Snowgaine 2008 Part II

We knew that we were hosed at this point. It was two kilometers of shoving to the next cluster of houses in North Boylston. But we also knew that the intersecting road would be plowed as we had seen it earlier in the day. When we reached our destination it was 4:45 pm and we faced a hard choice. 14km of biking around to the finish on known plowed roads or 3km of bike push plus 3km of bike riding. Given the road conditions we figured either option would take about an hour. We selected the latter on the chance that the 3km push might get lucky and encounter some rideable snowmobile tracks or that the plow line might extend up the road a bit. No windfalls came our way and we finished at 5:40pm. Good for a two hour time penalty on Sunday. (Three minutes of penalty for every one minute over). Given the lack of plowing on Wart Road the long road ride around probably would have been faster. The underlying math question was "can you ride a bike 11km in shallow snow faster than you can push a bike 3km in deep snow?" If somebody out there with ready access to snow wants to do a few time trials I'd appreciate hearing your findings. :)


Day two was substantially more relaxed. We hung out for two hours after the field start at 9am and even loaned out the bikes to another team that had (like us) stayed out far past 5pm and faced too high of a hurdle to take home any kind of top prize. Even if everybody were still in it we would have loaned them out. Its just that type of event. Bruce and I set up our intent the night before and settled on a clockwise route around the southern map: (45, 70, 37, 62, 44, 52, 33, 72 and 54) would be our CP order. We set out running fairly hard, so in hard in fact that we blew past the forest boundary leading out to CP45. We quickly corrected that . But then comically and for good measure we blew past McKibben Road which led west to CP70. We were almost to the next road down (shown just at the edge of the map). By then and just elected to continue on and take the westbound county road out of Smartsville. It was a plowed road versus a snow packed trail so we were able to run faster but it was clear we weren't all that focused.

After that we settled in and made quick work out of everything in our path. After punching CP52 and reaching Bargy Road at 2pm (the north to south road between CP52 and CP33) we debated a run to CPs 65 and 41. We figured we'd have to bust a whole lot more hump and probably have to sacrifice CP 72 in order to make it work. On the other hand there would be cheeseburgers and hot dogs on the grill by 4pm. For an extra 34 points we took a pass and finished off the next couple points with relative ease. We even stopped to dump our snowshoes at Bruce's van on the way in to the finish line. We came in just before 4pm with 1104 points for the weekend. A nice total (good for 6th or 7th place overall) but still only good for 2nd place on the ride home!!! Brent and Abby did a better job of managing the clock both days and rolled in with a score around 1180 not including the points for CP44 which they had visited but failed to punch. Oddly enough they were not alone in this feat. Another team had done the exact same thing. I don't recall free beer or any similarly distracting items in the vicinity of CP44 but for some reason it eluded two teams.

Post script: That's a really crappy digital photo of the map in the Wart Road post. My scanner isn't playing nice. Check back in a few days and I promise a higher quality set of images.