Eco-Challenge North American Championships 2003
Bushwhacking Out of Eco
Christopher O’Connell - Team Water Turkey / 01.08.2003
Imagine yourself at the hippest club in town – its about 1 a.m. Saturday morning – the place is jam packed with all sorts of bodies, bumping and flailing around unpredictably. You’re trying to make it to the other end of the bar, but you keep getting jostled, knocked off course, and sharp high heels keep jabbing and kicking you. It’s dark, and the dance floor is so thick with bodies that you can barely keep track of where you are going. At one moment you think you are near the edge of the dance floor, only to realize you’ve made a complete circle, and are back somewhere in the middle – or maybe the dance floor is just longer than you expected? Now imagine this continues till… say sometime after noon on Monday. Thirty-six hours it takes you to get to the other side of the dance floor. Its like an episode of the Twilight Zone – constantly getting whapped in the knees by a stray purse, climbing over tables and chairs and passed out bodies – never clearly seeing where you are trying to get too, moving ever so slowly, yet you just want run as fast as possible to get out.
I’ve been trying to explain to my non-adventure racing friends – and even some of my adventure-racing friends – the hell that was the first leg of the Eco-Challenge North American Championships. The nightclub analogy is the best I could come up with.
The Toughest Test
I knew from the beginning of our race season that this race would be Team Water Turkey’s toughest test yet. Not so much in terms of terrain or mileage, but by the fact that is was an unsupported race. The four teammates would receive no help or assistance from the usual smiling faces of our support team at the transition areas ... we would have to tackle the 250 mile, 5-7 day race near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario all on our own. It was something most of the team had never done before. But Susan and I were very confident of our teammates for this race – Vicki Mouw, a strong biker and paddler and Buck Bybee, a veteran of unsupported races, a strong hiker and great climber.
The weeks prior to the race were extremely stressful – at least for me… I didn’t realize you needed a Birth Certificate to get into Canada until a few days before we were scheduled to leave – and it arrived by Fed-Ex just hours prior to our scheduled departure! Still, we ended up being one of the first teams to arrive in Sault Ste. Marie and this gave us plenty of time to relax and go through the pre-race stuff, and try not to get on each other’s nerves too badly.See All Event Posts
