[RACE REPORT] The Tahoe Big Blue Adventure Race has become somewhat of a Bay Area adventure racing tradition. It’s been long standing and it’s always packed with adventure and excitement. A lot of that fun is born from the location. Lake Tahoe is an adventurers’ dream! This year’s race was sure to be exciting. The weather would be a key factor. The forecast that lead up to race day included snow and rain. And the same was predicted for race day! Race day for the Dirty Avocados (Mike Chastaine, Jon Masztakowski, Susan Bower, and Brian Schmitz) actually started the night before uneventfully with a clean and quick prep and feeding. And we held that bearing through the next morning to the start.   

Going into this race we had high expectations. Susan is a monster mountain biker and has raced on many excellent teams—most notably Thin Aire. Even though she had twins just over 8 months ago, she is already tearing up the trails. Brian has become an amazing biker and extremely strong when towing. Mike has also developed into super strong mountain biker and also had some success at past Tahoe Big Blues. Last year Jon and Mike finished this race in 2^nd over all. Jon doesn’t race a lot, but has done this race with Mike the last 4 years and they were division champions a couple of years ago.

We put great team on the course and we fully expected a good result. There were some very good teams present: DART, Dogs in Space, Bull Moose Extreme and BAARB. That said, we felt that we had the firepower to place very well.

The start was about a 2 mile run from Commons Beach to the Kings

As we pulled into the beach from which we started the rest of the field were already leisurely prepping their bike gear. It was already decided that the race would be restarted with the bike section. We later learned that we would get zero credit for the lead we had built. Our incredible paddle was all for not! 

When the race finally restarted with a mass bike start, it started to rain. We jumped out to a lead and tried to drive the pace. We went back and forth with Dogs in Space up the rather substantial climb to the first CP. We were allowed to get the CP’s in any order, including when to do the o-course that was set up at Sawmill Flats. We had considered going to the o-course first. We concluded that getting the bike CP’s first would be the fastest way. Apparently all the top placing teams choose the same basic route – a clockwise route through the bike CP’s then the o-course.

We got to the first CP directly behind Dogs in Space and just in front of DART, who had taken a slightly different route to get to this CP. BAARB was within a few minutes. At this point we began to see that Jon was not feeling well. Jon got altitude sickness and suffered more then anyone we have ever raced with. Despite his suffering, Jon hung in there and was towed and helped as much as possible.

The second CP we were seeking required riding up to the Tahoe Rim Trail, then down a very technical trail called Missing Link. When we reviewed the map, all we saw was a contour line at the check point. As a result, it appeared that we would need to ride down and then back up the hill. On the way to the second bike checkpoint we were not able to keep up with DART and Dogs in Space and fell back a bit. It was snowing and very cold at this point. Our fingers were so cold they hurt.

As we started down Missing Link, Mike’s crank fell off my bike. Yup (you read that right), Mike’s crank literally fell off. Mike had just had the bike serviced and apparently they had loosened the pinch-bolts. Fortunately this was not the first time this had happened to Mike. Mike knew how to fix it and got it back on in short order. Even though he was able to do the repair quickly, we were passed by a number of teams. At that point, based on the belief that we had to climb back out, we decided to leave the bikes, run down the trial and back up. When we got to the CP, it was obvious that there was a good dirt road at the location.  We looked at the map more closely and found the road, and also discovered that it would go directly to the next CP. We had made a big mistake. We did not have much of a choice, and ran back up and got back on the bikes. The route that we were now committed to added several miles and at least 1,000 extra vertical feet of climbing. We’re sure it cost us at least 30 to 40 minutes…maybe more.

Once we got back out to the Fiberboard Freeway, we decided that we should get the CP at the top of Mount Watson, the high-point of the race. It was snowing again as we climbed.  Jon was suffering but we kept pushing. We got to the summit just before DART who would have been a whole CP ahead of us. We got the check point and then quickly descended back down the snow covered road we had just climbed. As we went down we saw Dogs in Space coming up the hill. We knew they were also a CP ahead of us.  Beyond that we didn’t know what place we were in.

After Mt. Watson, we had to head to a single track trail that descended directly to the CP.  Although some of us had ridden down that trail last year, we got on the wrong trail that was a bit longer. We rode quickly down to this last bike check point and then hustled as fast as we could back up the hill and then down to the o-course.

We got to the o-course as the weather began to clear and it warmed up a bit.  We smoked the o-course in under an hour. According to the results, the only other team under an hour was DART (3 minutes faster then us.). We made up time on every other team, including BAARD, who we were able to get ahead of during the o-course.  Mike was zoning; being able to see the map well and hit the flags dead on. 

After completing the o-course, we quickly threw our bike shoes back on and dashed out of TA. As we were leaving, we saw BAARB just finishing the o-course. We need to head down the hill back to the bike/run TA. We motored down the hill, got on to Highway 28 and climbed Dollar Hill, before we got back to TA.  We moved quickly, dropped the bikes, changed shoes and headed out on the last run. As we left we were told that we were in 4^th behind DART, Dogs and a solo. The solo was 7 minutes ahead. We ran as fast as we could until Jon would have to walk for a few steps. Still we made good time.  Just before we got to the finish at Common’s Beach, I saw the solo walking in front of us.  He turned, saw us and dashed off to the finish beating us by less then a minute. We finished in 4^th place over all and 1^st in our division.

As soon as we finished Jon had the staff call the Paramedics to get some oxygen. He had all the classic symptoms of altitude sickness and needed to go to lower elevations. Jon was amazing in just hanging on. Brian towed Jon a great deal and was supper strong.  Susan biked and ran strongly and kept the pace up. Mike felt pretty strong and was generally happy with the navigation aside from the first error.

This was a very good effort by a team that had to overcome mechanical failure, an extremely sick team mate, a bad route choice and the horrid weather. Through it all, we moved quickly and effectively and came up with a top finish against a strong field.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 10:47 pm 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]