Wanted to write a quick report on how the excellent weekend training went. I cut-n-pasted a write-up by steve-slow-but-sure from the WAR message site! So much credit goes to Steve!

Inspired Adventure usually does a weekend training, but I contacted Matt several months ago to set up a special 3-day training deal - it was sure worth it.

We travelled down (for some reason we all came from Seattle, where was the Oregon representation??) to the Mt Hood area on Wednesday afternoon, and met with Matt at the Mountain Air Lodge (Matt's cabin in the woods) http://www.inspiredadventure.net/news.html

Thursday saw us discussing gear selection (man, by hunting gear sure is heavy , reviewing what gear we had all brought, team selection, navigation, some rope work (ascending, tyrolean traverse, and regular traversing), then we got the coordinates for the following two days of training, which we plotted with our new found navigation skills (from UTM coordinates ) and then made a route selection. Of course I pulled a quad muscle doing the ropes stuff so I was already hurting before we started doing anything hard, ha ha ha :>

Friday saw us up at 05:30, a big hearty breakfast, pack the cars, and head for the start of the bike leg. We had estimated this at about 25 miles, and around 5-6 hours when we plotted the route. This is funny, the above was Steve's estimate, my estimate was 45-50 miles, I figured 6 miles an hour, I figured maybe 8 hours. So we told Matt 5-7 hours, boy were we fooled! I measured the distance on the map but didn't look close enough to those contour lines, the scale of the map was 1:69,000 or so, it didn't look that steep

We started well enough, and then almost imediately went almost verically up for a couple of thousand feet of hike a bike, but where then rewarded by our first incredible views of Mt Hood in the morning sunshine, and an incredible single track descent, that was followed by several hours of uphill slog on fire roads, which rewarded us with another awesome view of Mt Hood over a beautiful alpine Lake. A LOT more uphill, then a bit of downhill saw us at the top of the Ski area, then followed some excellent downhill which was over way to soon, then some more single track. Man, my 6 year old, full suspension downhill type bike was sure fun on the downhills, but it just about killed me the rest of the time:-) I NEED A LIGHTER BIKE PLEASE, ha ha ha (someone was laughing)

Now we where on our way back, and it was all downhill, over some more great single track, finishing with a fast pace line down the highway to get us back before dusk.

We returned to the house around 19:00 after riding 71Km (about 44 miles) in 12 Hours. Took a bit longer than we expected, ha ha ha - I didn't laugh much out there, to tired!

Then more food, and resupply for the hike. We headed out on the Hike at 20:00 and by now it was totally dark. We had extimated about 28 miles and at 2mph, that would be 14 hours, so hoped to be back around 10:00 Saturday morning

Anyway, we started up yet another incredible hill, for something like a 4000" ascent. Then downhill. We managed to get misplaced a bit in the middle, and only got to the end of this first hill as dawn was rising on Saturday morning.
This was really misplaced. Matt told us our mistake wasn't to bad, ha, only cost us about 2 hrs when we were totally exhausted already, in the middle of the night with the sleep monsters chasing us! Basically we made a mistake in not keeping track of the terrain and direction as we were going (more difficult at night!). We had been going for almost 3 hours when we decided to take a bearing, low - we where heading north, should have been heading almost due east. We'd been going almost 3 hrs, we should have gone at least 3 miles right, maybe more - hey it was straight up a mountain in the dark and we messed around for 30 minutes getting going. we looked at the map, the only place the trail went north was PAST the junction - oops, we missed the junction. About 40 minutes back, just as we crested the mountain, I'd spotted a little trail at a switchback the kind of went off to the east (just the direction we should be going). We'll, ealier I'd just about walked off the end of a steep switchback when I missed the switchback (man, it was almost vertical with the trail about 1 foot wide). So we figured it was nothing. Well, we remembered it now. Well, some suggested going on another 20 minutes or so to see if we found the junction (we should be real close if we went the right way) but we finally decided to go back to that faint trail! 40 minutes later we were back there, congradulated ourselves on finding our way, took a drink and food, I decided to walk down the trail a ways - it got narrower and narrower, straight drops on both sides (back to that scale map, didn't show no cliffs), then I'm looking in a black abyss, the world ended several hundred yards down the trail. It was going in the right direction but we didn't have wings So we ran all around that area, being careful trying not to fall off the top of the world, we found no other trail! Boy, from elation to devastation in a flash! and this is a short race So, there is only one way to go, lets go further up the trail past where we turned around and see where it goes! So 45 minutes later we're back where we turned around (crawling over/under/around deadfalls and collapsed trails - freaky at night). Keep walking, about 15 minutes later we hit a nice trail junction just like it showed on the map! Still 1050 feet elevation gain to go to DEVILS PEAK.

We stopped at Devils Peak for some basic navigation review, compass work and so forth, man I really needed to get off my feet and I'd run out of water an hour ago - on top of a mountain, in the middle of the night, water a long way away (I found out I sweat like a pig and need lots of water!).
We'd been up almost 24 hours, moving for over 20, my longest before that was 9.5 hrs

Down that 5,000 ft peak to about 1,700 we went, took forever, people fightly the sleep monster, stumbling in the trail, one guy literally walked right off the trail and caught himself in some trees! Good thing we were mostly down the mountain by then. Me, sleep (or lack thereof) never go me, my bumb knee did. I found out that any/all injuries or problems will come out and get magnified with this kind of effort. I've been on viox for several weeks, periodic pain under my kneecap, but not to bad - well, after several miles coming down that very steep trail - I really felt that pain under my kneecap! If I didn't have trekking poles I'd still be on that mountain (they'd have put me out of my misery and left me there . By the time I got to the bottom I could hardly walk - we'd been "racing" for over 24 hours and I was done!

We had to have a team meeting, what to do, one of your team mates really having trouble (just like on TV . Another team member was also having knee pain. We decided 2 members would have to stop (me and my wife kept me company, she must really love me!), the other 3 would go on!

THE TEAM OF 2 - We went back to the cabin and slept for several hours :->

THE TEAM OF 3 - Well, there was suppose to be a relativley flat trail to the next objective, which we where supposed to achieve thru a short (1-2 mile) bushwack, but what looked so easy on the 1/69000 map turned out to be totally impassable, so we took the decision to miss that objective, and head back towards the next one. We managed that, and after another 6-7 miles of flat / downhill hiking started the final ascent to a short rappel.

We finally reached the Rappell around 14:30 Saturday afternoon, after being out for 32.5 hours - definitely a record for me, and I think a massive achievement for all of us.

The rappell was a great way to finish what was an awesome weekend.

The weather was also incredibly kind, with glorious sunshine all day Friday, followed by an incredibly warm night, and then Saturday was clear with a little cloud, which kept the temp down nicely.

We learned an incredible amount of stuff. We had the opportunity to practice many things such as bike and hike towing, with different systems, and learned from Matt's immense experience.

Truly an excellent training course for anyone contemplating adventure racing.

The food was incredible, however, DO NOT eat the 15 bean chilli the night before a race

Thanks to Matt S for an excellent course, and also to Team Chilli Bean (Ken, Hailey, Heather, Steve &; Matt H) who where such excellent team mates for the whole weekend.


Ken