Equinox Ski Challenge

Here's one of the coolest things I've heard in a while - a post from Wilson about his experience in the Equinox Ski Challenge:

I skied more than you this break.

If anyone wants to fight me on this topic, we can... later. I kind of feel like my fifteen year old cat who is starting down the path towards arthritis - pretty sure my parents are going to need to mash some glucosamine into my dinner soon too. As I told a friend of mine, "this isn't the most sore/ tired that I have been, but a bunch of my joints have gone on strike and say they won't be coming back until working conditions improve."

Let me just say right now that this post is a novel, if you can't be convinced to read the whole thing the gist is - the Equinox Challenge is super cool and the Birkie has nothing on it.

Well, let's take a step back so I can actually tell you about this weekend. Friday night I drove up to West Yellowstone with my Dad and one of my teammates from high school for the West Yellowstone Equinox
Challenge, a 24 hour ski race. The course was a 9.1K loop until 7 in the evening when it switched to a 6.4 (I think, I never actually checked). The race started at 10 in the morning. Every time you came through the lap you had to check to make sure that they had written down your bib number and then you could either start again, take a break, or tag off to a teammate if you were in the team division. Well, Ian and I were the only two man team (They said beforehand that it was split into solo, 2-4, and 5-8 but it really became team division or solo). We flipped a coin and Ian got to start. The whole time he was gone I had my fingers crossed that he wouldn't be the first one back though - because I knew that would mean a really early bonk, especially because there was a pretty fast team from XC Oregon doing a 4-person 6 hour race. Fortunately he came through a
minute or two back and I was on my way. The course was brutal. It was no Saint Mike's, but it had one climb in the middle of the loop that was about as hard, or a bit harder, than the last hill at Stowe. For the first 4 laps we alternated laps, then he said he was going for two, so of course when my turn came I went for two as well. It was a huge mistake, but I kept doing two laps while he did one meaning I was on for 50 minutes off for between 25 and 30 minutes. All things told though, I felt pretty damn good. I was flying - going a bit below threshold - but the tracks we incredibly fast. I was knocking down laps in less then 25 minutes. My first big mistake happened around 2 in the afternoon when a five man team sent out their fast guy who was drafting off me. I was pretty sick of it so I decided to drop him. I was transitioning really well (which paid off big time because the loop had a ton of hills that made 180 degree turns right at the top) so at the top of one of the hills I put in a bit of a surge. Over each one I would get away, but then he would just catch back up. After putting in way to much energy I let him pass and he dropped me super hard.

I crossed 100K at about 6:00, 8 hours into the race, and I was starting to feel it. My forearms just didn't want to grab the pole for the first 5 minutes of my leg, the bottoms of my feet started to feel pretty beat, as did my left knee. I didn't have a clear sense of time for most of the race, but just a little while after 6:00 I had a huge
bonk. I really wanted to eat, but didn't want to do the actual eating - an IV would have been great. I have to give huge props to Ian who, while I was bonked, pulled off an extra leg which actually gave me
enough time to put my skis on again. Well, I went out to do two laps, ended up doing three and when I came back inside the warming hut I was toast. There was no single thing, but I was so low on energy, had so
little leg strength left, and hardly any mental drive to keep me going. I ate a bit, Ian came back in just before 10 and we celebrated the 12 hour mark together. I ended up going back to the hotel for a couple hours of sleep, Ian stayed in the warming hut in a sleeping bag. Through the course of the night we each did a couple laps, but we were getting nowhere.

At 8:00 Ian woke me up saying we had two hours left to put some more K in. He led out with a lap, then at 8:27 I started mine. 8:27 is important because the entire lap I was doing the math on how fast we each had to go to get back before 10:00 (everyone had to start their last lap before 10:00 for it to count. I flew around the course in 16:30 (the shorter course by the way), which I am fairly sure was that loop's record, then he took a leg, and I again went full out to try and squeeze the extra 6K out of the 24 hours. When I came back through
the lap though Ian was just standing there. He was totally fried, but I had made up enough time that our last lap only needed to be 30 minutes to beat the deadline. When I got back he was there and totally fired up for a victory lap. We went out screaming and shouting, and we were hauling. On one of the downhills I spun around and went down backwards. We came in at 10:05, twenty four hours and five minutes after we had left for our first lap.

In retrospect there is a ton that I would have done differently - more varied food, ie something that wasn't sugar/carb, slower out of the gate, longer time on, thus longer time off, taking my boots off every chance that I had, etc. - but regardless it was awesome. We unintentionally won the 6 and 12 hour team division, at one point we were an entire lap, nearly 30 minutes, up on the entire field. I skied most of the fastest lap times excluding Zach Violett from XC Oregon. By the end the four and five person teams had dropped us besting our 289K with 450 and 460K. That is still 145K each, most of which we did in the first 12 hours - the cocky side of me comes out and I'll just say that with one more teammate I really think that we would have buried the field. So the plan for next year (assuming the equinox lines up with spring break again) is to go back and race the thing in the solo division, unless we can find a legitimate third team member.

Moral of the story. Ski racing is awesome.