24 Hours of Adrenalin

August 19, 2006 was an ominous date that loomed on the horizon for most of the summer. In summers past, I had been spending my free time running around from adventure race to adventure race. It was fun, lots of fun. And I might get back to it one day, but this summer my team and I had decided to opt out. Instead we planned to do some casual camping trips, and one major event. It seemed only natural that we'd choose the event that had the most biking in it. After all, biking was always our favourite leg of any adventure race (except maybe the Fisk 55). That's another story.

The 24 Hours of Adrenalin is, just as it sounds, a 24 hour endurance event where each team races around a course in relay format, logging as many laps as humanly possible in the 24 hour time span. Sounds easy enough - not to mention fun:-) And it was FUN! We had an absolute blast out there. The setting was the newly renovated Canmore Nordic Centre. This is a cross-country skier's mecca in the winter and it makes for an incredible mountain bike park in the summer.

Our team consisted of 5: Myra, Graeme, Ken, Dave and myself. We were also fortunate to have Kirsten, Kerstin, Jody, and little Nathan as our support team. Starting us out was our fearless team captain, Ken Hurd. The race began at 12noon on Saturday with a lemans start. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's a running start meant to thin out the crowd heading out on to the bike course. In this case, running the 600 metres up hill was all Ken's to enjoy. Good on ya Ken! I know the rest of us appreciated your enthusiasm.

Though the 15km loop course was very, very difficult, starting with the grueling 4km uphill climb and all, the hardest part of the whole event was trying to stay well fed and rested between your laps. We had 5 people on our team doing laps, one at a time, at an average speed of 1hour 15mins per lap. So, if I finished my lap at 3pm, I could go rest for almost 5 hours before I had to go out again. That might seem like a lot of time, and at first it was. After my first lap I was rested and fuelled and ready to go again in about 2-3 hours. But, as the event went on and I had done the 2nd lap, I needed almost all of that 5 hours to rest up. I think I even took a nap in that time. Between the 3rd lap and 4th lap was the hardest. I finished my 3rd lap around 4:30am.
I was tired and sore, having completed 3 laps at race pace. I'll admit that there were a few spills and tumbles in there that weren't helping things either by this time. I got back to camp and everyone was asleep. I crawled into the tent and closed my eyes thinking, "What am I doing???... It's 4:30am and I have to be up again by 8am to re-tune my bike, eat, get hydrated and get down there to the transition area to do "another" lap..." That was hard - really hard. All I wanted at that point was to drift off to sleep in the comfort of knowing I could sleep as long as I liked hahaha... Not even close!

8am, I was up, and out of the tent. It was cold and I was sore... Others in our camp were getting up too so I had company at least as I got ready. I was going to be the last rider from our team. It was 10am when I took the baton from Graeme and headed out. The sun was up, shining brightly by then and it was warming up. It was a great morning to be out on a ride. It's too bad that I was almost too sore and tired to fully enjoy it ;-) I finished at 11:15 and we called it quits. It was past the 11am cut off and we'd had our fun.

I really can't say enough about what a great experience the adventure racing has been for me. Every time I hear myself tell a story about a race, I am consistently amazed at how I always find myself describing some horrendous situation, or circumstance like how hard this one hike along this ridgeline was through the night in the dark, how tired and delirious we were after 18 hours of racing solid, or how lost we got in the forests looking for this one stupid checkpoint. These really shouldn't be good memories, but oddly they are. They're by far some of my best!