Rod's Account...

After surviving the Fall Classic, we figured why not subject ourselves to even harsher conditions and colder temperatures by doing a race in December!!! After a bit of convincing from Team Virabadrahsana and Team Comfortably Numb, we decided the Chill was for us. Since this race was for 2-person teams, we were able to field two Fat Otter teams for this one.

Since there was no pre-race meeting the night before, we were able to get a good night sleep before the staging of the canoes the following morning. We woke up refreshed and got the canoes staged and headed to the start for the pre-race meeting. We were given maps and instructions to review prior to the start of the race and quickly headed to the cars to review the information. The pre-race meeting went quick and we had a bit of time to get back into the cars and stay warm until the start.

The race started with around a 3 mile trail run around the area. Peter and Andrew took off full steam and were out of site within moments. Al and I decided to jog it slow and save a bit of energy plus minimize the sweat that would have probably frozen solid. As we were finishing the run, we saw Peter and Andrew take off the bikes out of the transition area. We also made a lightning transition to the bikes and were off for our ride to the paddle. We didn’t make it 100 meters and I realized something was seriously wrong with my bike. I hopped off and we examined it to find that ice had built up around my cables and shifters overnight and were frozen solid. It took a couple of minutes before we were off again at a pretty strong pace. We passed several teams on the dirt/mud roads. At this point, the sky was dumping a sleet on us that felt like needles as we were riding.

We made our way to the canoes and had a fairly strong paddle. It seemed like we were leapfrogging with a couple of teams that kept passing us while we were punching the passport only to have us race by them once we were paddling again. Once we were finished with the leg, we did not repeat our fast transition. Cold hands and feet kept us from moving anything very fast. Still no sign of Peter and Andrew.

Back on the bikes, we had a short ride to a hike a bike section. My hands were so cold at this point I was trying to ride with my fingers curled under, all while trying to shift and read the map. Once we were off the bikes and hiking them through the woods, we warmed up again and all was well. After the hike a bike, we were to ride to a railroad grade and take that a couple of miles before our ride back to the transition area. As we pulled up to the CP at the railroad grade (a volunteer check required gear), we bumped into Andrew and Peter!! I couldn’t believe we caught them, but it turns out that they had gotten so cold after the paddle that it really crippled them for a while. We pretty much stuck together with them for the rest of the ride and pulled into transition moments apart.

The final leg of the race was the orienteering course. Since we had cranked on the bikes, we had around 4 hours to try and complete the O course before the race cutoff. We began this section with Peter and Andrew and stuck together for around half of the course. We eventually split up to attack the next CP in different ways. It was a nice balancing act on sinking logs, but we nabbed in and were off again. It wasn’t until a couple of CPs later that we bumped into Peter and Andrew again. They had missed the sinking log CP all together and had gotten a bit disoriented before finding the next CP. We split up again and Al and I began grabbing the remaining CPs (one of which was a nice little zip line over a ravine). Al and I ran to the finish and placed 11th out of 79. Peter and Andrew came across 10 minutes later to place 25th.

GREAT RACE!!! It felt good to get out of the winter eating and being lazy routine and race a little. The event was well put together and the terrain was fairly interesting. We will most likely do this one again in 2005! Thanks again to Infiterra for putting on a great race.

Peter's Account...

The December Chill. The only race in or around the Midwest for adventure racers in the month of December. Infiterra Sports has been putting this one on for a couple of years, but it was the first year Team Fat Otter would be present. It’s not that our team was a deciding factor in the outcome of the race, but that this race had a deciding factor in the outcome of our fledgling adventure racing team.

This was the first year that I (Peter Semenchuk) had been racing. It was the second year for Fat Otter’s captain, Rod McLennan, and also the second year for Al McLennan, Rod’s father and still hardcore racer. Andrew Wells was our newest team member, having only completed one race prior to the Chill. During the course of our racing season, we had decided that we should put forward a “fast” team, and a “slower” team for the Chill, as we had to put together 2, 2 person teams. We decided that Andrew Wells would race with me (we both had been running faster), and Rod and Al would race together under the “slower” banner. Of course we knew all bets were off on race day.

Friday, December 9th. The say that the day before the race is when the race really starts. Today would be no exception. Andrew and I would be meeting up in the afternoon, around 2.30 to pool our gear together in his adventure-born Honda Civic, and we would drive up to Pinkney, MI, ahead of Chicago’s Friday rush hour traffic, and have plenty of time for everything. Sure.

Friday, December 9th, 3.30 pm… Andrew calls me. “I’ll be home in about 15 minutes.” 20 minutes later, we are pulling gear out of my car and getting into his. “We need to stop at the bike shop to pick up some gear.” The trip to the shop costs us another hour. 5:00 pm. Like the many herds of buffalo that once roamed this great land (sigh), we enter the “expressway” during peak rush hour and proceed to sit in bumper to bumper traffic. Pretty good race so far, I must say. At least we haven’t had any navigation errors.

The rest of the drive was long, but rather uneventful, although we did hear from our friends on Team Comfortably Numb that they had some transmission problems and were stranded with only one vehicle for their large two teams and family. They worked out their problem by stuffing everyone and everything into one vehicle, and made it to the hotel. Just like most of our races with them, they still got there before we did!

Saturday, December 10th 1:30 am. All the gear is together, the bags are packed, the drinks are mixed, vitamins taken, and all are ready for bed, with minds still racing (no pun intended). A light snow is starting to dust the cold Michigan ground as we drift off to sleep.

Saturday, December 10th, 5:00 am. Alarms go off, and I realize how little sleep I’ve really gotten. I feel good, and we start the morning pre-race rituals. 45 minutes later, we are dressed, packed, and loaded into the car and off to navigate through town to the race start. We arrive, check in, and fidget with our gear while a now thicker snow dusts the already white ground.

8:10 am – Pre Race meeting. We get instructions and hear a little briefing on the course layout and precautions. The race will start in a large mass with a run on a trail promptly at 9:00 am.

9:00 am – Race Start. Rod and Al, myself and Andrew are ready to go. Rod leans over to me and Andrew and says, “Good luck guys, you are going to do great!” The race clock starts, and we are off. Andrew and I are super hyped, and start to jog at a good clip with the middle of the pack. As we enter the woods on the icy, singletrack trail, my adrenaline takes over and I tell Andrew we should pick up the pace. We do, running on the sides of the trail downhill past teams, slipping occasionally, but moving our way out to the front of the pack. We arrive at the passport station very quickly, ahead of most if not all of the teams in the race. This was probably as far in the lead that we would be for the whole race. We ran out the three mile trail, blood pumping and now over-warm in all our winter layers, and we headed to the bikes for a quick bike section over to our paddle put in.

We arrived at the paddle put-in early, with a few teams passing us on the way in. I noticed early on that Andrew was slower than his normal bike pace, and offered him some gel. We quickly discovered that our gel flasks were very hard to squeeze on account of the cold… Hmm. Looks like we already had problems with energy although we didn’t realize it yet.

The paddle around Halfmoon lake was bitterly cold. The wind was blowing hard, and snow and sleet were flying in on us as well. We were getting splashed and soaked by our paddles and the waves, and the 4 mile paddling section seemed to crawl by in slow motion. Paddling may not be our strong suit, but coming out of the paddle was worse. Although we finished relatively quickly and still hovering in the top 15 teams, we opted to take some time and change wet clothes upon transitioning back to the bikes. It was at this point that we both started to shiver, Andrew so much that he couldn’t untie his own shoes. We got clothes changed and realized we had made one very critical error: we didn’t have dry gloves to change into, and our current gloves were soaked through. We squeezed them out, mounted our bikes and started to ride, hoping to regain some warmth.

The cold wind blew through our wet clothes and chilled us, our already numb hands couldn’t actuate any levers on the bikes at all. Andrew actually crashed into me from behind because he couldn’t squeeze his brakes and he didn’t want to ride into the busy street ahead. Along with some other teams, we managed our way through a hike-a-bike section, following the footprints in the snow of the lead teams ahead. We continued to slow our pace as we were both too cold to move as fast as we should, and we were both behind on our food and drink because a lot of our food was frozen at this point. The wind was carrying a light blowing snow/sleet mix, and it was very hard to see as we rod on into it.

We continued to bike, for miles, and at some point were stopped at a checkpoint when I looked back and saw Rod and Al. This evoked two feelings for me. The first was excitement for them, the second was disappointment for me and Andrew. We had lost a lot of ground and this was not to be the race where we established a “fast” team. This mentality only further sunk our spirits and decision making ability, but at least for a while, we could race with Rod and Al as well, enjoying the camaraderie of our teammates and friends.

We biked onward together, through a town called Hell. Not kidding, seriously, it was called Hell, Michigan, and it just so happens that as we were biking it, it was snowing, so, I guess you could say Hell froze over. I couldn’t resist saying that.

When we got through with the 16-17 mile bike section, we transitioned to our navigation gear. At this point, we were sitting at about the middle of the pack. We had a 5 color orienteering map with a number of checkpoints on it. The parking lot was bustling with the activity of many teams in transition, and again we were off, ahead of Rod and Al. We met up with Team Comfortably Numb, and starting working with them on the nav course. Again, Andrew started to slow. He looked at me nervously and said that his legs were cramping up. I could tell he was disappointed, a seasoned runner who in all rights should have been leaping and bounding past my slow self. He said he though he would have to drop out now, because he could not go on. I took a moment to think. Any racer knows that when people start talking about dropping out, things can go from bad to worse quickly. I calmly told Andrew not to worry about his legs. We’ll walk a little, you’ll eat a gel packet and these ibuprofen, and drink some water. You’ll be kicking in no time. This critical moment brought us back to life: Andrew trusted me enough to take the “meds”, and he was feeling better in 30 minutes. A small victory. We had lost some ground, but were now working neck and neck with Rod and Al. We would run ahead of them, they would catch us as we were punching a checkpoint and so on. Finally, we all ran into another team we call friends, Team “V” (the v stands for something, and it sounds like “veer-abroad-our-sauna” I’m just not going to try and spell it correctly here.) Anyway, I made a quick and hasty decision to follow team “V” as they cut across the trails in order to find a CP. We left Rod and Al behind, and quickly we were lost. When we had finally gotten our bearings, we had lost about 30 minutes, and we had missed a checkpoint. We decided to skip it, as we had already passed it by. We moved on and started finding checkpoints again. We were soon joined by an elated Rod and Al, who had correctly identified every checkpoint thus far and were now by all rights kicking our butts. Along the way we had all realized that we had forgotten our helmets, which were part of the mandatory gear for the zipline checkpoint. It dawned on me later to start asking teams if we could borrow their helmets, and finally we found a generous team. Team Hafke Legal Services (I think it was you guys?) happened upon us, and they kindly gave us their helmets. We parted ways and continued on in our quest to gain ground, finding all the remaining checkpoints, and sprinting to the final CP, a zip line. We nailed the zipline, and ran in for the finish at a full on jog. It was all the effort we could muster, but we were done, 30 minutes before the cutoff, and having found all but one checkpoint. We ran in with one thoughts on our minds: “Would it be enough?”

We were greeted at the finish by a relaxed Rod and Al, who had already finished and had grabbed every checkpoint. They nailed the whole course, racing a very good race, steady, strong, and consistent, with little or no errors. It was great to see that an unexpected “slower” team Fat Otter had taken 11th place. Andrew and me, the “fast” guys, grabbed 25th of a 92 team field. 77 of the 92 teams completed the course. Infiterra put on a great race, Thanks to all of those guys and their volunteers for keeping this sport moving in the Midwest!

The post race for the December Chill made it all even better. Rod, Al, Andrew, myself and all of our friends with Team “V” celebrated with pizza, beer, and dirty martinis around a hot-tub and pool, relaxing our sore muscles and generally have a good time. We knew we would be back next year already.

Race report by: Peter Semenchuk, Team Fat Otter