9 a.m., Day 1
As the remnants of Hurricane Helene swept over me, I huddled on a mountain ridge in West Virginia. The 2024 United States Adventure Racing Association National Championships hadn’t even begun yet, and I was already getting chilled. About 200 other competitors and I were using one another for shelter and doing jumping jacks, while the frigid gale bowled metal chairs across the plaza of Snowshoe Mountain resort. This was actually the best weather we were supposed to have all day, because the storm was in a lull; rain would soon begin pouring again.
Finally, the race directors shouted go, and the runners broke toward every point of the compass. We were all headed toward the same finish line. But in between here and there — some 120 miles on the most efficient and complete route — we would take countless different paths.
That’s because adventure racing is a mash-up of an Ironman triathlon and a wilderness treasure hunt, with teams of three tracking down hidden checkpoints over vast distances in rough terrain. For this national championship contest, we had to seek 50 checkpoints secreted throughout the Monongahela National Forest over the course of 30 hours — during which time few teams would sleep. To reach the checkpoints, we could use only our feet, mountain bikes and canoes, and for navigation we had to rely on maps and compasses. Whichever team found the most checkpoints (and crossed the finish line) by the deadline would win.
I received topographic maps of the course before dawn, in the bunkerlike basement of the resort’s convention center, along with my two teammates: MacRae Linton and Jedediah Britton-Purdy. Despite the early hour and horrid weather, MacRae was literally bouncing with excitement, as he had for all our annual expeditions since college 15 years before. Jed, however, was questioning the wisdom of racing in the storm. Jed is about a decade older than I am, and he reminded me gently that our wives and young children would be in the path of the storm — was it wise to make ourselves totally unavailable for 30 hours? I shared Jed’s unease at being away from my family — and also MacRae’s excitement at the impending challenge. Ultimately, I figured we were already hundreds of miles away from our homes, so the only practical option was to forge ahead.
Laying all 10 maps out on a table, we surveyed the mountain ranges we would traverse. Topographic maps are filled with elevation contour lines — which to the untrained eye look like illegible spaghetti but to the knowledgeable reader transform 2-D paper into a 3-D hologram. Scattered through the hundreds of cartographic square miles, amid the other symbols that marked everything from cliffs to the thickness of vegetation, were the red circles of the checkpoints, which we had to figure out how to best connect. It was beyond the ability of mere mortals to touch every checkpoint, so doing well required figuring out which points to attempt. Many checkpoints were hidden far off-trail, in intentionally difficult places to reach, so strategic route choices tended to involve hard trade-offs: Were we better off following an established trail over a peak or bushwhacking a shortcut through a boggy valley?