The Bonk Hard Chill

As Shakespeare once said, "What’s in a name?" Well in this case, not much. This is a February race every year for Bonk Hard and is always appropriately named, but at the pre-race meeting Friday night, Jason started off the meeting by grabbing the microphone and saying, "Welcome to the Bonk Hard ‘Heat-Wave.’ Yep, that sums it up. Somehow the temps have been in the low teens and 20s for most of this winter it seems, but on race weekend, the lows were only 45ish and the highs were in the 60s. As always, Bonk Hard had some killer prize give-aways at the Friday night pre-race meeting, including free entries into a Bonk Hard Race, AR backpacks by Columbia, Salomon XT Wings trail shoes, a Kuat bike rack for cars, and many more. The free Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s was killer too, but we all left town before we could use it. Wonder if we could sell them on eBay?

We stayed up late Friday night plotting CP’s 1-26, and getting last minute mandatory gear stuffed into our packs. As usual, we didn’t sleep very soundly in anticipation of a long raceday ahead. I was especially anxious to see how my new GoLite racing pack was going to perform for this race. I really like my Salomon pack, but it is about an 18 litre volume, and this new GoLite pack is a 25 litre pack which I thought would be better since some of the mandatory gear in a winter race tends to be bulky and heavy. Well it turned out to be the schnizzle-fo-dizzle, plus a few more schnizzles and another mo-fo-dizzle. It was super roomy like the Adams Mark Honeymoon Suite, and all of my gear fit nicely in there with room to spare. I think I am becoming a backpack junkie. Most of my friends call me the headlamp junkie. Ok, I have a couple, or nine....

On race morning, we had to first stop at Camp Rising Sun to stage our bikes, and then we drove our cars to the actual Race HQ at Camp Clover Point.
At 6:25 am, the National Anthem played, and we started off on a trekking leg at 6:30 am with headlamps. We hit all of the CP’s without any problems, and then went on to the bike drop area and rode our bikes a very short distance down to the lake where we dropped them lakeside in a staging area and transitioned to the paddling leg.

The paddling wasn’t too bad. Admittedly, the lake water was really, really cold, and the coves had a ton of ice in them, with very large pieces floating about too. It was a bit disconcerting to run your canoe into those floating ice chunks with thoughts of capsizing into the frigid waters. But it wasn’t that bad, and we never came close to capsizing. The biggest thing about the paddling leg was the paddles. The race website stated that you can bring your own paddles. Well... we didn’t. When we saw so many other racers with double bladed kayak paddles, we knew we were in trouble on the paddling leg. Teams can put down some serious time on opponents if they are jamming with two people who both have kayak paddles rather than a standard single blade canoe paddle. Add new break apart kayak paddles to the gear wish list.
Once we finished most of the lake paddling, we canoed back to the beach where we dropped our bikes off earlier, but this time we had to load them into our canoes and strap them in and take off for another mile or so of lake paddling. That was stressful. I just bought a new carbon framed mountain bike, and thoughts of that bike on the bottom of the lake were.... well, there was a ‘pucker’ factor of 10+ during that paddling leg if you get my drift. Two bikes strapped into the canoe also adds some problems to the stability of the canoe, but honestly, it turned out to not be a big deal.
So we paddle to the next CP where we took out the canoes and transitioned to the mountain bike. As always, it feels good to use different parts of your body just about the time when your muscles are getting tired from doing something else. Arms and back were tired, but now it was time to mash on the bike and crank those leg muscles.

The biking leg was mostly on gravel roads, so that was good as we knew the trails around the area were very muddy. We hate riding on muddy trails for a lot of reasons, but not the least of which is that it just isn’t good trail stewardship at all. Alot of racers on trails can cause some serious damage, but thankfully we were mostly off of them except for trekking on them at times. So eventually we biked our way down to a church (CP23 I think) where we went inside and received an additional 16 or so CP’s that we had to sit down and plot. We also took some time to re-fuel as the church volunteers had tons of juices, fruits, turkey sandwiches, etc waiting for us. Wow, these volunteers never cease to amaze me for the hours they dedicate to races like this for our benefit. I was plotting our new points as Ken and Marc took turns reading out the UTM coordinates to me, and between the CP plots I would scarf down a bite of turkey sandwich that was handed to me. They had bananas to eat too, but our team was really hoping that they had plantains....Oh well, that’s another story.

After plotting the new CP’s we took off to hit a few more CP’s on the bike, and then we came to CP26 where we dropped the bikes again and transitioned back to trekking where we were essentially doing an orienteering course. Often an orienteering course isn’t all that large, but this one seemed to cover miles, and the terrain was pretty darn steep and muddy at times. We had an awful time finding one of the CP’s and we became discouraged for a short while, but we got our wits about us, regrouped and somehow we intersected with a jeep trail that actually showed up on the map! It was then that I knew where we were again! We then backtracked a bit to hit the CP and all was right with the world again. We had reference points again to shoot bearings to the remaining CP’s. We all agreed that this was tough terrain to bushwack through. It was steep, muddy on the hillsides, rocky at times, and lots of deadfall. We weren’t traveling on trails, I’ll put it that way.

While still hitting the CP’s on this trekking leg, we came to what I refer to as a crucial point in the race. We hit the CP that was on an old abandoned boat dock. We had about three more CP’s to hit before we were to go back to the bike drop area and retrieve the bikes. It was beginning to get dark. I asked Jill what time it was and it was getting to be about 4:00. We had only an hour or so of daylight left. We had to decide if we were going to push on and try to find the remaining CP’s, or whether we would just start making our way back to the bikes and then on to the finish and skip the last few CP’s. Ken did a great job of rallying the troops, and we agreed that we had headlamps, let’s use ‘em. We hit the last few CP’s very accurately during the waning hours of daylight. Unbeknownst to us at that time, this would become our demise for our final ranking. Then we made our way back to the bikes. It was about 6:15ish, and yes, very dark.

We transitioned back to the bikes and rode about 3 miles maybe where we then had to get back across the lake where the finish area was. Since it was dark and getting cold, the race directors decided to hold up our team and a few others so that we could paddle across the lake as a large group for safety reasons. They also provided a small watercraft that followed us as well for safety. We once again strapped our bikes into the canoes, turned on our headlamps and blinking red lights on the bikes and off we went into the icy waters one last time in the dark. It reminded me of the scene in the movie "Titanic," minus all of the floating bodies in the water, of course. The water was very calm. Fortunately this paddling leg was only about a mile. We took out at the beach and jumped onto our bikes for the final few miles or so of biking to the finish.
We made it to the finish at about 7:30. Technically the race cut-off time was 7 pm, but we were told on the course that we would still be allowed to finish since they were holding us up as a group at that final lake paddle.

Once race results were posted, to our surprise we had a very disappointing finish. It turns out that the volunteers supposedly informed us at a bike drop to trek transition area that we were to be back at the bike drop no later than 5 pm or suffer a CP penalty for every minute past 5 pm for the CP’s in that orienteering section of the woods. For whatever reason, we didn’t hear that or it wasn’t told to us, and so we made it back to that area well past 5 pm and unbeknownst to us, we suffered severe penalties, getting credit for only 31 CP’s when in reality we hit all 42. Oh well, life is full of disappointments. We still had a lot of fun and learned a lot about racing, ourselves and each other.
Race Summary by Bryan Greaser
Next up: Ozark Greenways Adventure Race