Everyone thought we were crazy for doing this one!! A 24 hour race in the middle of February….are we out of our minds??? Apparently we are!

We decided to come down the afternoon before and stay at the lovely Hotel Attica. The owners of the hotel are by far the most hospitable people I have met in a long time, but I’ll get to that a bit later. Since this was technically a ‘training’ race (believe me, it was real enough) we were racing two teams as one, so there would be five of us for this little adventure. We were probably not as prepared as we should have been and we ended up staying up pretty late dorking around with all of our gear.

Race morning came quick and we were off to the pre-race meeting. We immediately got through the gear check and received our maps and UTM coordinates for the race. I quickly got to plotting while everyone else got everything ready. The race was organized as 3 loops that we would be required to do in order. We were informed at the meeting that we would be starting on a quick out and back bike ride before starting the rest of the course. The ride turned out to be pretty awesome. It took us on a railroad grade into a quarry turned offroad park. After about an hour of dodging 4 wheelers and jeeps, we were back at transition and ready to start our first loop.

The first CP was at a waterfall in a nearby town. We found a couple of other teams there when we got there insisting that the CP was not there. Knowing better than taking another teams word, we scouted the area (which was amazing….great waterfall surrounded by what looked like a cavern of ice) and came to the same conclusion. We hopped back on the bikes and road to the next CP. At the checkpoint, we received UTM coordinates for and land nav section. As we were heading to the first nav point, we were joined by the volunteer’s dog who decided to stay with us for our 3 hours on this leg. At one point the stupid dog jumped into a river we were trekking along and couldn’t get out. Thanks to Andrew’s superhuman ability to rescue dogs from freezing rivers, the dog was back on the shore in seconds. After we finished getting the points, we were back on the bikes and heading back to transition.

We arrived at transition just before dark and decided to stay a while. There was a nice fire and hot soup the entire race for the teams as they would come back from the loops. This was a nice touch, but kept us in transition way too long. After our leisurely transition, we were back on the bikes and off on the next loop. We arrived at the first CP to find an ascend up a 70 foot cliff and a rappel back down. We rocked through this section due to a lot of practice the week prior, and we quickly back on the bikes and heading to the paddle put in. We arrived at the paddle CP and saw the piles of rubber rafts that would keep up out of the river for the next few hours. We were told that since we had a 3 person team and a 2 person team (making up the 5 of us) we would get three rafts to take us and our gear down river. We decided to put three bikes and two people in one raft, two bikes and two people in another raft, and Andrew in the third. We carried the rafts about a quarter mile down the road to the actual put in and began our float.

We decided to just float and steer for a while, but that just made us cold, so we eventually began to paddle to build up a little heat. This was especially amusing for us as we watched Andrew’s raft turn 90 degrees with every stroke. We had to stop at the transition area and check in about half way through the paddle and we took full advantage. As it turned out, we had to stay there anyway since there was a problem with the take out downstream. After being held up for nearly a half hour, it was decided that we would have to ride the bikes down to the paddle take out and continue the coarse from there. We were tired of riding and decided to just grab one more CP from that loop and continue on the last loop. We rode off and got the CP which didn’t have a punch, but rather instructions to ride back through the offroad coarse to get back to the TA. Yeah right!! We rode back on the road and made a quick transition to begin the next loop.

The last loop took us on the bikes to the next nav section (with one CP along the way) which we were looking forward to. When we arrived, we were given the UTMs to plot for the coarse. It looked fairly easy and we were quickly off to find Lover’s Leap.. the first of the land nav points. We found the CP fairly easily and took a short break there to simple admire the beauty of the area. We were high up on a bluff overlooking the forest and river just before sun up (I think it was around 5:00am)….it was amazing. The next CP proved to be a bit more challenging for us. We misidentified our location on the map and were looking a couple hundred meters off course for the CP. We were convinced we were in the right spot, but the lack of sleep was making it challenging to make the right decisions. We eventually identified our error and found the checkpoint right where it was supposed to be. We got the last of the 3 checkpoints with ease and returned to the bikes. We were supposed to traverse across the river with our bikes and continue from there, but we decided we didn’t want to commit to the additional mileage on the bikes since we were all sick of riding. The race director allowed us to traverse across and back instead, so we seized the opportunity. Peter and Andrew decided to traverse with their bikes, while Al, Patrick, and I decided to go bikeless for the traverse. What a great spot for the traverse…..it was my first time and it rocked!!

After finishing the traverse, we jumped back on the bikes and were back to the TA for the finish. We rode in strong and together in 22 hours and 30 minutes. Out of the 16 or so teams that started, only 6 made it to the traverse. We estimate our finish in 3rd or 4th out of the 6. This was a great experience for all of us. I am really confident about our upcoming 24hr race schedule. Special congrats to Patrick who chose this for his first race and finished strong. Thanks again to Dynamic Adventures for this awesome event.

Oh Yeah….we decided to go back to the Hotel Attica to shower up and catch some zzzz before the post race brunch. The owners didn’t flinch when we walked in all adventure race disgusting. They offered up 2 showers and a room to sleep in. They even got the post race brunch going early so we could east and then sleep. On top of that, I don’t think they were going to charge us anything. It wasn’t until we offered to pay that they gave us the rooms and showers for $40. These people rock…If you’re ever near Attica, IN, stay at the Hotel Attica!!!