Wanted to write a quick report on how the excellent weekend training went.
First, thanks to Ken for setting this up.
We traveled down to the Mt Hood area on Wednesday afternoon, and met with Matt at the Mountain Air Lodge (Matt's cabin in the woods) http://www.inspiredadventure.net/news.html
Thursday saw us discussing gear selection, reviewing what gear we had all brought, team selection, navigation, some rope work (ascending, Tyrolean traverse, and regular traversing), then we got the coordinates for the following two days of training, which we plotted with our new found navigation skills (from UTM coordinates :) ) and then made a route selection.
Friday saw us up at 05:30, a big hearty breakfast, pack the cars, and head for the start of the bike leg. We had estimated this at about 25 miles, and around 5-6 hours when we plotted the route.
We started well enough, and then almost immediately went almost vertically up for a couple of thousand feet of hike a bike, but where then rewarded by our first incredible views ov Mt Hood in the morning sunshine, and an incredible single track descent, that was followed by several hours of uphill slog on fire roads, which rewarded us with another awesome view of Mt Hood over a beautiful alpine Lake. A LOT more uphill, then a bit of downhill saw us at the top of the Ski area, then followed some excellent downhill which was over way to soon, then some more single track.
Now we where on our way back, and it was all downhill, over some more great single track, finishing with a fast pace line down the highway to get us back before dusk.
We returned to the house around 19:00 after riding 71Km (about 40 miles) in 12 Hours.
Then more food, and resupply for the hike. We headed out on the Hike at 20:00 and by now it was totally dark. We had estimated about 28 miles and at 2mph, that would be 14 hours, so hoped to be back around 10:00 Saturday mng :)
Anyway, we started up yet another incredible hill, for something like a 4000" ascent. Then downhill. We managed to get misplaced a bit in the middle, and only got to the end of this first hill as dawn was rising on Saturday mng.
After this first peak, we had a relatively flat trail to the next objective, which we where supposed to achieve thru a short (1-2 mile) bushwhack, but what looked so easy on the 1/69000 map turned out to be totally impassable, so we took the decision to miss that objective, and head back towards the next one. We managed that, and after another 6-7 miles of flat / downhill hiking started the final ascent to a short rappel.
We finally reached the Rappel around 14:30 Saturday afternoon, after being out for 32.5 hours - definitely a record for me, and I think a massive achievement for all of us.
The rappel was a great way to finish what was an awesome weekend.
The weather was also incredibly kind, with glorious sunshine all day Friday, followed by an incredibly warm night, and then Saturday was clear with a little cloud, which kept the temp down nicely.
I learned an incredible amount of stuff, and had so much of my existing knowledge put into context. We had the opportunity to practice many things such as bike and hike towing, with different systems, and learned from Matt's immense experience.
Truly an excellent training course for anyone contemplating adventure racing.
The food was incredible, although my fellow racers might tell you that I should have eaten a little less of the 15 bean chili we had on Thursday night :)
Thanks to Matt S for an excellent course, and also to Team Chili Bean (Ken, Hailey, Heather, & Matt H) who where such excellent team mates for the whole weekend.
Cheers
Steve
(AKA Swamp Gas)