Week 5.
by Ben Davis
Staff Writer
My watch beeps at the top of every hour. Usually I don’t notice it; but on March 21st, I heard every single one of them.
While most students were leaving UCA on Friday March 20th to paradise islands, casinos and cruise ships to exotic lands, my brother Jed and I were packed into his truck headed to Natchez Trace State Park in central Tennessee. We got a late start because I couldn’t skip class because I gave it up. Who doesn’t skip their last class the day spring break starts?! No one but me, I assure you.
But, I guess this story actually starts back on January 12th. Jed and I were working out at the fitness center, riding a stationary bike when he looked at me and told me what I’d be doing on my first day of spring break.
“I signed us up for an adventure race. It’s in Tennessee on March 21st,” he said calmly, like it was normal.
“What?!”
You see, Jed and my father have done adventure races for years, and I had heard horror stories about them. Hours and hours of walking, running, biking, canoeing, zip lining, falling, flipping over handle bars, blisters on top of blisters, none of their stories were ever good. And here I am, tipping the scales at 350-plus and he’s telling me nonchalantly that I am going to spend 12 hours doing a 40 mile adventure race, and that he signed us up AND paid for it already? Sketchy.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s going to be fun.”
It turns out that the two months between that conversation and the day we left for Tennessee would provide me enough time to get into some semblance of shape. We worked hard those two months, and by the time spring break got here, I was actually starting to slightly look forward to it.
We arrived for check-in about 45 minutes before it closed. The guy looked at me curiously when I told him my T-shirt size was extra-large. His curiosity was justified. I was still XXL, but it wouldn’t be long, so I figured I might as well get a head start. After a carb-packed dinner (pizza buffet) we got to our cabin and went to bed early since the race started at 7 a.m. the next morning.
The way adventure races work is that the directors give each team a map and a list of coordinates, latitude/longitude style - 30 in this case. Each team plots the points - I say team, but I had nothing to do with it. Jed did it all - and then spends the next 8-12 hours tracking down each checkpoint in a series of biking, trekking, and canoeing. Sounds easy enough, right? It’s not.
You don’t know frustration until you’ve walked around in a 400-meter circle through a forest looking for a red and white stick attached to a tree for an hour and a half while getting your legs ripped to shreds by thorns because your brother conveniently forgot to tell you it’d be a good idea to wear pants. And that was only the third checkpoint. We had 27 left to go.
The next 10 hours were spent biking uphill and through forests, walking through muddy ponds, kayaking miles and miles with blistered hands and painstakingly jogging the last 800 meters of the race only to finish less than a minute behind a team we had rivaled and fought with all day. We experienced bike malfunctions, shady teams using GPS and not-so-honest people along the way. At one point, we found a racer that had gotten lost, we let him know where his team was so he could reconnect with them, only to have him lie to us about where a checkpoint was. It cost us 30 minutes.
The Natchez Trace Adventure Race was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done - both physically and mentally. But we managed to find every checkpoint, not something every team could say that day. We managed to finish 54 minutes under the deadline. We managed to stay sane and even had a few laughs along the way.
My body ached for 48 hours after the race. My legs were so completely covered in cuts and scratches that I could barely walk. My back was seized up from carrying 20 pounds of equipment all day. And have you ever sat on a bike for five hours? Try it sometime. Tell me how your butt feels afterward.
While I’m not sure I can agree with Jed when he said “It’s going to be fun.” I will say that it was an extremely satisfying experience. One I’ll not soon forgot. And one that I quite possibly might do again. Just not anytime soon.
