AWAR 2003

 We had been looking for a new, faster team member. Having Bill join us turned out to be a good choice, since we had our best ever finish in this race; third overall and first ever premier division win, first coed team. The race was in the Altamaha River Wildlife Management Area near Hazlehurst, GA. Yes, we were in the swamps.

It was a great day for a race. The weather was perfect. The race started at first light with an eight mile trail run with the first mile through a swamp. Before the run ended we had crossed several creeks without getting wet. At the last creek we had to plunge through up to our knees, much higher on Cathy. Sooner or later the shoes will get wet. Then we stopped long enough to pick a little cotton for Jenn’s fifth grade class. By the end of the hour and a half run we were in eighth place.


We have always been fast in the transitions and this race was no exception. We did stop long enough for a picture before we started the paddling section.

The paddling was down the Altamaha River in small four person rafts. The paddle section on the river was 17 miles on the map start to finish. The paddling was something to just get through as fast as possible, since the raft was not going to be comfortable. Zach made the four hour raft entertaining by changing positions ever minute trying to get comfortable. By the time we were half way through Bill was wondering what he got himself into by teaming up with us. Fortunately, we were not in the raft the entire time. There was a two mile trail portage and eight other opportunities to get out of the raft and portage across sand bars. All-in-all we were able to portage four to five miles cutting off seven or eight miles on the water. By the time of the last portage the raft was getting very heavy, but fortunately all we had to do at that point was cross the river to the transition. By the time we finished the rafting we had dropped to 17th place.

The next section was 11 miles of orienteering with 17 checkpoints. We planned on about five hours of travel time during this leg. Most of the checkpoints were not difficult to find. It was more important to strategize the sequence of travel to optimize time and distance. One of the best parts of the orienteering was when a truck with race volunteers came by passing out Red Bull and Gatorade to racers. We skipped three checkpoints because we felt the time penalty would be less costly than the time it would take us to find them. As it turned out it was a good strategy, because we moved from 17th to the top five in the standings in the five hours we were orienteering and unknown to us at the time, we would not have finished the bike section because of a time cutoff.


When we hit the final transition we were told that we had to complete the bike by 8pm or be disqualified. It was a quarter till six and we flew through the transition to start the bike. We had to ride the 20 miles of trails and find the three checkpoints within two hours. We pushed as hard as possible to the farthest checkpoint arriving in 25 minutes. Then Bill found a short cut on the map to check point two but we had to travel through some heavy duty swamp and cross a pretty big black water creek to get there. When we reached the swamp area Cathy’ was reluctant to cross but being the trooper she is, she did. We soon ran into team NADS and we traded directions to checkpoints with them. After finding the second checkpoint we started heading back and ran into another team that said the next checkpoint was not far away. Once we found that checkpoint we had 35 minutes to get back. We made it in 20 minutes. We probably had the fastest bike section of the race and were one of only five teams to complete it.

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