Sick in the Snow...

This year’s Snowgaine marked my sixth foray into the snowy woods of upstate New York, and CNYO was returning to Happy Valley, site of the race two years prior, the only Snowgaine Abby and I have managed to clear. This year the snow would be deeper (up to two meter drifts) and the course covered more ground, so as we planned our routes, we laid out our best case scenarios thinking we’d have to drop something.

We were joined this year by new teammate, Jim Driscoll. While many of our teammates had the pleasure of racing with him last year, it would be our first time joining forces, and we were looking forward to it. Sure enough, Jim didn’t disappoint. Not only is he an impressively strong teammate, but he is a great one in every sense. He took on the role of team Yeti, breaking snow for something like 99.2 % of the event and leading the charge along already cut trails, further beating them down for Abby and me. Even then, we struggled to keep up at times, but we were grateful for the challenge and motivation as well.

As always, the woods were quiet and shrouded in the deep snows coming in from the Great Lakes. We utilized as much of the numerous water features as possible to keep our ascending to a minimum, and along with a fair bit of snow-mobile and road travel, we kept a steady pace over the course of both days. The field was small this year, but a handful of very strong Canadian racers were on hand, and since we had our first real snowfall in Philadelphia two days before the race, we weren’t too concerned with how competitive we would be. I still always marvel watching the Canadian racers running at a steady unbroken pace in their snowshoes when I can only muster the energy to crawl through the deep powder.

Mark and Barb Domine had laid out a course of clusters this year. There were ten or so pockets of four or five controls each. A handful of lone controls were sprinkled between them, and teams had to rely on snowmobile trails, roads or occasional long stretches of off trail travel to move between the clusters. Day one went smoothly enough and we found ourselves roughly following the same course as Bob Miller and his wife and Running Free. For stretches of the morning we seemed to hold relatively steady with them before they turned it on and pulled away, accessing a distant cluster we didn’t feel comfortable going for.

By the time we reached the finish, we remarked that we had accomplished our best-case scenario, and indeed, we had set ourselves up for what looked to be an “easier” second day with a real chance of clearing the course.

Day 2 began poorly as I woke up from a poor night of sleep, my throat aching, my head spinning, my legs feeling weak. More on this at the end, but I wasn’t optimistic when we took off from base for a long stretch of off trail travel. Thankfully, I eased into it and felt fine for the rest of the race. As for the course,  considering that various teams had accessed the points we started with the day before, we were surprised that we had to break snow a fair bit. Guess we were doing something a bit differently. We made steady time, keeping an eye on our watches and becoming more and more confident that we would be able to clear it.

Two plus hours in we found ourselves approaching the famous school, a distant point on the map used both in 2013 and 2015. At least a couple of the Canadian teams had made it all the way out there on the first day, meaning they had a fair bit less distance to cover than us on Day 2, but we were just glad to have made it out to that distant corner of the map with plenty of time to work our way back and sweep the last three clusters of controls on our way to the finish. Considering that we weren’t sure we’d be able to clean the course, it felt great to do so with over an hour left on the clock. Bob and his wife won as usual, and I believe Milton took second. We finished third in the coed division, though Running Free had a podium slot (2^nd, I think) locked up only to find they had forgotten to punch one control. While they still beat us handily, it seemed that we did a bit better against our friends from up north than we normally do in this event, so we are happy with that!

Now onto less snowy races and more time scouting and designing this year’s Cradle of Liberty, GOALS ARA’s 24 hour race which Abby and I are once again directing. The Rev3 Epic is coming up in April, so I think it’s time to trade in the snow and ice for warmer weather and my bike...

**Addendum: It’s been a brutal winter for me. Training started off well enough as I’ve alluded to, but Zoe has been bringing home illness after illness and I seemed to stop fighting them off back in December. I’ve had my training interrupted several times for several days at a time since December, and I basically fell apart the day after Snowgaine. Recently diagnosed with pneumonia, I did little over the course of the month and have had to back out of the Rev3 Epic. Alaska is too important and I’m still unable to resume training. Not ideal when preparing for a seven day race…sigh…At least spring is coming, and at least Cradle scouting is going well.