Extreme Heart Challenge
Sioux City, IA
August 7, 2004
report by Jason Elsenraat

Let's see...where to begin.  For once we finally got on the road on time!  I couldn't believe it.  No last minute Wal-Mart trips or anything.  We were destined to have a good race from the git-go.  The trip to Sioux City really doesn't take long when you drive 98 mph the whole way with a tail wind and have your mind occupied by Trivial Pursuit questions.  Rick, Laura and I rode in my truck and Deron and Andrea rode together in Deron's car.  Other than Rick and I getting killed by Laura in Trivial Pursuit (she's had the cards for 10 years and I'm convinced she had every question memorized) and us almost running off the road 4 times on the way there...it was pretty uneventful. 

Showed up at Headquarters around 4 or so Friday afternoon.  I can't remember the name of the park where the race started...something like Seratoma Park.  Pre-race meeting was at 8 and we found out that the race was going to be based on points.  What that means is that you could bypass certain checkpoints, but you wouldn't get any points.  Each checkpoint was worth a different amount of points based on how hard it was to find...or how far out of the way it was.  So, time really didn't mean anything unless you found all the checkpoints.  Teams could come in 12 hours in front of us...but if they missed one checkpoint we still beat them as long as we found all of them.  Anyway...let's move on.  Key takeaway here is that you should make sure you get all the checkpoints....which is a given for any race.  

The race was slated to start at 11 pm Friday night so we spent the majority of the night getting gear ready and fine tuning our bikes and all that good pre-race stuff that you do.  We didn't get any maps or UTMs at the race meeting and we wouldn't get any UTM coordinates for the entire race.  They said that they would hand out maps after each discipline with the checkpoints already plotted on them.  So basically it came down to route choice and pure speed.  It was good that we couldn't plot a UTM wrong, but on the flip side it was bad that other teams couldn't plot a UTM wrong.  I've never done a race that was like this one (no plotting and point system) but it seemed to work out alright.  For some reason I kind of enjoy plotting my own UTMs.  Oh, by the way, this is the first race that I navigated.  More to come on that later...  

So, here it is 10:59 PM and close to 50 teams are lined up in front of the 'Start/Finish' banner looking up a hill that we had to run up.  I guess we all figured it was a marked trail run of some sort and once we were finished with that we would get some maps and take off on the bike.  So...here we are...stretching...ready to run up this hill and get going.  The gun goes off and we take off as fast as we could up this hill!!  We get to the top, out of breath, and we have to go down this little hill.  When we get to the bottom there are buses there waiting for us.  What the?  We find the bus with our team number on it and we tell the bus driver that we're all here and we're ready to go.  Nope.  We have to wait for all the other teams that are scheduled to get on our bus!  So, a couple minutes later all of the teams on our bus have showed up and ready to go...and we tell the driver to get a move on because we're all here.  Nope.  We're then informed that the race hasn't officially started yet and they were going to bus us out to the "country" to start the race.  Real nice clark, real nice.  

So on the bus ride out we get maps for the first run and the first bike section.  Looks like the run was 6 miles and the first bike was around 15 or 20 miles.  So, after what seemed like forever, we finally got to the race start and took off on the trail run.  The run went pretty well.  We hit the first checkpoint on the run in 2nd place and we were all feeling pretty good.  On the way to the next checkpoint, which was the transition to the bike, I turned around at the top of a hill and could see 200 bobbing headlamps.  Kinda cool.  Anyway, lost a little time on the last 3 miles of the run and ended up getting on the bike in about 4th or 5th place.  Andrea, our WONDERFUL support girl, had our bikes set down and ready to go when we got there.  Put on our bike shoes and helmets and took off.  

The bike ride was pretty uneventful.  It was all gravel road to the next transition.  Deron started feeling a little rough but we managed.  The ONLY eventful part of the bike ride worth talking about is a route choice I made.  We decided to go South on a gravel road while almost everyone else continued to go straight, or West.  My idea was south = downhill.  I'm joking...I really thought it would be quicker going this way.  Anyway, we went down this road and at the gravel road that we turned right  on, there were two or three huge road signs with flashing lights that said, "Road Closed"..."Bridge Out".  Nice one Jason.  Anyway, we've invested about a half an hour in that gravel road so there was no way we were going to turn around.  So, the bridge was out down the road a ways, but we were able to walk our bikes through the construction zone.  We didn't lose any time.  We lost more time with the headwind going south than we did the bridge that was out.  Our shoes didn't even get wet.  

So we cruised into the transition into the night nav / trek section still in about 4th place.  Andrea was waiting there again with all of our stuff ready to go.  Andrea was absolutely fantastic as a support person!!  Thanks again Andrea!  There is no way we could have done as well as we did without your help!  We threw on some shoes, got our maps, grabbed some food and water and took off for the first checkpoint on the nav.  The nav was basically a huge loop of checkpoints.  We found most of the checkpoints rather painlessly and we all felt pretty good except for the pheasant that Laura scared the crap out of!  Or was it the other way around?  Imagine a nice, quiet, peaceful trek through a field at 3 in the morning and something that sounds like an alien space ship 2 feet in front of Laura takes off for the motherland.  I think she had to change shorts.  

So after the nav we had a "trail" run.  We ran / walked on gravel roads for a couple of miles to get to the trails.  Once we got there we had decided that we were going to get a checkpoint and head down to the traverse and get it over with so we wouldn't get caught in a bottleneck.  Well...somewhere along the way we went right past the first checkpoint and a couple of bulls that looked like they would be the sumo wrestlers of the cow race.  We ended up at the traverse and decided we would go back and get the first checkpoint after the traverse.  We walked through a little swampish type thing to get to the traverse just to have a guy yell down that we had to go back around the other way.  Where we just came from.  So we trampled through this nasty, stinky, grungy thing a little more and finally got up to the start of the traverse.  We all did the traverse and took off.  We ended up not getting CP 1 and decided to go get the other checkpoints first.  This is where we lost a lot of ground on the 1st and 2nd place teams.  I took the team on the wrong path that cost us about 45 minutes.  We finally got things straightened out and finally made it back to CP 1.  Finally done with that trail run.  That d*mn trail run!  Anyway...I beat myself up a little over that one...

After the trail run Andrea was waiting for us with our bikes at the next TA.  We stayed a little longer in the transition than I would have liked, but it wasn't long before we took off.  I'm pretty sure we were in fourth or fifth place at this point in the race.  The bike took us on about 10 miles of gravel road and paved roads, and from there we would hit some trails.  We were going fine on the gravel roads, not going fast, but chugging along just fine and passed a team on the way to the singletrack.  We hit the singletrack and got all the checkpoints after going over some super fun jumps and almost getting kicked in the head by a couple 'roided out horses.  One of the best parts of the race was the singletrack in my opinion.  After the bike section came one of the worst parts of the race...the paddling.  

We transitioned off the bike in 3rd place and ran down to the river with our lifejackets and paddles.  We hopped in the canoes and took off UP river.  Apparently the race director, Dave Sly, is notorious for making teams paddle up a river.  Now what is really odd is that I'm pretty sure that we paddled faster up the river than we did when we got the third checkpoint a ways up and turned around and paddled down the river!  The head wind was so bad that we paddled as hard as we could and I could have swore we were going backwards.  I ate some food and drank some water and sure enough we were going down the river.  The paddle was fine.  It was getting hot out and I rarely drink enough in the canoe, so hopefully that wouldn't come back to haunt me.  Got out of the water and carried the canoe up to the truck and we were ready to start the rollerblade/scooter section.  

Laura had made it clear before the race that the US Rollerblading team wouldn't be calling her anytime soon for tips, so our original plan was to have me pull her through this section so we could go a little faster.  Well, Laura grabbed on to the tow, and watching me pull her down this paved river trail...I'm sure I looked like a monkey on wheels.  In the meantime, Rick is skating backwards like Jeremy Roenick wondering why we're going so slow.  Rick started pulling Laura, and Deron and I could still hardly keep up with him!  We rollerbladed what I thought was 3 to 5 miles and finally found our checkpoint and instructions to the next transition.   

At this point in time we were right in the middle of downtown Sioux City.  By-the-way, never, ever...ever, ever, ever leave your bikes unlocked in downtown Sioux City.  That's a different story that I don't want to get into.  Our next event was an Urban Challenge called Ramps.  Basically we ran in downtown Sioux City to different parking garages and had to go to the top to get our passports checked.  We knew we were close to being done so we all took off running.  We found the ramps no problem, and with the help of the elevators we made it up to the top and got our passports checked.  We made it back to the start of the urban challenge, got on our bikes, and headed back to the Start/Finish area...even though we had to do an optional land nav section...which wasn't really optional in our minds.  At this point in time we knew for sure that unless a flock of p!ssed off pheasants came back and picked Laura up off her bike and carried her away...we had 3rd place locked up.  

We biked back to the finish, did the land nav section and finished the race in 3rd place in a time of 17 hours and 27 minutes.  I think only 4 teams out of 50 got all of the checkpoints.  Now, I've raced with Deron in quite a few races, and I've trained with him even more, and I know Deron is probably the best biker that I personally have ever ridden with, but to let you know how bad he was feeling...he had to visit the ER for an IV after this race!  Deron - we all knew you were hurting...thanks for sticking it out and finishing it and still coming in 3rd place out of 50 teams!  Serious points scored in my book!  Rick did awesome, too.  You never would have guessed it was his second race that he has ever done, and Laura is just a freak of nature.  She was the only one that was running 17 hours into the race on the last land nav section.  And we couldn't have done it without Andrea.  Thanks again!  Overall, this race was very well organized with lots of volunteers.  I really liked how they mixed it up throughout the race (started out in the middle of BFE and ended up in downtown Sioux City doing an Urban Challenge), and I'm sure I'll do it again next year.  

There was a tie for first place with Team Witness and Team IowaActive.com, and they came in OVER an hour and a half in front of us!  Gravity Matters has come in 2nd behind Team Witness in 2 races now, and we know everyone on IowaActive from Raid the Ridge.  I feel like I've done a few races and been pretty fast, but those two teams must have been flat out movin'!!  I still, even with our 45 minute setback on the trail run, don't see how they came in an hour and a half in front of us.  They're fast.  Really fast.  They were on their home court though...and we'll see them again at the US Adventure Racing National Championships in Indiana come November!  :-)

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