Big Tahoma Rogaine

To hone the Navigation skills Glenn and I raced as Team Trioba in the 12 hour rogaine at Mt. Tahoma. The race is put on by our friend and long time racer/race director Eric Bone of Mergeo.com. We entered the 12 hour duathalon, 6 hours of biking followed by 6 hours of running, so we could hone our skills and work any kinks out that would be better left in the hills of Washington over the next couple weeks of racing.

One thing about Tahoma is that there is not a lot of flat ground. You are either going up or you are going down, so we spent some serious time working our way up. After the maps were handed out we strategized and came up with an ambitious loop to circumnavigate Mt. Tahoma on bike and then climb it on foot. There were clusters of checkpoints on the circumnavigation that required us to climb a couple of other mountains. When it was said and done we climbed 6,400 ft. on our bikes.

We made it about 5/6 of the way through our loop and realized we were going to be cutting it short with time. In a rogaine missing your time cut off results in drastic time penalties so it is better in most cases to get back within the regulated time rather than squeaking in that last CP. We found an out on our route and climbed our way up and over a ridge and bombed back into the hash house with 3 minutes to spare. We learned our competition, team nuun-Feed the Machine (That's my team!), made up of Aaron Rinn and Aaron Matzke had already come in and were out on the course.

We quickly transitioned, re-organized our foot loop and headed out running all flats (There were none that I can remember), slight uphills and down hills and fast hiking the uphills. After it was all said and done we felt like we left some points on the table that we should have gotten but overall were happy with our effort. High fives all around the hash house when we came storming in and the anticipation built.

It turn out nuun-Feed the Machine cleared 1455 points and we eeked them out with 1465...totally amazing to be sooo close after 12 hours of racing and having two completely different point profiles/routes. More high fives, some coffee and off to warmth. Did I mention it was snowing at the high elevations? Here is a link to our bike route.

Not only was this a great race, but it was fun to see a lot of the other local teams and people out running around the woods. The Trioba-A team (we were the B team), Verve, Militant Hippies, Robin and Cliff, and many others...adventure on.

Orienteering, Biking and Skiing...the adventurers winter diet

This weekend was comprised of some good fun in the mud, rain and snow. Saturday started off with Cascade Orienteering's O' Series #5 event at Bridle Trails state park in Kirkland, WA. This was a real runners course (very spread out) and there were a lot of local adventure racers out tuning up there navigation skills and getting in a good workout. As it turns out I happened to get a slightly better workout than most of them as the field crushed me... and I speant about 10 minutes more on the course that everyone else ;-) One wrong turn between 5 and 6 and going to checkpoint #3 instead of #13 did not help me any. I think Alex might have had the fastest time out of the AR heads, with Glenn up there in contention as well.

After that a group of 5 of us set out for a ride from Bridle Trails to Mercer Island and Ballard, I made it about .5 mile when my hub (Freewheel) broke and I lost my ability to pedal forward. Boohoo, I called emergency support (family) to pick me up and the gang continued on what Aaron said was a great ride. While I waited for my pickup I propped my handlebars on the side wall at the busy intersection I was at and proceeded to have my own spin class to stay warm, I'm not sure if I had ever had so many strange looks before....it was pretty funny.

Back country skiing - Kendall Knob

Sunday Matt, Ruaraidh, Eric, Mike and I headed to Kendall Knob up at Snoqualmie Pass for some fun in the snow...check out the pics here. It turned out to be a great day and the snow stability was good all around.