Raid the North Extreme
Gearsracing.com: The Wheels Stay On, But The Pedal Falls Off
Susan McKenzie / 23.08.2003
Like the countless other portages that link the dozens of rivers and lakes in Quetico Provincial Park, Sauvage Portage is a thin trail, unmarked except on the map. Problem is, the map is wrong, and the portage is about 250 metres away from where it appears on the map.
Gearsracing.com spent about two hours hunting for the portage. “We were paddling around the islands and then going in on foot, trying to find it,� says Kevin Wallace. “Finally, we had to give up and just get the canoes through the bush ourselves."
“We were in the water and we could hear them,� says Phoenix’s Mike McIvor. “Then we saw them heading up and we were like, oh man! They didn’t find the trail�
“Offset printing problem,� says Spirit’s navigator Chris Koch.
“Not only did we have to bushwhack our canoes, we had to do it on the longest portage,� says Ted Jennings, laughing at his team’s misery. “Two kilometres! So much for our thirty-hour paddle theory.�
Two kilometres, and several positions in rankings. But the team’s woes didn’t stop there.
“We thought it would take thirty hours, but it took more than forty,� says Jennings.
“We went fourteen hours without food,� says John Yip. “Well, we had some jelly beans at one point. We were hiking and found a compass and a map and a little bag of jellybeans some canoeists had lost or something. So we opened up the bag and ate those.�
Phoenix found food on the trail, too. “Yeah, we found a space blanket and a bag of food out there,� says McIvor, whose teammate Robyn Dicesare could go head to head with Spirit’s Dave Hitchon for toughest racer (or most hard core) under pain in this race.
Hitchon went thirty hours without food he was so sick, Dicesare spent the entire race with a bum shoulder after a nasty spill on the first bike ride. She could hardly lift her left shoulder, but she still carried her own pack, paddled on the water and biked the race.
“I took a lot of Motrin, and just turned my pain receptors off,� she said at the end. “I have a big suffer bucket. It’s full now.�
For Gearsracing.com, the frustration continued until the end. The wheels didn’t fall off the team, but the pedal did fall off the bike.
Five kilometres into the final 80-kilometre bike leg, John Yip’s left pedal fell off his bike. He had been struggling with it since the first bike leg on Sunday, and it finally gave up the ghost of Friday.
“We had this moment where we thought, oh man, let’s just pull out the radio and get a lift,� says Wallace. “But then we were like, no way, we’ve got to finish.�
“He towed me on the bikes,� Marnie McBean tells race director Dave Zietsma at the finish line. "So I just looked at Kevin and said, ‘You tow him.'�
“I’ve never towed a guy before,� says Wallace.
“Hey, I’ve been towed before,� Zietsma tells Yip. “There’s no shame in it.�
Yip nevertheless did pedal with the one remaining pedal. “That leg is a bit sore,� he says.
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