Unfortunately there are no pictures from the All Nighter. This race, presented by Jeremy Van Ek, board member for Chicago Area Adventure Racing Association (CAARA), was my first experience with adventure racing. The ISU Redbird Challenge was the first multi-sport race, but the All-Nighter added orienteering to the mix, which is something I had never done in competition.
My partner in grime Nate Gawel, had turned me on to the CAARA Web site (http://www.chicagoadventureracing.org/) and I found a navigation clinic at Blackwell Forest Preserve. Nate couldn't make it, but I still wanted to learn the basics of orienteering. This is where I met April, Ellie and Drew Hernann, who would end up teaching me so much about orienteering and racing in general. Jeremy did an excellent job of relaying the basics of "nav" and map reading, which will make or break any team in AR.
Well none of my friends thought that doing a race like this sounded like any fun. So I turned to Matt Stewart, director of the Redbird Challenge, and asked him. Simple answer from Matt,"Sure."
I have NEVER had as much fun as I did gearing up for this race. The anticipation, the course route planning over the phone with Matt, meeting the Hernann's at Millenium park for Blues Fest and plotting our UTM (universal transverse mercator) coordinates on the topographic map and especially BUYING NEW GEAR! Aside from replenishing food at race checkpoints, buying new gear is my absolute favorite thing to do. Since this was a training event and we had the checkpoints in advance, we went on to Google Earth and looked at satellite imagery of the course, which covered between 5-6 different towns within DuPage County.
I won't go through each checkpoint (CP), but there are some very vivid memories in trying to find some of those checkpoints that I want to go over. The first being when we finally found the first CP and then decided to ride on the railroad tracks to the back entrance of a Forest Preserve, which to this day I'm not sure if that was legal, but hey, in the name of adventure racing. Some guy even asked us if we were lost when we got off the tracks, I can only imagine what was going through his mind staring at two dorks with headlamps staring at a topographic map. It's moments like that I remember though, cutting down railroad tracks, checking behind you to make sure that a train isn't barrelling down on you!!
This forest preserve was a little tricky because when we plotted the course, and looked at the maps on Google Earth, we were convinced that Jeremy placed the CP on an island with a bridge leading to it...but after 45 minutes of searching this tiny little island, we found nothing...except a wet pair of boxer shorts...AH HAH! Looking back to the map, we surmised that the CP had to have been on the other island. SO! I took off my pack and hopped into the lovely, algae infested, stinky pond water that sits adjacent to a highway and power lines!
My wife makes fun of me for this memory, but I'll swear by this being one of the reasons that I subject myself to this constant state of punishment that is AR. We were walking through high prairie grass in a large, open meadow, on a bearing that would take us to a hillside where we'd find CP5. With the night being damp to begin with and the grass leaving us sopping wet, the fog was actually something you could reach out and touch. Easy CP to find, but as we're standing there at midnight, on this hillside and I'm looking from my compass back to the horizon, I'm seeing the headlamps from the people that are ahead of us in the direction of CP6, and the headlamps of the beams coming from the people that were headed toward us at CP5. It was amazing really. I never would have thought I could stand in a field somewhere, about to cross a wide open field for half a mile, hit a river, stop, travel upstream until I find a milkjug wrapped in reflective tape (this race's CPs).
This race was also where I realized another beauty of AR...that you get to eat as much as you want. You need energy and your metabolism is running faster than a Jamaican sprinter in Beijing, so break out the jerky, bacon, gels and Nutter Butters!
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