Good luck with HRAdventure this weekend -- maybe "skip" some TAs!

Posted by Grant on 9. September 2009 21:40

Good luck to everyone racing and staffing the 18-hour HRAdventure race this weekend!  I have a few angles to this race, with the sponsored Untamed Adventure team in Virginia racing and so I wish them all the best . . . and of course the organizers, Pam and Mike, are good friends so I hope they have a successful event. 

Before I go on, I should say that I have no knowledge of the race course this weekend.  I do know the region well, however, and I have my suspicions on how the course will shape up, but I'm not going to state anything for the record.  I wish I could race, truthfully, if for no other reason than it's an excuse to try out some kayak sailing techniques since they permit sails on the paddle legs (when does a kayak become a sailboat, I wonder?)!

I will, however, comment on something I see a lot of in adventure races, and maybe this will assist some teams racing this weekend -- teams can be disorganized and spend a lot of time in transition areas.  This race is 18-hours, which may sound like a long time but in all honesty it's not that long.  Do you really need to change your clothing 3 times during an 18-hour race?  Do you really need some "down time" in between disciplines, where you just sit at your support vehicle and catch your breath?

You can bet there will be somewhere between 3 and 6 transition areas (TAs) in the race, and for the sake of argument I'm going to say there will be 4 TAs.  An inexperienced or disorganized team could easily spend 15 minutes in each transition and end up clocking 1 full hour of race time in the TA eating, changing clothes, looking at maps, or just resting.  By comparison, if you're well-organized and efficient in a TA, you could spend 5 minutes in each one . . . totalling 20 total minutes in TA for a speedy team, compared with 60 minutes for the slow team.

That is food for thought, but I don't want to stop there, an 18-hour race is short enough that you can save precious minutes by "skipping" a transition area entirely.  By this, I mean you plan ahead and sort through the race plan to find an opportunity to blow through a TA by being prepared in advance.  I think an example is in order . . .

Let's say the race is designed as follows:

• Start with a paddle leg
• Transition area 1 where you switch to biking
• Biking leg
• Transition area 2 where you switch to another paddle leg
• Paddle leg
• Transition area 3 where you switch to trekking
  
• Race continues . . .
  

In this scenario, you could start the race and paddle in your bike gear (bike shoes, bike gloves, etc) so you don't need to do anything in the first transition area besides drop your paddles, put on your bike helmet, and hop on your bike (you could even paddle in your helmet if you wanted, and use your bright bike light for any night paddle navigation, but I didn't go that far here).  For that paddle leg, you should have your backpack all set for biking (water bladder etc) so that you don't need to stop for a moment at your team vehicle at TA 1.

With such a strategy, you could transition in way less than 5 minutes at the first TA.  At the 2nd TA, biking to paddle, don't bother switching to paddle shoes -- just get right in the boat and go.  Hopefully your support crew has fresh water bottles in the boats, maybe some food taped to the side of the boats, and you can surely paddle in your bike gear again.  Even if there's some rough portaging, or an orienteering course where you have to get out of the boat, bike shoes should suffice for anything of moderate distance.  In this way, instead of taking time in 2 transition areas (the paddle-to-bike and bike-to-paddle changes), you can fly through and "skip" them.  In our hypothetical race of 4 transition areas, instead of spending a total of 60 minutes in transition areas that we figured for a slow team, you could spend as little as 10 minutes.  That's a 50 minute advantage by just careful planning and time management. 

This requires a lot of coordination with your support crew and teammates.  Everyone needs to be aware of your team race plan, so that everyone can play their part.  If one teammate slows in a TA to change socks and shoes, for example, you're all going to be stopped so you might as well take advantage of the time.  One item we always brought to a race that required support crew was a whiteboard.  We would outline the entire race, for the benefit of those racers who haven't read the race booklet as well as for our support crew, and plan a strategy around that outline.  The support crew keeps the board once the race starts so they have a clear picture of how they can help.  The whiteboard is also a handy way for the support crew to record times for any teams ahead of you, rule changes, weather forecast, or anything else to relay to the team as they're passing through a TA.

This may sound a bit excessive, and if you're just out to experience a race and enjoy a good time you don't need to worry about slow transitions, whiteboards, or combining legs of the race together in terms of the gear you'll carry and wear (the "skip" concept I've outlined above).  Just go out and have fun.  But if you're a bit more competitive, and looking to push the clock, TA strategy can easily cut an hour from an 18-hour race and that's a very good chunk of time.

Regardless, good luck to everyone and I hope the chiggers and ticks aren't part of your mandatory gear by the end of the race!