Above: The 2012 USARA Adventure Race National Championship from the point of view of its second-place winners, Term Tecnu. Video by Aaron Johnson.
Most people you find biking uphill through sleet on a rainy October weekend in the Catskills are tough. The folks who do it as part of a 30-hour, 100-mile adventure race course are hardcore.
On October 12 and 13, the 2012 USARA Adventure Race National Championship was held in the Catskills, starting with a canoe paddle on the Pepacton Reservoir in Delaware County and ending a day later when exhausted racers crossed the finish line at the Hudson Valley Resort in Kerhonkson, Ulster County on bicycles. (We had some great photos of the race start back in October.)
In between, the teams of racers camped out in freezing weather, bushwacked through brush to find hidden caches, rappelled down a waterfall, and biked and ran for miles. Part marathon, part obstacle course, part scavenger hunt, the race tries you to the limit.
Just being fit isn't enough. The team captain of the winning team, Justin Bakken, told the Active Times:
Your smarts are #1. What comes at you and how you deal with it is 95% of what adventure racing is about. It’s not like a triathlon where you can pre-run the course and know what’s coming up ahead. In adventure racing, most of the course is going to be unknown until you’re out on it, competing. And race directors, if they want to be tricky, will put in any sort of non-motorized transportation they can think of—horseback riding, rollerblading, scooters, ropes challenges (ascending, rappelling, traversing) riverboarding (like boogie boarding down a river through whitewater rapids).
Just like in the fictional Hunger Games, where the directors of the competition can change the terrain around the contestants on a whim. (At least in adventure racing, they're not trying to kill each other.)
So what is it like competing in an adventure race? Unfortunately, it's hard for spectators to tell -- there are no grandstands in the middle of the forest at night. The most they see is at the start and the finish -- the middle is off in the bush somewhere.
But thanks to Team Tecnu, which came in 2nd place in the race, we have video of how it was this year in the Catskills. Garret Bean, a member of Team Tecnu, sent us the fantastic documentary video his team produced, which was shot by a videographer who followed them along the course from start to finish. (Kudos to him.) You can watch the whole thing above.
In the video, Team Tecnu member Kyle Peter tells us that "this course was by far the most challenging Nationals of the four that I've done. Extremely difficult, relentless bushwacks with some of the thickest fight of vegetation that I've had in a race."
In his interview in Active Times, Bakken described how the weather was so cold that his team had to thaw their shoes before putting them on in the morning:
The night of the race, it got below freezing. They race in all conditions, and they don’t really cancel them or delay them at all, so you can be out there in some pretty nasty stuff. In New York, we were biking up this gravel two-track when it started sleeting. That’s a moment when you say to yourself, “Wow, the weather can’t get much worse than this—30º and sleeting.” That night it cleared up and got really cold—puddles were freezing over—and our bike shoes were totally frozen when we arrived at a transition area around midnight. We couldn’t get our feet into our bike shoes, so we had to warm them up next to a fire before we could put them on. That was one of the most challenging aspects of that race, to be sure.
Sounds like the Catskills to me. Bravo to all the race participants!
