This past weekend, Team Green Paw Adventure Sports was back for the 3rd annual Atomic Adventure Race.  Anna and I were there along with new teammate, Mark Bolyard, as our third.  As you may recall, we almost won this race in 2009, but a wrong turn put us on a forbidden route within a couple miles of the finish line.  In 2010 we had some bad luck that pushed us back to finishing in 5th place.  We were hoping to have some better luck this year, but things just didn’t fall our way.

     We arrived at beautiful Amicalola Falls State Park on Friday afternoon.  Met up with Mark, and checked in to get our maps and instructions at 5pm when check-in opened.  We were up until around 1am the night before the race (pretty good for us), planning our maps, packing our gear, and preparing ourselves for what looked to be a long course, especially since two sections of the course would not be revealed until we were on the course.

     After a 5:30am bike drop, the race started at the base of the park around 7:30am.  We simply had to run up the hill to the reflection pond, and turn back to get on the bus, which would transport us about 45 minutes away to our bikes.  The only real advantage of running up the hill fast was getting to sit towards the front of the bus and get off first.  We were the 4th or 5th team on the bus.  When we arrived, we were the first team out of the transition area on our bikes by at least a couple minutes, thanks to our Power Grips.  We were the 4th team to get to CP 1 on the bikes, and chose to backtrack the road into CP1 to get back to the North/South paved road that took us to Hwy 60.  Not sure how many teams took this route, as none of the leaders in front of us had, but we arrived at TA1 just slightly behind them and figure the route choice saved us 10 minutes or so.

     At TA1 we transitioned to “boats.”  In our required gear for the race, we were carrying a pump to inflate a raft, paddles, and PFDs.  We were given a 2-person inflatable raft at this TA, which we had to take through this section and to the next TA after the trek.  We witnessed Wedali get in and pop a hole almost immediately, then deciding to trek the section, followed by CP0 not even attempting to get in, instead hiking across the river and into the woods with their raft. 

We carefully got in and started down the rapids.  A few minutes later…   “OOWWW!”  I had hit my tailbone pretty badly on a rock in the rapids.  Pretty soon we got out for a portage to cut off some distance, as the river wound around.  We got back in at a footbridge with some rapids and tried continuing on in the raft.  From this point on, it seemed that every time we got in the raft, teams would pass us on foot, then when we would get out and run, teams would be passing us in their rafts.  To boot, rocks were getting harder and harder to avoid in the water, and Marks ankles as well as Anna’s tailbone were taking a beating on the bottom of the boat.

     We were just not having any luck on this section, and were thankful when we finally got to the end of it.  With Mark packed up with the raft AND two sets of paddles, we continued on the next hike section.  We nailed CP7 and thought CP8 would be simple, as it was marked at the end of a road where it “T”s with a trail.  A little past the distance we thought the point would be at, the road ended and the trail went only in one direction.  There were quite a few other teams here looking for the point.  We looked in the logical places, but no luck.  After about an hour of searching, we started to continue on, but soon heard that another team had found it nearby where we were looking, so not wanting to miss a point this early in the race, we headed back.  After another hour looking for CP8, Ben, the race director, drove up in his truck and told us it wasn’t there, was missing, and to move on, so we did.  At this point, we were already running short on time and food, and decided to skip CP9 which would take at least another hour to get, knowing that if we had time later, we could get two bonus points to make up for it.  Teams AR Militia and Who Plotted both helped us out here by sharing some of their extra food to help us finish this trek strong.

     When we got back to our bikes, we finally got to drop the extra weight of the paddles, PFDs, and raft.  What a relief!  We were off on our bikes, and quickly snagged all the CPs en route to the next TA, as it got dark out.

     At TA3, we were giving the coordinates of 6 CPs that we had to get on foot.  We were told it might take around 4.5 hours to get all 6 points.  Once we plotted the points on our map, it looked to me more like a 6-7 hour trek, so we took enough food accordingly.  After easily getting T1 off the road at a footbridge, the rest were out in the wilderness, many not on any marked/mapped roads or trails.  The trek from T1 to T2 took us a Long time.  It was only about 3k, but because we were bushwhacking and constantly getting ourselves stuck in thick brush, it took upwards of two hours to get to T2.  We finally got on a trail right before the point, and jumped on a small, unmarked trail on the ridge of the mountain that took us to the point.  From there, Trek CPs 3, 4, 5, and 6, were all relatively straightforward, taking a trail to the attack point for each CP.  It got quite cold in the middle of the night during this section.  The low was supposed to be 56, but it was easily in the 30s, and raining on and off.  We heard a couple teams say that they saw snow falling.  Around T4, we wrapped our mandatory space blankets around our bodies under our jackets to help retain heat, which worked surprisingly well.  We found an overgrown trail that led us from T6 back through T1 to the TA.  It took us a bit over 7 hours to get all 6 of these points, and we knew at this point that we would be short on time to get to the race finish (roughly 7 hours away).  We sat in the TA briefly contemplating not to go on, until we decided to go for it!!!  Race director Josh recommended skipping all the CPs on the way back to save time, but we did not heed his advice, grabbing every bike CP there was on the way back to the finish line.  When we got to CP20, we were disheartened to hear that Many teams had taken the Appalachian Trail, thus explicitly breaking the race rules of absolutely no travel on this trail.  The teams that did this incurred a 4-hour penalty, but this would be added on after the 1pm cut-off time, which at this point we realized we were going to miss.  Had we done the same, we would have easily saved enough actual hours on the course to make it in before the 1pm cut-off.  We skipped the orienteering section at TA4 and headed straight for the finish, missing the cut-off by around 30 minutes.  In the end, we got all but 6 CPs, but were unranked because of missing the cut-off time.  We raced hard, and I’m proud that we pushed ourselves for over 30 hours of racing to the finish. Anna and I both had a great time racing with Mark for the first time.  He’s a good, strong teammate and is welcome back on Team Green Paw any time!  Although no team cleared the course, congrats to all those who competed.  It was a long, hard course, made especially challenging by the lack of a real paddle section.

     A BIG thanks to Megan Roberts, who took all the pictures on this page.  You can view and buy any of the Thousands of pictures she took of the Atomic AR at her website here.

     Next up for Team Green Paw is the 30-hour Florida Sunshine AR on May 28-29.  With less than 2 weeks to recover, it should be interesting…   though at this point we’re more concerned about our tailbones than our leg muscles :)