WEDALI: WE DID IT!

Molly Moilanen / 13.11.2010

Over the past year WEDALI neglected its blog and failed to write a single race report. Between work, school, racing, training and traveling, our rehashing of each race's highs and lows was done primarily on road rides and trail runs with teammates and training buddies. Snapshots of races can be found on our attackpoint logs, but to hear an in-depth account of a particular race, score-o section, pack rafting nightmare or mystery team challenge, you have to bike with us at Murphy or run the hills at Theo. OTNT (orienteering Tuesday night training) is where we swapped stories of our adventures and found inspiration to rally for next weekend's race.

But if any race deserves a written race report, it's the 2010 USARA National Championships in Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania. My 2010 AR season is over so instead of hitting the trails, tonight I'll tell the story of one of the most memorable days of my entire life – the day WEDALI (We Eat Dust and Like It) won the USARA National Championships.

Background: WEDALI was born in the spring of 2003 when Justin (Biz) Bakken, Paul Bronkhorst and Scott (Erl) Erlandson met at a ropes clinic and a local orienteering meet. Ellen Farseth joined the team in 2004, followed by Scott (Scooter) Lund, Molly Moilanen (me) and Jason and Andrea Nielsen from Battle Creek, Iowa. Over the years, Amy Vroom, Darin Soukup, Andrew Kroese and Tom Puzak have also raced with WEDALI, making our team better (and taller). WEDALI is more than an AR team. To me, WEDALI is magic. WEDALI is inspiration. WEDALI is family.

October 14, 2010, 1:28 p.m.: I sit in a conference room somewhere in Minnesota country, watching the minutes tick by as my Board of Directors argues about the best ways to "measure success" as we kick-off our next strategic planning cycle. When the clock hits 1:30 p.m., I race out the door like Cinderella in a new pair of trail-runners. Miraculously, the next eight hours go as planned and at 9:30 p.m., I unite with my teammates – Biz and Erl – in Hidden Valley. The boys arrived around noon and spent the day prepping our team for the race. This is WEDALI's twelfth race of 2010, so we have a good handle on our pre-race ritual. We crawl into bed before midnight and deposit some sleep hours in the bank, a rare commodity before a thirty-hour adventure race. Feeling confident about our pre-race preparations, we set our alarms for 6:20 a.m. and snooze until 6:30.

October 15, 2010, 6:55 a.m.: Erl heads up to headquarters (HQ) to collect maps and stake out a table for UTM plotting. Biz and I arrive shortly after 7:00 a.m., ready to plot and select our course. Before we start plotting, Biz copies forbidden routes from a set of master maps hanging on the wall. Tracing the maps is more tedious than expected and requires focus and precision. By the time we start plotting UTM coordinates, we're behind. The team next to us – Team Granite, who won Nationals 2 last year – is already working on their route selections. I remind myself to focus on OUR maps and OUR race. Finally, with all 15 of our UTMs plotted, Biz digs in. By triangulating information from three sets of maps, he determines the path we will chase for the next 23 hours.