Recovery
Team Member Chelsey reporting-
It is crazy to think that a week ago today we were making our way through the Empty Corridor, a desert the size of Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland combined. We were only half way through our 70-mile desert trek and still had 3 more days of competing in The Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge Race. It was at this point in the race where I stopped and said ” Wow, this is brutally amazing.” So many oxymoron type thoughts cross your mind while adventure racing, “I hurt, I hate this…. but I never want this to stop.” I think it is where the term “love- hate relationship” came from.
This was my 2nd real adventure race, my 1st international one, and my 1st stage race. A lot of firsts. A stage race is where the racers start each “stage” en masse, and race non-stop until the end of the stage. Sometimes, the stage ends with a short rest, and right away leads into another stage, sometimes it ends with a night of rest before starting again in the morning. Each team has 4 people and in the world of professional adventure racing, teams must be co-ed. Our team consisted of Jason Magness, Daniel Staudigal, and Eric Meyer. Jason, Daniel and I had spent the greater part of the year playing and racing together, so we pretty much knew where our place on the team was. Jason plays the role of the navigator/driving force/slave driver and Daniel plays the joker and mule, carrying the heavier team gear. I play the girl, my job being to keep up. Eric was a wild card.
We met Eric through yoga and the Outdoor Retailer Show. He has spent over 9 months climbing Everest and K2, and is sponsored by Talus Outdoor Technologies. This was his first adventure race ever… he had no idea what he was getting himself into. We could have made a Reality show out of the whole thing. “YogaSlackers take famous K2 Climber Eric Meyer through one of the hardest Adventure Races in the World, will he make it!?”
Kayaking
The first day of the race started with a “prologue” in which we biked 12 miles, ran 8miles, swam 1 km and kayaked for 6 miles. I have never done a triathlon in my life, so going all out right from the start has not been my mode of training. Luckily I was to have 5 more days and at least 9 more Mass Starts to warm up to this idea! An hour after we finished the prologue ,we were back in the kayaks for a long ocean paddling stage. We paddled 40 km of rough ocean to an island in the middle of the Persian Gulf. We navigated by way of google earth maps and GPS, which was a first for Jason as the navigator. It was a little confusing as the maps were a little old and Abu Dhabi and the surrounding area is changing so fast. They are actually creating new islands everywhere! On the tiny sandy island, we set up a bivouac camp with the other teams, cooked an amazing Indian dinner thanks to Eastern Essence, we passed out. The next morning promised us 70 more kilometers of paddling, with the aches and pains of the previous day still fresh…for me just getting up was a bit of a challenge! Luckily the day provided us with calm water and we were only set back a little – wading through mangroves and portaging our heavy boats across a sand spit. By that afternoon, Eric got the hang of paddling with a wing blade, so staying together as a team was much smoother, we finished the day by 2:30 pm at the beach where we got to guzzle some water and down some pineapple before they shipped us off to the Liwa desert for our next stage.
At the end of our 3 hours on the bus, we arrived at our 2nd Camp. It was an amazing site. Tents every where in the middle of the desert, and in true YogaSlackers form Daniel and I went to play some acroyoga before the sun went down. Red fine sand felt so good underneath our bare feet, however for the next 2 days we would be doing everything we could not to let any trace of that same sand inside our boots. Our plan was to wear our Gore-tex Inov-8 288 shoes with gaiters over the top and duct tape around our calves making sure there was no sand getting in. When I was all set to go, complete with my tights, desert shirt and desert hat, I looked like an 80′s Moon Walker Halloween Costume gone bad. After breakfast and a half hour of preventive foot maintenance, we were ready to go. At 7 am we were all off on our 70 mile trek through the desert. There were 6 mandatory checkpoints and 6 optional checkpoints. Every optional one we skipped resulted in a 6 hour penalty. We had 35 hours to complete the stage, which had to include an 8 hours of rest somewhere along the way. At this point in the race we knew that if we wanted to place in the top 20 we had to make every check point. Missing one was not an option, but only a few hours into the race both Daniel and Eric were experiencing heat exhaustion, and were ready to take a long rest. At the 4th check point we made the risky decsion to take the full 8 hours rest and then go with out stopping as fast as we could until we completed the course. After doing a much needed yoga session complete with some long hold inversions to drain our tired legs we attempted to sleep 3 guys and 1 girl in a 2 man tent… it was interesting.
4176151676_ed3bf6d1f3 desert yoga session
The next leg was amazing, brutal, frusterating, stressful and spectacular. The sunrise coming up over the sand dune mountains was amazing. Jumping down the sand dunes was freeing. Making sure we didn’t kill Eric and get to the finish line in time was stressful. To get through it, we all had our seperate mantras and little goals. The checkpoints served as little accomplishments and a 2 minute break to refill our bladders and maybe a minute in the shade of a jeep if we were lucky. I personally didn’t really have a mantra, instead I felt as if I was purging my sins in this life and past lives. Instant Karma. I also spent time pretending that I was the Buddha escaping from the Chinese. What ever our imaginations came up with helped, no matter how silly. In the moment, it seems perfectly sane. We had one goal – the finish line.
At checkpoint 6, Eric puked right infront of the medic. Jason put him on tow (basically tying him to a bungee cord leash), while Daniel took his pack and I played cheerleader. 20 miles, 2 checkpoints, and countless sand mountain ridges later we arrived at the finish line 30 minutes before the cut off. After a night of amazing food and drowsy story telling between teams, we fell asleep with the alarm set for 4am – Day 5 was to start early.
4176149366_bb731fde88_m Eric on tow
At 6 am there was another mass start on the bikes. We had a slow start, and shortly into the ride Jason was screaming “you are a munchkin!!” This is not the first time I have heard this, so it wasn’t until he yelled- “your bike seat is slipping,you are way to low”, that I realized why it had been getting harder and harder to pedal. We finished at an amazing and bizarre 5 star luxury hotel in the middle of the barren desert – a full 20 minutes behind the top teams.
An hour later, after eating pastries and doing a full acrobatic performance flow for the TV crews we lined up for our second mass start of the day – another biking stage. I am so thankful I had no idea what it was going to be like. If I’d known that there would be 45 mph winds blowing sand into every crease of my earlobes and eyelids, with stretches of road that were covered with a foot of sand…I’d have checked into the hotel! This leg was really amazing in retrospect though, learning how to ride my bike down hill through sand, getting a pepsi in the middle of the desert and almost getting blown off the road. Our team finished in good time with Eric still alive and pedaling. Life was good.
The 6th and final day was supposed to be the easiest day. Our quote of the race was “Once we get done with day (insert # 1-5 here), the rest will be easier.” Unfortunatly this was never the case, but luckily it kept us all going till the very end.
We woke at 3 am, happy to be stuffing our sleeping bags and rolling our mats up for the last time. An hour later we were bused to the base of Jebel Hafeet. The stage was to start with 12 miles of orienteering in the darkness. The first 6 miles of it, I was puking inside my mouth trying to keep up with Jason. Luckily he had me on tow, so if I slowed down at all, I couldn’t fall too far behind. Halfway through, we switched the tow to Eric.. It looked like he had hit his wall and was not bouncing back at all. As the sun rose, we snagged the last checkpoint on the flats, and prepared to ascend the 3000 feet to Abu Dhabi’s highest point. On the climb up the mountain, Eric was getting whiter and whiter. Our race had been good enough this far to almost guarantee our team a spot in the top 20 and the coveted title of “top rookie team” (which came with a $2500 award), but we still had to finish each stage within the allotted time.
With Jason behind him and Dan and I in front we managed to make it to the finish line 5 minutes before the next bike leg was about to start. If we had missed that biking leg, we would have lost a few places. Luckily we were able to hang in there for the last 40 km of biking and final 5 km run to the finish line. After we crossed we immediately flipped upside down into headstands, hand stands and acro yoga play while the medics and other racers debated wether it was a good idea to do such advanced poses after an intense race.
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That night we ate delicious food while images of the previous days feats ran through on multiple flat screen t.v’s. It all felt like a dream, did this really happen? It was fun comparing notes with Eric. My favorite quote from him was “It was like climbing Everest and K2 in 6 days. All the suffering from both of those mountains was crammed into the last six days. Adventure racing is just suffering in fast forward.”
Back in civilization we cleaned up, donned our new sweet podium jerseys (thanks Prana) and started planning for the next one. We can’t help it. Addictions are like that…
