On Friday March 7th, James, Nathalie, and John left Ottawa to meet Harper in Berne, NY, just outside of Albany, for the Central New York Orienteering Club's annual Snowgaine. The Snowgaine is a 2-day orienteering-style "rogaine" (meaning you try to get as many checkpoints as you can in any order in a specified amount of time) that allows the option of travel by foot, snowshoe, skis, bikes, or any other human powered mode of transportation. The rule though is that you have to keep whatever gear you take with you at ALL times (so you would need to bring your bike with you to go get a checkpoint that is in the woods). Since we are a running team, we chose not to bring our bikes with us to the race. As some members of our team had managed to clear the course for the last couple of years on foot with plenty of time to spare, we expected to be able to clear this course in the same way. But it seems the race director had other plans for us...
When we finally got our maps on Saturday morning (one hour before the 8:30am race start), we quickly realized that the course this year was really designed for one day of biking and one day on foot. Our only chance to clear the course was to attempt on Day 1 to run the same roads that many other teams would be biking, in the hopes that them having to carry their bikes in the snow to the off-road CPs would slow them down enough to give us a chance to keep pace. But mid-way through the day we realized that the course was just too long and we were forced to start skipping checkpoints and take the shortest route back to the finish line in order to avoid the huge penalties that come with arriving after the 8 hour cutoff. So we ended up doing a LOT of running and not getting as many CPs as we would have liked to. We covered almost 54km, most of which was on roads, and the rest was in thigh-deep snow. An exhausting day!
Day 2 went much more smoothly strategy-wise, but we were still pretty tired from the previous day's running. We managed to get lots of CPs and managed to cover another 37km on roads, snowshoe and snowmobile trails, and in deep snow (only this time on snowshoes). But ultimately we couldn't close the gap on the teams that used their bikes. We finished as the top co-ed team and 4th overall behind 3 teams that biked one of the two days (and only a few points out of 3rd place).
This was our first race together as a foursome for 2014 and it gave us a chance to test out our new Osprey Rev 18 packs, and to put our Nuun electrolytes and Fruit2 Energy Fruit Bars to work for us. The Rev packs were really comfortable, whether running or hiking, and allowed all of us to have 8 hours of food and water right at our fingertips. We were also able to quickly and easily strap our snowshoes in/on our packs for the road running sections. The Nuun and Fruit2 bars kept us going hour after hour out there as well. All in all a tough race but great early season training for the team.
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