It's a mad, mad, mad, mad race

I was so sad on Saturday; so very, very sad.

You see, I had spent months running and pedaling my mountain bike up the gnarliest climbs I could find in my nearby woods and paddling up and down the rapids in the rivers all around my new home in Pittsburgh. It was all in anticipation of this year's Captain Thurmond's Challenge triathlon and it would be my third year competing. Everything looked to be perfect. My legs were fresh and strong and my fitness right where I thought it should be in order to perform well. I'd been in my new racing kayak for a few races and dozens of workouts, and at this point I really felt at home paddling it.

The race began well. The biking section would have a new course in 2008 so that the race could start and finish in Fayetteville, WV. After about a half mile of riding through the town's quiet streets, the racers entered the woods. We weren't quite spread out enough at that point, so some ritualistic bumping and passing was necessary. After a few descents and climbs on the singletrack course, I sat comfortably in position somewhere in the top 15 riders as the passing diminished. It was looking to be a good race!

Then, just as the race director had described in the pre-race meeting, the trail opened up to a graveled forest road. Down into the gorge I raced and once in awhile I was able to see a racer or two ahead of me when the road opened up for a straightaway in between switchbacks. Screaming down the mountain we went. At a rightward turning hairpin, a volunteer stood there, presumably for safety, encouraging us to keep going. A quarter mile further down the steep road in next hairpin turn to the left, the road opened again to a long, straight descent. I clicked my shifter into its highest gear and picked up speed.

I though it seemed odd that we were going so far away from Cunard.

Cunard is the place where we were to ditch our bikes for our boats and paddle to the end of the New River Gorge at Fayette Station. But, we were getting closer to Fayette Station on our bikes, not Cunard. Oh well, I thought, I haven't seen any course markers and there are still fresh tire tracks in the muddy sections. There must be riders ahead of me.

Slight panic began to sink in with my first glimpse of the New River Gorge Bridge, high above Fayette Station. This was a long way from Cunard. But there are still tire tracks! A group of hikers then encouraged me that there were eight riders ahead of me. Allright! I'm in 9th position! This is really my year!!

My slight panic became more intense when I reached the paved road and found one of my competitors, dejected, standing next to his bike.

"We're going the wrong way!", he shouted.

"Are you sure?", I protested.

"We're at the take out!", he said with eyes of disappointing solidarity.

A few bystanders disagreed. "The other racers went down that road!", they said. We shrugged to each other and off we went down the road. This road is one way, I thought, as we cranked our bikes as fast as we could down the steep, paved hill. But no cars approached us. Instead, we came upon those other racers that the bystanders had told us about.

"There's nobody down there!", one of them shouted, clearly infuriated. I was now in a group of about ten riders, two of whom won the race in previous years. This group was not happy. Kill the Monster lynch mob visions danced in my head.

Later, when I came upon a National Park Service Ranger's Jeep driving through the woods, saw the expression on his face, and heard the words he had to say, all hopes of seeing my results among the better ones in this year's vanished.

I had stopped racing. But, something inside me wouldn't allow it to be over until I heard it from an official. And, with the ranger's brown NPS uniform and white and green jeep, it doesn't get much more official than that in the New River Gorge National Recreation Area. I was just so sad.

And so, from Fayette Station, two riders decided to ride along the railroad to Cunard, disqualifying themselves from the race by doing so, but it was the most direct way to get to their boats so that their team could proceed. The rest of us began to backtrack. For miles (and miles!) we all had descended into the New River Gorge at breakneck speeds. Now we slowly ascended back out, feeling cheated. At the point where asphalt gave way to dirt, the two previous year's winners accepted a ride from a pickup, leaving about 6 of us to continue into the forest. We rode together, licking our wounds, bitching about how in the world a race director could possibly fail to mark a turn off a screaming fire road descent!

And that's when we ran into the ranger. His words should have reinforced what we already knew, but for some reason (denial) it was hard to hear that the entire race was now ahead of us because we'd missed a turn off that fire road.

Several hours later, after transcending the remaining grief steps (actually I was still stuck somewhere between depression and acceptance), I found myself back in Fayetteville. In the meantime, I had decided to stop racing after completing the remainder of the bike course and then paddling to a point where I found my friends from Three Rivers Paddling Club on the river. Telling race officials that "122 is pulling out of the race", as much as it pained me to say it, came at Fayette Station. I've felt this emotion before, but it's been due to injury, not personal protest and exhaustion. When I found the race director, things changed. I had clearly not been the only one ready to tell him exactly how badly he'd screwed up (er, how angry we were that he did). Shaking his head while holding it in his hands, he was courteously apologizing to each of the racers who stood in front of him. He knew that the mistake was on his watch whether or not he'd carefully instructed his volunteers. I imagined myself in his shoes.

And so I began to walk away after leaving him with my name for my refund check. As he maturely took his next tongue lashing from the line of tongue lashers, I looked up at the Fayette County Courthouse and the big, bright blue sky illuminating its stone facade and the dozens of townspeople who had come out to support the race. I stopped in my tracks and turned back. "Hey, Adam!", I shouted. The race director looked up like a victim. "I'll be back next year."

Git 'r Dun

Here's the Beckley, WV Register-Herald story on the race.