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The Fig Adventure Race - Team Outdoorzy.com
November 2006
Pine Ridge , KY
posted by Wade
This race took place in the Red River Gorge in North Eastern Kentucky. At the time I'm typing this the race results aren't available, but I think there were around 40 teams, 15 or so finished. Which is a testament to the difficulty of this race.
I was told that the race was 50 miles long in previous years, but was expanded to 60 miles this year.
The race started off at 6AM, the temperature was around 25 degrees, and the moon was full. The first leg was a canoe the length of a small lake and back. Our canoes, paddles, and pfds were covered in frost. Team Outdoorzy.com did well on this section, we were the 3rd team to pull up on the bank at the end of this leg, and the 2nd team out of the parking lot for the bike leg. We biked down the road a bit, then went off road to start the mountain bike section. The first obstacle we encountered was a former bridge. I say former because the only thing over this creek were two I beams. The beams were both about 10-12 inches across and covered in frost. We picked our bikes up onto our shoulders and tightrope walked across this. A fall would have probably ended the race for a competitor, it was about a 10-12 foot drop to the creek bed and the water was shallow.
Then up a huge hillside trough some mud and then on to get the first checkpoint. At this juncture several teams were hot on our heels. We decided to take a right at an intersection that looked to be the first checkpoint. NOPE...  We spent about 30 minutes looking and never found it. We learned that there was another right turn about 200 feet past our wrong-turn, that was the correct way.
We also passed a road when going for checkpoint 2 and wasted about 30 minutes on the wrong gravel road.
Those two mistakes cost us big. But we honed our orienteering skills in after that and didn't make any more major mistakes.
We completed the bike section at True North Outfitters headquarters and got some much needed sandwiches and gatorade. We also restocked our clif bars, gu, and powerbars, and grabbed our climbing harnesses for the next section.
We then went to the Koomer Ridge Campground and took a short jog to a rappel station. Truenorthjoshua was there to greet us with two Outdoorzy.com bumper stickers on his helmet as he belayed people. Jim belayed me and I rap'd fairly fast to the bottom of a 40-50 foot cliff. The rap was fun, then we scrambled up a cliffside to get back to the trail.
Back at the campground we dropped our climbing gear with our bikes and took off on foot for the Trail Running/Orienteering section. We would run for several minutes then walk for a few when checking the map or drinking, etc. We made great time on this section and got all the checkpoints.
Then we arrived back at the campground at about 5:30PM. We were not going to make the last two checkpoints. Our support team and one of the race coordinators gave us a cheerleading and told us to go for it anyway that the course wouldn't be closed and we'd be allowed to finish. We went on with headlamps and headlights on the bikes.
We got checkpoint 16 on a wet muddy trail with quite a few small wooden bridges. We were both drained and felt pretty bad at that point physically. We had to carry our bikes through this section due to the parks regulations for the Whittleton Trail. This section was roughly 2 miles.
Finally we were out on the road for a 1.5 mile bike ride back to the parking lot where we started. We had to do one last short canoe section to get the last checkpoint. On the way we saw a car honking and flashing lights. It was our support team. They told us the course was closed and we were done. We were kind of bummed at that point, this was the first race we'd competed in that we didn't officially finish.
True North Outfitters did a great job with Safety, Food, Drink, Information, etc. All the checkpoints were where they should have been, and all of the race staff was very friendly.
Outdoorzy.com bumper stickers were given to all the participants, and 2 t-shirts were given out as prizes at the awards ceremony.
I would reccomend this race, but might suggest that it be dropped back down to it's 50 mile length so that more teams could finish.
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