3 Days of Syllamo- 50k

Ken and I travelled down Hwy. 5 South to run the 3 days of Syllamo 50k trail race. It was a tough drive down there with both of us struggling to stay awake at times. We arrived about thirty minutes before the start. We sat in the truck for the last few minutes before the start with the engine running and the heater cranked. I have learned to almost hate the morning of a race because of the anticipation of just wanting to get out there and go.

At last we were off. The race headquarters was where the first aid station was at the Sylamore 25k that I had done three weeks earlier. I do not have the patience to tell about all of the details of the run. Two people, among many, that we became acquainted with were Lindy from Republic, MO and Robert from Georgia. I believe that he said Augusta. Allen Honeycutt lives in Berryville, AR and we talked for a small stretch. That is one of the neatest things about these races. No one is so ultra competitive that they cannot talk. You can tell that they are just happy to be out there experiencing the trails and the people.

The run ended up being twenty-five miles. The experience was awesome. I do not know what next year holds but I would like to run all three days next year. The three days consists of a 50k, 50-miler, and a 20k.

The legs were tired on the drive home and we had to make a couple of stops to stretch and revive a little. I definitely know what they mean by a runner's high after completing these races. I hope to do a 50-miler soon.

My next race will be the Frisco Highline 50k on April 18th. Overall, I feel like leg strength is my biggest training thing right now. I just need to get more miles in on running.

This post is by Marc.

The Sylamore Trail 25k

I had been viewing this race for some time on the internet and I decided about 3 weeks before the scheduled date to sign up for it. I wanted to do the 50k but I did not have the guts to get that done. Looking back, I could have done it, but I am glad that I did not.



I headed out on Friday afternoon, and after about a three hour drive I ended up in Allison, AR. I got my sweatshirt for entering and proceeded to find a campground for the night. I was going to sleep in my truck and then later decided to get a campsite and pitch a tent. I built a fire in a fire ring with old scrap lumber from the addition to the office at the Sylamore Creek Campground. I sat around the fire for a couple of hours reading and eating peanuts and drinking Gatorade.



I turned in about nine o'clock and slept well until about one. I was a little cold. I dozed until three and nature called. I was in and out until 4:19 and I decided to get on up because my alarm was set at 4:30. I was cold as I laid on the ground in my sleeping bag. I expected the weather to turn colder that morning according to the news. As cold as I was laying on the ground I really figured that I was in for a cold race. As it turned out I figured out that the ground was cold, but the air was not nearly as cold. I could not even see my breath as I came out of the tent.



I proceeded to drive to the Angler's resort where the race started. We were supposed to check in at 6:00 a.m. I was there at 5:00. I love being early. I had my choice of parking spots. I knew it would get crowded and boy did it.



The 50k started at 7:00 and the 25k started at 7:15. We were off. We encountered the creek crossing at just over a mile. This was not wading. This was crossing the Sylamore Creek which was up to my titties. There was no rope and it was slippery. One miscue and you were swimming. One lady was swimming in front of me. It really would not have been that big a deal had I fallen because I was pretty deep already.



Anyway, out of the water and on with the run. It was beautiful. It completely blows away anything that I have ever ran before as far as beauty. There was over 6,000 feet of ascent and descent. There was one aid station for the 25k'ers at about six miles. I stopped long enough to get a peanut butter and syrup sandwich square and a quarter of a banana. We then proceeded up a million stairs. This began the major climbing portion of the race.



After climbing forever, I distanced myself from two girls that I had been trailing for some time on the downhill. I made it to the halfway point and punched my bib number and began the journey back. I met a guy named Ryan and he trailed me the rest of the way. He ran when I ran and walked the hills when I walked the hills.



We came back to the same aid station and I refueled with the same food as before and I filled my Camelbak with Gatorade and was off again. Ryan and I talked a little here and there. I heard the girls talking behind me and it inspired me to run harder. They caught me at the creek crossing. This crossing was very cold. The adrenaline was not surging like the first time and my legs ached. The girls passed me in the creek and they began running as soon as they exited the water. I was not able to start the running engines immediately. It took me a hundred yards or so before I could begin to jog again.



I walked up a steep, short climb and then began to run the rest of the way in. I crossed the finish and asked if I was the first 50k'er. It got a chuckle from the race director's wife. I was chilly very quickly after stopping. I drove back to the campground and took a wonderfully hot shower and began my drive back home.

It was a wonderful trip. I plan on doing it again next year. I encourage anyone to. I am now preparing for what I was glad that I did not do on this one.........the 50k at the 3 days of Syllamo. This will be ran on March 13th on a lot of the same trails as this one. I am very excited about this next challenge.

This post is by Marc.

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

Castlewood "8 Hour" Adventure Race

Sat morning, December 6th, 4 am. Wake up time for the Bonk Hard Castlewood 8 hr Adventure Race. Ken, Jill, Marc and I all stayed together the night before the race, packed our packs together, and plotted the checkpoints that we had already received. When I took a peek outside at 4 am, I saw a very light dusting of snow covering the lawns, streets, and houses. Oh boy. I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that thoughts of, "What in the H*%^ am I doing this race for?" didn’t pop into my head...... And stayed there for a while.
We headed to Castlewood at 5 am, and passports and additional maps were given out at 5:30 am. We staged our bikes near the Race HQ pavilion and were informed that we were all going to be bused to a remote unknown location. The buses arrived at 6 am and proceeded to take us on a drive out I-44. It seemed like the bus ride was 40 minutes long. I was halfway expecting to see a highway sign reading, " Rolla, 20 miles."Fortunately, we exited in Eureka, took some backroads and arrived at the race start area about 6:40. While many racers from STL may have had an idea where we were, our team had no clue where this bus trip just took us. We stood for the national anthem, and then Marc lined up to run out to two designated volunteers and brought back our clue sheets and UTM coordinates for additional plotting. Ken plotted the CP’s onto the map and off we went on a short trek to the first leg of the race, a paddling leg at 7 am with freezing temperatures.

This paddling leg ended up being about 8-10 miles I believe. There was an orienteering course mixed in there too. We did it without any major problems.
Once we pulled over to the takeout, we had a mandatory gear check, and then transitioned to trek, hitting CP’s 6 through 13. We were doing well until we moved from CP 7 to CP 8. We had major problems finding CP 8, which turned out to be right inside a tunnel going under the RR tracks in a remote area of Castlewood State Park. I won’t go into all of the details of the "CP 8 fiasco," but it cost us time, A LOT of time. Once we finally found CP 8, we easily and quickly hit CP’s 9 through 13. But we were morally defused at that point. It was a defining and testing moment for our team to say the least. Frustrations were setting in, having teams that you were way ahead of begin passing you, etc. Every adventure racing team has dealt with moments like this, and it really tests the team factor to see what every individual is made up of, as well as testing the collective team unit itself. We responded by sucking it up and trekking faster and harder. We noticed some teams beginning to walk and were ‘hitting the wall,’ but we pressed on pretty hard and we all felt pretty strong still.
We arrived back at Race HQ, transitioned to the mountain bike and hit CP’s 14 through 29 pretty much without any problems. We then went out on a final trek to find as many CP’s as we could before the 5 pm race cut-off as there was substantial time penalties for being out past 5 pm. We took off and found seven CP’s, one of which was on a beautiful bluff overlooking the Meremac River at sunset, and it was awe inspiring. We made it back to the Finish line with a little time to spare.
Once it was all said and done, we finished 10th place in 4 person co-ed out of 21 teams. We were disappointed in not having a more respectable showing, feeling capable of finishing in the top 5 if we had raced to our capability, but we raced for 10 hard hours and learned a lot about ourselves and the team. Another race under our belt is always a good thing.
By Bryan Greaser
Next up: Bonk Hard Chill, February 2009

Sand Spring River Race 2008

Ken and I got the pleasure of racing together in the third annual, two person AR sprint at Sand Springs Resort on the Niangua River just outside of Lebanon, MO.

The morning was cold. It was not cool, or brisk, it was cold. We were prepared with plenty of clothing for the pre-race preparations. Ken was even prepared for a total eclipse of the sun as he still wore his headlamp in broad daylight (he had just forgotten to take it off). We pulled in and began to sing “Stayin Alive” by the Bee Gees. We had discussed the lyrics earlier in the week and both admitted that we could not understand the lyrics but we liked the title so it has stuck temporarily as our theme song. This was especially true on this day as Ken had heard this song on the radio earlier in the morning. Come to think of it, what kind of radio station still plays that song Ken?

We traveled by bus to the beginning run (sprint) of 2.2 miles. We ran the first mile in 6:34 and the second mile in 7:04 and was very glad to see the run ending and the canoe starting. We neither one could have kept up that pace much longer. I took the front and Ken took the back of the canoe and off we went.

Further down the river I bailed out and headed to land to do the mystery event. It consisted of a zip line across the Niangua River. It was a blast! Thanks for letting me do that Ken. The next one is yours. When I got done zipping, the instructions were not very clear on what was next as far as me getting back into the boat. I asked the volunteer if I just needed to jump in or what. She said yes and so I did. Ken was right there with the canoe and I dove into the canoe and we were off………………..that was short lived. The officials then decided to inform us that I had to get out of the boat, back into the river, and run a few feet past a fallen log before I could get back into the boat. Soooo, out of the boat I went, down the bank and then back into the boat. Now we were legal and off again.

A little further down the river we beached the canoe and were off for a two mile technical run. By the way, did I mention that it was technical? Up the hills was a hike. Down the hills it was sometimes a free fall. We slid down parts of it. It was some amazing scenery overlooking the river. You really did need all of your concentration on parts as a fall from the heights was definitely possible. The highlight of this run for me was when we missed part of the trail and it took us a bit to relocate it. Once we did, we had surrendered a couple of spots to other teams. We got in a traffic jam because of this. We began a downhill run and the teams in front of us were very cautious about the downhill. I was thinking of our need to get past them and about that time I heard a voice behind me say, “Gotta go.” Next thing that I see is Ken bounding down the hill, passing the teams effortlessly, and making his own trail. I knew that was my cue to get on it also so down the hill I went making my own trail down the other side of the pack. That move alone made up major ground for us.

It was then back to the canoes for a short trip back to the transition area (TA). We were out of the river and off to our bikes. At this point I got to see Pam and the kids and my mom for a brief moment. It is always so good to see your family at these events and having them cheer you on.

The bike portion was seven miles. It was very technical and rocky and lots of major hills. We passed one or two teams on the bike. We then stashed our bikes and ran across the finish line together. The family was there and Dad had since joined them. I was so excited to see him there.

We had a blast. We finished 2nd in the men’s division and 6th overall out of about 40 teams.

The race was, once again, very well organized. Thanks to the volunteers and the Glendenning family for all of their hard work to put on this race.

Thanks for the pictures Pam, Dad, and Jenny.

Race summary by Marc

Burnin' at the Bluff 12 Hour Mountain Bike Challenge

This wasn't necessarily our adventure racing team that competed in this race, but I decided to include it on this blog anyway. The Burnin' at the Bluff 12 hour race has become a premier race put on by Mesa Cycles out of STL on a very technical, rocky, rooty and loose gravel short steep climbs around a 13 mile loop of Council Bluffs Lake south of Potosi, MO.

Cyclewerx sent four teams to this race, and I was racing with 15 year old up and coming phenom Garrett Smith and Scott Taylor in the 'Fast' division under the team name "B.A.M.F."

We had an incredibly consistent day of racing. We pretty much went out and raced a perfect race. It started at 9 am, and by 9:45 pm we each had completed 3 laps of nearly equal times for each lap. Not a single flat tire all day. Must have all been choosing good lines.

This was good enough for a 2nd place finish in the Fast division out of 10 teams. It was a nice finish to an excellent race that just gets better and better every year. A great race to finish off the mountain bike season and carry some momentum into the offseason and next year. I still have the Bonk Hard Racing Castlewood 8 Hour Adventure Race on December 6 with my AR team and we are sending myself, Marc, Jill and Ken, so I can't get complacent. There is still much prep to do.

By Bryan Greaser

Up next: Castlewood 8 Hour Adventure Race December 6, 2008