during the race for additional points. Silly stuff like weight carries, trivia, or riding tiny kid bikes. Xander turned to me excitedly: “I want to do that right away!” Hah, I said sounds good, but my only qualifier was that if a bunch of people tried the same, we wouldn’t wait in a line to do it, he agreed.
Race started, we went through the archway and immediately u-turned to the challenge and to my surprise we were all alone, all other racers had gone out onto the course. So RD Jesse explained the challenge: as a 2-person team we only had to pick 2 of the challenges, we decided riding the tiny bikes would be funny so we took turns trying that, it took us about 5 attempts and then did the weight carry and completed our challenge in about 5 total minutes, and we were off.
Xander immediately went to navigation work and took part in the AR tradition of overshooting the first checkpoint, hah. He caught it quickly because we came down to a river/dam that told us we went too far. I told him not to worry, that everyone overshoots the first checkpoint 🙂 His strategy was simple, we get an A dogbone, then go get the corresponding B; then we just get whatever A is next closest to us, rinse repeat. There were also 4 CPs that were not part of the pairs we could get any time, so when one of the Bs was close to them we got those in quick succession and then right back to more A-B pairs.
Xander was the epitome of something I often tell new racers: “it doesn’t matter how fast you are if you run the wrong way.” We jogged for the first 1 or 2 checkpoints but after that he said he just wanted to do fast walking and that’s what we did the rest of the day minus jogging some downhills. We’d occasionally run into a team running through the woods going for the same CP as us, yet we’d exit before them because Xander would slow down when things didn’t feel right or to keep us on track, another proud dad moment.
16 checkpoints in and we had yet to miss a checkpoint at all. I was making sure I wasn’t navigating, I only went in the directions he asked me to, and maybe even occasionally would test him by going the wrong way to make sure he wasn’t just blindly following me, he caught every one, hah. Sorry future Xander who reads this 😉 There were a few times I spotted flags as he almost walked past them I didn't mess around there and always pointed the out cause that’s what any teammate would do. If he told me about a turn/feature that was next I would note it when we came upon it, but never did anything he didn’t tell me to do or look for (even when I had my own nav ideas, it was hard, hah).
I do worry with all youth racers that probably the biggest thing they all lack is hydration/calorie intake knowledge; kids generally feel invincible and never eat/drink until they crash; schools don’t exactly do endurance sports and so, much of the race is me reminding him to eat/drink, and even then it's getting the “ok fine” response, hah.
The hardest part to the dogbone CPs was not knowing where the B parts of the pair were going to be, I sensed Xander getting tired/frustrated when almost every B CP seemed to be located on the opposite side of where we were forcing us to cross back and forth across this section of the park repeatedly, but through it all Xander never asked us to stop moving and I channeled my inner Jeremy Johnson and struck up as many fun conversations as I could, Xander stayed in the navigation zone while chit chatting about video games, movies, and about weird noises we heard coming from the woods, hah.
About 3 hours into the race the end of the trek was in sight, we only had 2 dogbone pairs left but they were going to be the hardest ones. They were across the park from each other and also the lowest value pairs while also seemingly the hardest navigationally (one of them clearly was just thrown into the largest vegetation patch I could see on the map). Xander picked a very conservative approach angle from the trail for 56A. I’ve been teaching him how to set/shoot a bearing with a compass and so he gave me a degree bearing, I thought it would come up a little shallow but we went for it and hit a wall of the thickest vegetation I’ve seen in quite some time.
It was this moment I decided to test Xander to make sure he wasn’t just tired and going with any suggestion I had. I had a pretty good idea that we went too far east, so I turned even more east and said “I’m gonna look over here” and took off, and it was Xander who 30 seconds later yelled at me “Dad come back, it’s not that way!” another proud dad moment, hah, not just because he was definitely still navigating and caught me making an error, but because he took control of the situation and quickly told me to turn around. We went west just a short few steps around the thicket of nonsense and found the checkpoint moments later… in a slightly less dense thicket of nonsense.
Looking at our GPS track this in initial shallow bearing shoot was his only real bobble all day. After this we had one last dogbone pair to do and unfortunately it led us to the completely opposite end of the park… again… we finally cleared the trek and by the time we got back to the TA/bikes we had 45 minutes left. I told him the best tactic in this scenario is “lets get bike CPs for 20 minutes, and that gives us 25 minutes to get back.” I also told him lets transition quickly that being on the bikes would help get us off our feet and use different muscles. We’d hiked 10 miles by this point, definitely the longest distance I think he’s covered in one hike outing.
He agreed and we went out on the bikes, we got CP14 which was a 2-pointer and Xander smartly called it. I said I thought we could get more (I didn’t really) but he was definitely tired, a bit from lack of calorie intake but also at the same time he noted the next few bike points were even further away, off trail and all 1-pointers so if we were late back, we’d lose them anyway, a very solid point. So we agreed to head back and finished at 4 hours 39 minutes and got to relax and eat pizza while we watched all the other racers come in for the next 25 minutes.
13 total miles, 10 of it on foot, and then the results were in: we not only won the Family Division, we got 9th place overall, ahead of multiple AR regulars and definitely some fitter/faster individuals. Xander went from tired to excited when he got his 1st place division plaque to go along with post-race pizza.
Proud of this kid, he did awesome, and we go again next weekend at the
Walnut Creek AR (this time with paddling); and then next up for him after that is racing
Spring Bloom with his friend while my next outing after will be just slightly harder with
Shenandoah EPIC 24hr which I’ve missed the last 2 years.
As much as I wanted to hang out and wait for the 10-hour race to finish, we needed to get back home so we watched updates online and learned the BROR team took the overall win in the 10-hour race, congrats guys that is awesome! I can’t wait to join the BROR team again soon, but for now I’m “settling” for having my kid tell me I’m going the wrong way… even if he doesn’t know I’m sometimes just doing it to make sure he’s paying attention 😉
