Peaks and Valleys - San Diego

[Barrie]

Peaks and Valleys 2008
Apr 12, 2008

We hope this will become an annual event and after the inaugural event it seems those in attendance will be back. Of course that may be because we had beer at the end which was appreciated on a day where the mercury got to 98.4 degrees. Fortunately most of the racers had completed the course by the high temperature, but with no wind it was definitely a HOT day.

Peaks and Valleys is not a traditional Adventure Race. The map and checkpoint locations were given out months before the race, but it was the racers responsibility to select their route of travel. The course requires racers to visit 5 peaks in Mission Trails Park, and 5 valley locations. All points happen to cause some sort of back-tracking or overlap, and depending on how a racer or team solved this, depended on their success.

We expected the teams to take 3-3½ hours to finish the about 25 miles and the solo runners to take around 6 hours. We were astonished to find the first team finish in 2 hours 12 minutes, and the first solo runners to finish in 5 hours 13 minutes.

There ended up being 3 categories racing.

Team Bike involved a team of 2 persons where one could ride a bike and one was required to run. Dave Krosch and Lynn Trimble had this dialed in with Dave running to the 3 southern points while Lynn used the bike to get the 6 northern points. That left the middle peak of Kwaay Paay to be visited. The first to the last peak would run it. Their strategy worked perfect as Lynn rode past Dave with about 1 Km to go to do this peak. Being first there Lynn had the “pleasure” of running the 2Km to the top then 2 Km back down before biking to the finish. Meanwhile Dave headed to the finish line where he was drinking a beer before 2 hours had elapsed from the start time. We then sat around and discussed possible routes while waiting for the other contestants to finish.

Being a hot day many contestants used it as a simple training event and skipped a few controls, but finished before it got unbearably hot. So we had a number of racers back before the next few who completed the course.

The second category to finish was the Solo Bike. In this classification a single racer could use a bike as well as run to gather the controls. However, two of those controls were designated as running only (Pyles Peak and Kwaay Paay) and the bikes could not go on other trails also. Ann Hall and Ian MacDiarmid, while designated solo racers, stayed reasonably close such that they finished together in 4 hours and 10 minutes. After they ran Kwaay Paay they elected to ride up Cowles Mtn the back route (via Mesa Creek trail). This is a technical uphill and on the return a fast downhill. Soon after them were Josh and Veronica Williams, who took a very difficult bike route on a trail along Hwy 52. We joked with them at the finish about their route selection and are pretty sure they will change their course next year.

The third category was Run only which allowed racers to use all trails at anytime. The run option took away some of the backtracking as racers could do a loop of the southern controls. The Viasat team of Larry Bice, Kevin Hunter, Colin Sage and Rodney Eales ran together and finished in 5 hours 13 minutes. The only other two racers who completed the full 10 controls running were Casey Hare and Christian Palouda who suffered from the heat and were an hour back. Almost completing the course was Aaron Nowlin who ran out of water before starting up Kwaay Paay and almost fainting because of it. Fortunately he stopped at that point, which reminds us to next year point out all the locations where you can get water on the course if you have not stashed it somewhere.

There were many others not named here who raced and we appreciate them coming out to support our events. We had a total of 26 racers in the 3 categories, most doing the run-only. I want to apologize to Todd Webb for slipping a couple of rules in at the last minute taking away the option of going up the climber trails to Kwaay Paay and not allowing anyone to take a bike up the front trail to Cowles Mtn. Todd had planned to use both these “shortcuts” and nixing them at the last minute caused him to have to cut the race short so as to meet another engagement for the day.

For the race results please go to http://www.baAdventures.com/eventPV08.html