This years Sea Otter was a first for the adventure racing community. With the assistance of Todd Jackson (Big Blue AR Series) the first annual Thule - Sea Otter Adventure Race was held at the Laguna Secca venue. We were excited about this race because of the long standing Sea Otter MTB and Road biking tradition, the expo booths and the networking with other great riders. It’s not often in AR that we get the same fan-faire that is seen at Sea Otter. We mooched a camp space off of our teammates friend’s team, The Breakouts (thanks guys!).

The course was a bit shorter than what were used to. We really don’t get warmed up until the 6th or 8th hour. But because of that, it was to be a fast race! We started off with a run to our kayaks and a paddle up the shore a few miles around a bouy and back again. Nothing too crazy.

Once back on the beach we had to dead-lift our boats back t0 the parking lot. For me, the most difficult part of the race! We hoped on our bikes and after a quick map check we were off down the bike path north along the shore.

Around Dunes State Park we headed under the highway and towards the old military base. Once on the backside of the base we finally reached the fire roads and single track. I think Adam and Donato were happy because all the road riding on MTB can be annoying. But hey, this is AR, we could be carrying them! For the next couple hours we zig zagged around the Fort Ord trails. We were allowed to pick up the checkpoints in this section in any order. We had a pretty good path and were making smart navigation decisions.

There were other riders practicing for the XC race to be held the following day all over the course. Because there are no set routes in AR, many times we opted to cut trail, go up when most riders were going down, swim against stream, what ever it took to get us to the CP. I think they may have been annoyed with us. But here today was our race!

The approach to the transition area at Laguna Seca was uplifting. Tons of people visiting the expo cheering us oin as we pulled in and transitioned to our running gear and then we bounced off for what looked to be a short run/trek.

Thats exactly what it turned out to be. A very short navigation with some running and trekking. We finished that in about an hour and a half. The on home to the finish.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under Race Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [Permalink]