c2c 08 race report

8/14/2019 C2C 08 Race Report

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Costa Rica Coast to Coast Challenge 2008

April 20th to the 26th

Coast to Coast 08:

Cast of Characters:David Darby

Miles EstyBobette Burdick

Tom SmithSteve

Bill

(I did not personally meet Steve or Bill but Miles sawthem often and spoke to them frequently)

Race Structure:

This years Coast to Coast Challenge consisted of six stages. Stage One was a warm up of kayaking, trekking,ropes and biking in a mixed format. After that it was bike, trek, bike, trek and a sixth stage that was also a mix.

The format consisted of three forms of controls: Check-points (CPs) that were manned, drop-boxes that werenot and Transition Areas (TAs) between stages.

The start was just north of the Panamanian border inPunta Cocles on the Caribbean coast. The finish was atPlaya Bejuco on the Pacific.

Stage 1

In The Green Room

Punta Cocles, Costa Rica

10:00 a.m. Sunday April 20th

I am focused like a laser. The surf is huge.

Like a racehorse in the gate before the bell sounds, I am champing at the bit. I dig the paddles in a couple of time

but David is screaming in my ear to wait. The waves are thunderous and our kayak is bouncing in the shallowsurf. David has a grip on the stern and is holding us in the shore break. I can hear people on the beach shouting atMiles and I to launch. David will decide when we go. I cannot see over the surf to gauge the wave set. If he picksthe wrong set we will enter the washing machine on the spin cycle.

The race officially started on the beach a few minutes ago but that means nothing. Picking the right moment toleave the beach is everything.

A boat shoots out to my left. Its Economy Rental Car, our friends Danny and Alvaro (I think their female was inthe front). They hit hard and crash through the first wave, they clear the second wave, and are safely off. Anotherboat attempts to launch to my right. Its the wrong wave and although I try to focus on our set I cant help but


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The Green Room II

The Coast to Coast this year starts with a warm-upthat should take anywhere from 6 to 10 hours. Ourgoal is to have a good day and get off cleanly into therace at the end of the day. No sprinting.

The prologue consists of splitting the team into pairs,

one pair paddles about 4 kilometers down the beachand meets the other pair on their bikes. We swap outand they paddle about 6 kilometers. We meet upagain and one pair starts a 12k trek while the otherdoes a 40k bike. We meet at a CP and swap out andreverse course. You only get two bikes so we rig themso Bobette and I share one and Miles and David theother.

While David got Miles and me off the beach cleanly I donot return the favor. I shove David and Bobette into the biggest wave set to hit the beach that afternoon. The truth

is we didnt even look up; there was very little wave action on the second beach until we launched. They getrolled, thrashed and churned twice. They come up laughing both times. David and Bobette are new teammatesfor me so I was frankly amazed. They are starting a 5-day race by getting pummeled and they are acting like twokids at a pool party. If they had water pistols I never would have gotten them off the beach. To paraphraseWinston Churchill: adventure racing consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. It wouldhave made Winston proud.

1:56 p.m. Sunday, April 20th Gandoca

We swap out cleanly after Miles and I bike the 40k and David gives us a headsup on where to find a shortcut to avoid a long beach slog around the point. The

directions are a little foggy, the palm trees are numbered along the beach (forturtle studies), but we cant locate the trail at tree #11. We keep heading downthe beach until we come to a spot that matches Davids verbal description. Its agroup of college students from Wisconsin living in a beach shack with a bar,studying the mating habits of sea turtles.

Well, guess what Mom and Dad Cheesehead? Johnny and Sally arent spendingall their time on the beach in Costa Rica counting turtle eggs! Yep from thelook and smell of things they are spending your tuition money smoking dope,surfing and studying mating habits. Couldnt have seen that coming.

6:19 p.m. Sunday, April 20th

We meet David and Bobette back at the kayak drop and pick up the other twobikes the race organization has dropped for us. We ride back to the TA, hoistBobette up a tree to get a drop-box (she gets hoisted a couple of times in the raceand is surprisingly good natured about it) and get ready for a 90-mile bike. The top four teams are all within 20minutes of each other after 7 hours. We saddle up for a long night ride.

Stage 2, Mountain Bike

11:50 p.m. Sunday, April 20th

Valle la Estrella

Are those Bobettes legs sticking up in the air?

CP in a Tree!


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There is only one drop-box we need to hit on the way to CP #1. Its at a Pulpe (little store) on a dirt road that isnon our maps. Mike (the Race Director) tells us where we will find the road and that it is the only Pulpe on theroad. We do locate the road after biking a maze of cane-fields, but without coordinates we are forced to searchevery Pulpe on the road. We were told it might or might not be open. There are half a dozen. We find it much further along the road that doesnt exist than we had thought. We pile down some Coke and junk food (a pattern wewill repeat frequently) and head for Limon.

Limon: City of Love

1:45 a.m. Monday, April 21st

Bananito

It has been raining lightly off and on for hours. Now it is coming down sideways. If you concentrate you can justabout see your handlebars. We cannot ride in a pace line; we would drown from the water coming off the wheelsIt is unpleasant at best. I cannot see the map at all and my eyes are shot from the spray. The nav is not difficulthere; primarily pavement, and we arrive at the outskirts of Limon a little before 2:00 a.m.

David and I stop to get a look at the map. We need to locate an all night restaurant, PC 1, somewhere in the city.Limon is not a good place to wander around at night... or any time for that matter. It is a major port on the Carib-bean coast and a big entry point for the drug trade. A hooker promptly strolls up to Miles to see if he is up for alittle action. David and I point out that it is a long race and we need five minutes with the maps anyway. He de-clines. I guess hes tired. The hooker tries Bobette next. She declines also and the lady moves on with a barrageof Spanish abuse. I cant help but wonder whats wrong with me I assume its the dorky racing glasses.


Limon

We find the restaurant with the help of a circling police van. I am glad they are there but concerned that the cityneeds a circling police van. We check in, eat a pile of food and ride on. We ride by the ports, still active at 3 a.m.and go north up the coast paralleling the rail lines. This area is roadless, bound by the sea to our right and swampto our left. Mikes assistant, Carr, is waiting for us. He explains that the path along the tracks may be flooded in

places. While thats handy to know there arent any other choices so we adjust our masks and snorkels, set ourbikes on submerge and continue on.

We alternate riding the tracks (bone jarring and dangerous) and the trail next to the tracks. The water gets prettydeep in places. For the first time (and not the last) I hear the word Kuku (sp?).

As in: If you bitches are peddling knee deep then Im in this sh*t up to my f^#&ing Kuku!!!

Have I mentioned that my new teammate Bobette is completely nuts? If I put in this report even half the thingsshe said it would get an NC-17 rating. You just never knew what would come out next. It was a source of endlessamusement. Heres what she cannot hide behind all that talk: she is tough

as nails and will do anything to move her team forward. She has your backeven in Kuku deep water. If it needs doing Bobette is probably already do-ing it. Whining, on the other hand, is completely out.


Nueve Millas

It is very dark and this is not a fun ride. Riding on the tracks is slow andtreacherous. Riding on the trail next to the tracks is slow and wet. The pud-dles can be up to 3 deep and you only find that out when you ride intothem. At times the bikes begin to float and lose bottom traction. This turns

Time to take the meds...
http://www.youtube.com/v/uYBYRk8-uPAhttp://www.youtube.com/v/uYBYRk8-uPA


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into a bizarre form of aqua-cycling. Nobody seems to like aqua-cycling. We like going over the handlebars ontorailroad tracks even less.

Eventually we are forced back to the rails by necessity. The rails split from the trail and we need to go west withthe rails


Catorce Millas

Somewhere during this process I hear a motorcycle coming up behind me. When I look back I can see a group ofpeople approaching on the rails. They are riding on a platform. The front end of a motorcycle has been mountedto the right side of the platform and there is a kid sitting on the seat driving. The rear wheel of the motorcycle issitting on top of the rail, acting as the drive wheel for the cart. This is a rail taxi. Ingenious.

When the rail lines were abandoned on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica it left a lot of small villages strandedalong the tracks. Many of these villages take their name from where they sit along the railway. We had alreadypassed through the small towns of 9 Miles and 14 Miles. There are no roads; this was how people got around.

A visit from Mechanicus:

7:00 a.m. April 21

st

There is frequently no rhyme or reason to the magic of adventure racing. Sometimes things go badly. I guess thiswas a good time for the bicycle gods to favor us with capricious misfortune.

Miles suffered a routine flat and we stopped to fix it. Within 100 yards his fronttire blew off the rim with a loud POP! The tire had not seated properly. Milesskidded into a front wheelie. The tube, still inflated, wrapped around his front enda few times and bulged out all over. It looked like a clown version of a balloonpoodle at a kids birthday party. The combination of Miles almost chucking overthe handlebars and the tube poking out all over was very funny. Not so much for

Miles who was trying to get his heart re-started.

We went another 100 yards when my derailleur skipped a few times, jumped intothe rear spokes and shot off the back end like cannon fire. David fixed this withBobettes chain tool and I continued to the TA on my new fixed gear MTB. Daviddid a lot of pushing to keep our speed up. I was limited to 8 mph at 100 rpm. Myconcern was not how I was going to ride the 20k to the TA; I could push it thatfar. How was I going to ride it to the Pacific?

Barbilla TA: Stage 3, Trek


My bike was a mess and Miles stomach had gone off line at some point during the ride. Despite this we were onlan hour or two behind the lead team. We wanted to keep moving but needed to give Miles a chance to recover.The next trek section would be long and difficult, taking us through road-less indigenous Indian areas.

dehydrationn.

1. The process of removing water from a substance or compound.2. Excessive loss of water from the body or from an organ or body part, as from illness or fluid deprivation.


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We learned that a number of teams had met with misfortune and the field had narrowed significantly. TeamPolini had dropped due to injury; Team Adventure World Magazine had dropped when a teammate had sufferedsome sort of venomous bite (spider, scorpion, ant take your pick). Team Bones, last years winner, had decidednot to continue when their captain Roy Malone was not feeling well.

Roy didnt feel well because he had had an emergency appendectomy the week before. While extreme distanceadventure racing requires a commensurate level of denial Roy was taking it to new levels. Usually the removal ofan organ is grounds for taking a couple of weeks off. Like any good adventure racer Roy didnt see it that way.

My guess is his thinking went like this:

Better bring crazy glue in case the stitches fail, maybe some duct tape too oh, and some aspirin

Team Bones is not only the returning champion and one of the few teams with a realistic chance to beat the CostaRicans, they are also great people to race with and it was disappointing to see them go.

I asked Roy if I could borrow his bike for the remainder of the race (an Ellsworth Truth Score!). I vowed Iwould ship it home to him in as good or better condition than I got it. To his credit he agreed without hesitation.True to my word, Roys bike frame is up at the bike shop right now being reassembled with new parts that arejust as good as the ones that flew off, snapped off, got ripped off, broke off

Sorry Roy.

Miles Goes Dark11:00 a.m. April 21st

Despite having spent some extra time in the TA it was clear that Miles was suffering from serious dehydration.When your internal homeostasis goes whack (thats the medical term) a negative feedback loop spirals down-ward. The stomach shuts down, your electrolytes deplete and it becomes increasingly difficult to focus. You be-come more dehydrated. Miles was fighting severe nausea and all his concentration went into putting one foot infront of the other, and of course, dry heaving. The trek started with a long uphill to CP 2, located at a little school

in the mountains. The team slowed considerably. We were close to pushing Miles over the edge. He soldiered ondespite bouts of nausea and cramping.

6:00 p.m. April 21st

Brisas de Pacuarito

We located the school and prepared to spend the night. Miles hadnt been heard from in hours (if you dont countthe retching) and the next section is going to be jungle trails with lots of mud and no navigation markers. Davidwas aiming for a place called Valle Escondido (Hidden Valley) with little more than a topo map and a compassbearing. There were no roads into this area and the myriad of trails was unmarked and un-mapped. We would belooking for a small indigenous Indian school in a native village. Our search area, after we located the valley, wasroughly 2k wide and 3k long. It was not a place to try and locate at night with a sick teammate. It was our hope

that the extended stay would get Miles back on his feet and we could make up the time with faster movement indaylight.

We bedded down for the night on the tile floor of the school. 10 hours is a long time to spend in a foil bivy sackon a tile floor. It is also a new personal record for me in a bivy sack. I hope never to challenge this record. Asmany as 4 teams inhabited this CP at some point during the night. When we woke at 4:00 a.m. we had it to our-selves.


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Miles Is Back!

6:00 a.m. Tuesday, April 22nd

Somewhere in the jungle

Sometime early that morning on the trail I pull out a bag ofCombos: little cheese filled pretzels. Miles quickly downed a hand-ful and not 10 minutes later began singing.

apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, with the fur, the whole club

is looking at her

He was not only singing he was struttin and singing

David: You got any more of those?

Bobette: *&%$^ Combos!

This set off a frantic search through our packs for more magic Combos. I manage to turn up one more bag. Newplan: pick up the pace and feed Miles a couple of Combos every 20 minutes. Hope we can find more in my foodbin.

and Gone Again.

The singing stopped as quickly as it started. From a purely musical standpoint this was not a bad thing. He wentdark again and we didnt hear from him until Wednesday. With 100% humidity and temperatures in the 80s hejust couldnt get fluids in fast enough to gain on the problem.

Mud:

We trekked in a sea of mud. It was endless, deep and frustrating. We slid all around in it. Mud sucked our shoesoff. Mud sucked the life out of us. If that wasnt bad enough we encountered a swarm of enormous biting flies.They were incredibly tough. David managed to slap one, roll it down his leg and crunch it up. It unrolled andflew away. I hit one so hard I left a mark that just made it angry.

11:00 a.m. Monday, April 22nd

Indigenous village, 12k east of Valle Escondido

We eventually located the valley by asking direc-tions at some Indian huts we came to on the trail. Igot to use my favorite new word a couple of times.David had noticed that the Costa Rican teams would

stand outside a home and shout the wordUPE! (pronounced EW-pay) whenever theyneeded help. I thought Id give this a go. I stood out-side an Indian hut and let fly my best UPE! Outpopped a little Indian woman. Now were gettingsomewhere. Donde esta Valle Escondido? Shepoints about 4 ridgelines to the west and waves herarms emphatically. Translation: a long friggin wayover there, gringo.

Do not give this man a loaded weapon

I wonder how fast that chicken is.?
http://www.youtube.com/v/8Zn-1xcwujAhttp://www.youtube.com/v/8Zn-1xcwujA


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Stage 4

TA #3: The Incredible Shrinking Man

8:36 p.m. Tuesday April 22nd

Cien Manzanas

The symptoms become increasingly severe with greater water loss. One's heart and respiration rates

begin to increase to compensate for decreased plasma volume and blood pressure, while body tem-

perature may rise because of decreased sweating. Around 5% to 6% water loss, one may become

groggy or sleepy, experience headaches ornausea, and may feel tingling in one's limbs (paresthesia).

With 10% to 15% fluid loss, muscles may become spastic, skin may shrivel and wrinkle, vision may

dim, urination will be greatly reduced and may become painful, and delirium may begin. Losses greate

than 15% are usually fatal. [3]When we arrive at the TA Davids wife (Theresa) asks him how we are doing.

David: I think we may have been arrested for loitering.

Realistically Miles cannot continue in his current state. It is entirely possible that he cannot continue at all. He hashown an incredible tolerance for pain and discomfort and shows no signs of quitting. Such a fine line separatestenacity from stupidity

The race doctor is at TA #3 and he is doing the mandatory physical on all the teams. When we get into the TAMiles goes down for some sleep. We wake him for the physical and the doctor gives him the thumbs up. He is thepicture of health. Despite tanking blood pressure, elevated heart rate, nausea, oh and he looks like an Ethiopianrefugee, he is cleared to race. He was thin to start but in all honesty theres not much left but skin and bone. I

wonder what condition he would need to be in to get a no go?

We take the doctor aside to discuss our options. The Doctor speaks English reasonably well but we struggle tocommunicate. Nobody seems to know the Spanish equivalent of euthanasia. We try again. Put to sleep dirtnap put him down relieve his misery do the humane thing. The doctor either doesnt understand or isplaying dumb. With that option out we go to plan B. We are going to re-hydrate Miles. This time we are going toforce it into him. Its time for some tough love.

We plunk down 3 liters of water in front of Miles. Bobette and I take turns getting him to drink. It has to be doneslowly or he will just puke it up. This is agonizing for Miles but he doesnt give up. We tell him we wont leavethe TA until he drinks it all. We will stay until its all gone and he keeps it down. This actually works. It is in-

credibly uncomfortable for him but he stays with the program. There is some complaint that water-boarding is il-legal. Show me where it says that in the race rules.

We stay 5 hours but he gets it all down. We take his pack and empty it of his gear, split it up, and leave the pack.Miles is too weak to really complain but puts up a strong defense when we try and chuck his Chef Boyardee ravi-oli. He is living on this stuff. We head out on the bikes. Three hours later he is singing again.

apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, with the fur, the whole club is looking at her

There is some talk of cutting off his water.


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4 Star Breakfast:

1:20 a.m. Wednesday April 23rd

Outskirts of Turrialba

The next leg is a 40-mile bike, so of course its raining. It starts off almost immediately (well, actually about 2hours later, which is immediately in this race) with a short kayak section. This is an oddball but I like the idea.We bike to the dock of a very luxurious, small hotel on a lake. From there we need to take two kayaks, one tow-

ing two bikes on a tube, and find a drop-box on the lake. We have to unload two bikes with riders at the box. Thelake is not that big but all we have is this for directions: Go 1.45 kilometers southwest. When we reach thedock we learn that the average time to locate the box has been 6-10 hours. 1.45 kilometers in 10 hours? Thattakes the wind out of our sails.


We learn that Theresa, Davids daughters (Rachel andRebecca, two lovely young ladies who are really morelike cats than people, I only see them awake a coupleof times this week) and my wife, Renee, are staying atthe hotel. We decide to get some sleep. Not much point

in wandering around the lake in the dark. We are backout an hour later and head across the lake.

We are back in the hotel enjoying omelets; silver dollarpancakes and fresh squeezed orange juice a little overan hour later. Team Economy is still out there from3:00 yesterday afternoon. They took a break overnightto get some food and wait for daylight. That is theproblem with boxs that have no coordinates. If you hiton the right idea you find the box immediately. If not,you search for hours.

Most teams went southwest, but when they hit the opposite shore they realized they had only gone 1k or less.They got out and started walking. We didnt see it that way. We searched the shoreline until we hit a creek andcontinued up it the remaining distance to the box. This wasnt easy, the creek had a hard outflow and we weretowing bikes on a tube. We look like navigational rocket scientists. On the next one we couldnt find our ass in awell-lit room.

We dropped the bikes with David and Bobette andpaddled back to the hotel. They show up almost im-mediately after we arrived. This was a good trick be-cause David had no maps of the area and found his

way back through the cane-fields to the hotel by feel

We enjoyed a nice breakfast with the ladies. Miles,of course, was given some rice. He had been draggedthrough the jungle semi-comatose, water-boarded,and fed a prison camp diet. He was still singing.

You cant suffer all the time. Can you?

Kayaking with bikes. Always

wanted to do that. Bobette is point-

ing at the box over her head on the

tree.


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The Human Pincushion:


The team headed out with spirits high. Miles wasnt going to die after all and the sun was shining. We had caughta break on the lake and enjoyed a poolside breakfast at a 4 Star hotel. Things were looking up for Team DarkHorse.

Actually it might have been the pancakes I was dreaming of when I cycled over that Black Palm frond laying onthe trail in the canefield. The one with the thousands of 2 needle sharp spikes. It spun out of my front wheel intoto my right shin and foot and stuck there like Id kicked a porcupine. I dragged this 10lb frond about 30 feet be-fore Bobette caught it with her front wheel and pulled it free. The pain was absolutely stupendous.

I like to dabble with acute pain and mix it up with chronic pain. This was perfect. My leg felt like it had beenwhacked with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. I leapt from the bike and hopped around like a kangaroowith his tail on fire. Bobette came to my rescue, I dropped to the ground and she pulled my shoe off (which wasbleeding through) and began yanking out the palm spikes. There were hundreds. Dave, cheery as ever, thoughtthis was hilarious. He shot video. I screamed like a little girl at a scary movie.

Bobette, laughing and pulling out spikes said: You &%$^ make enough &^$% @!# noise for *&$%. You looklike *!*^# hedgehog! *&$#% dumb *&$%!!!. Or something like that.

Bobette pulled out all the long ones but there were few dozen that broke off she couldnt get. The race doc pulledout a bunch at the next TA but that still left a couple dozen. Two weeks later I still pull out two or three a day. Alittle bit of the race is always with me.

Note to self: There is no viable substitute for tweez-ers. Bring some.

Our Luck Runs Out:

12:00 p.m. Wednesday April 23rd

Near Tucurrique

The next drop-box seems straight forward enough.According to the instructions it is located on the ru-ins of an old bridge that spans the Rio Reventazon.To get there we have to locate an old road that is nolonger in use. The road is all but impassable, we arebeating our way through, but the box is at the bridgeruins so we stick with it. We arrive at the bridge ru-ins to find two other teams searching the area. They

have been there for hours. We know we are at the ru-ins but cannot find the box. What we dont know, butmany of the Costa Ricans do, is that there are moreruins mid-river. We are on a river but it is not themain channel. That has shifted over the years and is now a mile away through thick vegetation. Without coor-dinates we dont realize we are not yet at the correct ruins. Team Sarapiqui doesnt even bother with the old roadthey know they can cross the river and hit the box from the opposite shore. They approach it from Tucurrique andthe box is visible from there. We search for a few hours and decide to move on. This is a calculated risk. It is notuncommon for this race to have a misplaced box. Last year we searched for hours for one, and we think thismight be similar. Later we will be proven wrong.

Dave: resting up for his cow encounter. If you owned a reallynice boutique hotel how would you feel about finding this on the

front steps in the morning?
http://www.youtube.com/v/A6lW0pes1hwhttp://www.youtube.com/v/A6lW0pes1hw


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David vs. Cow: Tag Team Death Match

While we are looking for the box at the bridge ruins we all go slightly different directions. As I am crossing backthrough a field along the creek edge I see David go under a barbwire fence through a cow field. There are a fewcows in the field and they dont like Davids plan at all. To my surprise, and Davids, one cow rears up andcharges. Unlike our local Guernsey these cows have serious horns and look pretty athletic. David takes a stepback. The cow takes three hard steps at him and veers off relief, his and mine, is temporary. There is a secondcow coming in right behind the first and it isnt veering off. David goes over backward like hes hinged at the

heels. The cow breaks off the assault.

Inappropriate laughter is a basic adventure race staple. I laugh really loudly. Partly at the sight of David being at-tacked by cows, partly because hes still in there and the cows are circling. His run for the fence was pretty enter-taining too.

Heat On:


A long bike push out of the valley ensues. The sun is high and it is set on broil. We push the bikes from tree to

tree. Miles is looking better every minute (like a tall, healthy Ethiopian) and now is not the time to test our re-hydration efforts.

We hit the abandoned railroad tracks (linea ferrocarril) after a couple hours and go west. They are supposed to berideable but this proves false. We ride some, push some and carry a lot. We hit a couple of very old railroadbridges that look a bit dicey. They are rotting away in the jungle, hundreds of feet above the rivers. There are tiesmissing and some large gaps.

I dont for a second believe it is my fate to have anancient railroad bridge collapse underneath me inCosta Rica. Nobody dies like that. So I carry the bike

across without a second thought. I have excellent bal-ance and good shoes. The team follows, each with asimilarly baseless theory on why this bit of rottingjunk is actually quite safe for them. Miles does men-tion sending the government a sternly worded letteron his law firms letterhead.

We decide to abandon the rail line. The next CP is onthe rail lines but not for many kilometers. They suck.

Bobette: ^%#$ rail &^%#$ lines, kiss my &^$%, %

$@# &^$%

We all agree whole-heartedly.

Theres A Chicken Missing in Costa Rica


Juan Vinas

We take a detour through the town of Juan Vinas in the hopes of getting something to eat. After a bit of climbingon the bikes we locate a restaurant and sit down for dinner. We start out ordering a regular meal (more rice for

Yup - this looks fine. I think the safety inspector has been here

recently


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Miles) but David cant help himself. There were whole chickens on a rotisserie over an open fire pit out front.David orders the Pollo Entero. Yes, that means entire chicken. He consumes the whole chicken; nothing re-mains but a little plate of bones. The owner takes a liking to David, he is a railroad buff, and they compare noteson the railroad and the bridges we have crossed. He has antique pictures of them. These bridges are now deep inthe mountain jungle and he seems amazed that David has been to them. He gives us all pens with the restaurantsname on them and seems sad when we go. The pens were nice but a roasted chicken would have been better.

The Magic Streetlight:

We head out for the next drop-box at the junction of the railroad tracks and a road. We locate the road that willdrop us to the tracks but when we find the crossing there is no CP. Once again without coordinates we are at aloss as to where to go from here. There is supposed to be a restaurant here, but we are in the middle of nowhere.The map doesnt indicate that there is anything else in this valley. Oddly enough there is a streetlight up the val-ley a mile. We follow a dirt road (not on the map) up the valley and come to a small village and the restau-rant. We hook up with Team Elok at the box and head to TA#4. They know a shortcut over the next river into thetown of Orosi and we are happy to tag along.

11:30 P.M. Wednesday April 23rd

Along the way we stop at CP 5, which is a ropes course. 150 rappel, hoist Bobette up a cliff, back on the bikes. Iam first down the rappel and while I am untying from the rope a football size rock lands a couple feet from meand embeds 6 into the ground. I would be more concerned but I dont believe it is my fate to die by getting hiton the head with a rock. After all, I am wearing a helmet. I wonder mid-hoist why Bobette volunteers for theseclimbing assignments so readily. I am also relieved; I dont think I could do it. The answer seems obvious when Iput some thought into it: David is not a candidate for this. We dont have the horsepower for that. He is actuallyasleep right now. Miles looks better but he still has a 50-50 chance of going home in the cargo section of the air-plane. My physique can best be described as well nourished. If you were Bobette which end of the rope wouldyou want to be on?

Bobette: ^%#$ing cliff, @#%!my kuku ^%$* rope!

The Girls in Orosi:

2:54 a.m. Thursday April 24thOrosi

My teammate Bobette is as solid as they come and completely nuts. Where the rest of us have a little filter inour brains that helps us to figure out what should merely be thought but not said, let alone done, Bobette hasnothing. I like her like that.

Every morning she greets the new day by saying hello to the girls. The big girls are aired out and fluffed up.The little girls... well, you figure it out. She marched into the village of Cien Manzanas (100 Apples?) with her

shorts around her knees; the little girls needed drying out. The team rapidly comes to a point where there are nopersonal boundaries at all. Seriously none. Im fine with that.

We sleep a couple hours at the Orosi TA and knock the bikes down. We get up at dawn to start the next trek.Alvaro Saenz is still there with his team. He stops by while Im plotting the maps. It turns out his female has quitand the team wont be moving on. Alvaro has become a good friend over the last few years and I hate to see himdrop out. I invite him to join us. Miles and Bobette are seated at the next table over and I call over to them:

Hey team, what do you say Alvaro joins us? Were sick of each other anyway.


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Bobette: Yeah, the girls could use some new company! This statement is accompanied by general fluffing ofthe girls. This is not new to me; this constitutes modesty in many ways.

I turn back to Alvaro. He is speechless. I try to explain: Yeah, why notuh have you had breakfast? Noth-ing in his universe gives him a basis to understand Bobette. I drop it.

Many hours later Alavro and I meet up on the trail. He is trekking with Team Elok. We walk for a while togetherFinally he asks me:

Tom, this morning at breakfast, what does it mean when your female, she does this? Alvaro grabs his chest andshakes it.

That was an invitation to trek with us Alvaro.

For me?

I guess. I am already trekking with her.

There is dead silence for twenty minutes as we

work our way up the valley. He smiles, he finallygets it.

Your female, she is very strong, isnt she.

Yes she is.

Trek gone wrong: Stage 5

6:30 a.m. Thursday April 24th

Ridge above Orosi

We leave the Orosi TA just after dawn and head up into the mountains. The next section looks straightforwardbut the navigation is screwy. We have some general directions, no coordinates and a bunch of pictures to lead usto the next few boxes. Thats right, we are headed into the Costa Rican mountains with some snapshots

This goes badly right out of the gate. When we get up on the ridge we discover a major dirt road that is not on themaps. We have a picture of a water company sign, in fact its a cast concrete sculpture painted bright blue, wherethe box is. With no coordinates we dont know which way to go on the road. Right seems to make the most sensewith our intended direction of travel but when I ask a couple of workers (they are re-building the road), and showthem the picture, they all point left. We go left. We find a very similar sign to our photo, but it is not identical. Iask again, this gentleman points left as well. We continue. We run into two guys cutting brush. I show them thepicture. They assure us we are headed in the right direction. We come to the park entry; there is another very

similar sign, but not the right one.

We head back the other way. The mood of the Team is best described by this word I just made up:frictionalicious. David and I are keeping close track of where everyones trekking poles are.

The two guys cutting brush insist we have not gone far enough (all this is done in our pidgin Spanish). We wave$20 bucks at him and ask him to take us there. Were not walking back without some buy-in from the locals. Hetakes us to the same spot. We have wasted 2 hours. We head the other way. The mood of the Team is now bestdescribed by this new word I just made up: navi-cidal. David and I insist the team members turn in their re-quired knives with the 2 blade.

Bobette and I go to the same hair stylist


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The box is about 1k from where we hit the road. Wetake a photo that expresses how we feel about the di-rections to this box. That photo is not printable in afamily oriented race report. David and I request thatthe team walk in front of us.Now the trek is going swimmingly. It is a beautifulday and we are in a stunning valley. We are movingas a group of 9, having hooked up with Alvaro and

Team Elok. The navigation is still by photo but so farit is working.

6:00 p.m. Thursday April 24th

Somewhere in the mountains

Towards evening it stops working. We have beenbeating our way up into the mountains on cow trackand jungle trail but the last picture we match up is ofan entire valley. Can you see a drop-box in Photo #9?Neither did we. Thank goodness its not dark yet. Weneed to pick a peak and the directions dont match.

The peak that matches the given elevation is on thewrong side of the river. We are running out of day-light. We pick a peak and literally run up it. No box.Now its dark. We hike out to a dirt road, there are noroads on the maps. We try a different trail, but it be-comes impenetrable jungle. We backtrack to findTeam Elok enjoying a meal at the home of some lo-cals. The woodstove is fired up, the coffee is hot.What the hell we gather round the table and getsome rice and beans.

Think about it. A bunch of people dressed like freaks show up at your two-room home in the mountains and youimmediately set about feeding them. No questions asked. Go ahead and give this a try at home next weekend.Dress up in tights and strap on a headlamp. Trek around in the woods at midnight, roll about in a swamp andwrestle with a skunk. Find a house at the end of a long dirt road, stand outside and yell UPE!! when theycome out ask them to whip up some dinner for you. Let me know how that works out.

Note: It is difficult to convey the olfactory element. I hesitate to attempt a scratch-n-sniff. We stunk. When the 9of us gathered in that little 2 room home in the mountains the stench was palpable. These were country folk, usedto working with farm animals. I dont think they ever experienced anything quite like that though. My guess isthey moved out and burned the place.

Davids 5 Minutes:

11:00 p.m. Thursday April 24th

Somewhere in the Rio Navarro valley

If you race long enough and hard enough everyone is going to have a bad moment. Its my report so I dont haveto write about mine. Lets say there was more than one and leave it at that.

David had just about had it with the maps and lack of coordinates. You want to get a feel for navigating by pic-ture? Get a friend to take a picture of a fence 40 kilometers from your house. Have him send you the picture and 50,000-scale topo map of the area. Try and find the exact location your friend was standing when he took thephoto. Do it in the dark. Oh and you have to walk there.

Coordinates? No way. We use photos to find our way across Cost

Rica. Good thing the sun never goes down. Oh wait.


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He had cheerfully navigated all the foot sections with a bunch of photos and guesswork. Neither mud, biting fliesflying derailleurs or the crawling pace, could get him down.

The valley we came up, and the mountain we were on, showed up on the maps as being absolutely empty. In 3Dthere were some homes and dirt roads. Making sense of them, matching them to the terrain to try and figure outwhere the roads went was making us nuts. On our way to the next TA we realized we were passing close to thepeak we had not checked earlier. It was after midnight and the fog was pretty thick but the road seemed to goover the peak. The box was hanging right there. We could have walked up to it 6 hours ago. The pictures proba-

bly matched this spot as well, hard to tell, we could only see about 4 feet. We were a little bent.

Thats when Mike pulled up. That was unfortunate timing. David gave him both barrels. He wanted some coordi-nates. As a matter of fact he wanted them right now. David wanted to talk about how you locate a drop-box witha picture of a sculpture. David wanted to discuss finding a box with a picture of a fence. The fence was some-where in the valley David wanted to talk about that. He gave Mike an earful about trying to locate boxs with ahandful of photos and a map from the 1940s. It was Friday morning at 1:00 a.m. and we were all a little friction-alicious. I couldnt blame him, the lack of coordinates hadnt stopped us from locating the correct area of eachbox, but once there it became a scavenger hunt. David needed to vent. At one point I tried to intercede, David wabecoming navi-cidal. That just got the maps chucked at me. No problem rant on navigator man.

As quickly as he started, he stopped. Enough said. He went right back to being downright sunny.

TA #4: Stage 6

12:20 a.m. Friday April 25th

Luchita

We arrive at TA #4 just after midnight. We know we are in the village of Luchita because the race directions sayso. It is not on the map either. Like many of the TAs it is a community center so it is well sheltered and we de-cide to grab some sleep. We are high in the mountains and it is fairly chilly. We do not want to be forced to sleepin our bivys. In reality there is no big rush; there hasnt been for a couple of days.

Heres the situation. Once we slowed down to let Miles recover we really gave up any hope of a top 3 finish. 4thplace was solidly held by Team Race the Rockies (a great bunch of Canadians with a terrific sense of humor).They had passed us at the school a couple of days ago. They did a great job and finished strong early on Fridaymorning. We couldnt finish 7th,8th,9th or 10th unless we quit. Teams that dropped out along the way lockedthose spots down. We were hotly contesting 5th and 6th place. Well not really. Team Elok had one more thanwe did (the bridge ruins).

We were the 6th place team. We had about 16 hours left and it was over. The goal was to have a good last day andenjoy the experience. That plan worked for about 45 minutes.

Mechanicus redux:

3:40 a.m. Friday April 25thEmpalme

We leave the TA on bikes and hit the Pan American Highway soon after. We only needed to go up the road abou3k but it is an unpleasant ride nonetheless. This is a major paved truck route and it is steeply uphill. The air is70% carbon monoxide and 25% diesel fumes, we are at 8200 feet so the remaining 5% is unfortunately not oxy-gen.

We top out where we need to go west and begin our descent to the coast. The finish line is at 0 elevation and weare at 8200 feet. It is 100k from where we are. We need to get over a small coastal range but otherwise we are in


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for some tremendous downhill. We have been climbing for 4 days. Lets get it on!

I go 100 yards. I hear a loudclunk! my derailleur skitters across the pavement and into the grass (OK, techni-cally its Roys derailleur but thats a mote point. Now it belongs to all the people of Costa Rica). There is no ex-plaining why my derailleur goes free range at this point. We are riding on pavement. Is it possible for a derailleurto be so disappointed with the way you ride that it self terminates?

No problem. It is mostly downhill and we have a bunch of kayak and beach trek to do as well. We turn this bike

into a fixed gear as well and start the descent.

This totally rocks. We drop 3000 feet on a switchback, paved road as the sun comes up. You dont need any gearfor this.

Santa Maria


We pull into the fairly major town of Santa Maria de Dota.The sun has come up and it is an absolutely beautiful morn-

ing. There is one small problem. I have one gear and it isnttaking me anywhere quickly. My knees are also starting tofeel the effects of the high rpms and over-gearing on the up-hills. Sometimes after 100 hours or so my knees get achy. Ishould get that checked out.

If only we had a razor thin, well rested, well fed, hydrated,highly trained endurance athlete that could do some towing.

Wait a minute

apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, with the fur, the whole club is looking at her

We harness Miles up with the tow system and let him go to work. He goes at it like he is training for the Idi-tarod as a sled dog. I roll down the hills, he tows me up them. That gets us from Santa Maria to the next majortown of San Marcos.

San Marcos De Tarrazu:


We stop at a service station to shed some clothes. While we started at 3:40 a.m. high on the Continental Dividewe are now 5,000 feet lower and on the Pacific side. It is going to get very hot, very soon.

Miles pulls out his raincoat and announces it wont be leaving San Marcos. He is donating it to the people ofCosta Rica. No one on the team thinks any one in Costa Rica will want it. Team Dark Horse universally dislikesthe raincoat. During Miles dark days we had split his gear up to carry. The raincoat was a major bone of conten-tion. Adventure racers travel light and this thing took up half a pack and weighed in at 5 pounds. It is entirelypossible that carrying the jacket caused Miles to become dehydrated. We almost chucked it but agreed that ifMiles died of hypothermia in the mountains it would put a damper on the post race party.

Miles stuffed it into a bracket at the service station and we rode off. Good riddance lumpy jacket.

Derailleurs are for sissys


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The Dark Horse Goes Off-Plan:


Miles is doing a great job towing but the bottom bracket on my bike (sorry Roy) is beginning to grind out. Thechain is hopping around and eventually breaks. David fixes it again. The chain is now about 4 long. We timehim: six minutes start to finish. We reach the bottom of the next range of hills. . This is the coastal range we needto get over.

The sun is now up and it is getting uncomfortable. This close to the equator the sun is only about 3 feet away atnoon. It is an agonizing pace and I whine about my knees. We stop to rest off the side of the road. The suggestionis made that we just hitchhike over this hill and get back on the bikes on the other side. This doesnt seem right tome. We should suffer some more. It is pointed out that we could take a cab to the finish line and it wouldntchange our position. We are 6th. It is pointed out that I am being towed and doing all the whining. Hmmm thatis true.

We strike a deal. It is no secret to Team Dark Horse that my favorite vehicle, my dream ride, is a late 60s ToyotaLand Cruiser. I have always wanted a 1968 FJ40. My team agrees that we will only catch a ride over the hill if itsin a 1960s FJ40 pickup truck. Why do we agree to this? Because they are all over the place. I have seen a dozen

since we came over the divide.

Bobette puts out a leg and starts flagging down vehi-cles. For a while we have no luck. Then around thecorner, far below us, comes a tan FJ40 pickup withhigh wooden sideboards. A farm truck! It is chug-ging slowly up the hill,chugga, chugga, chugga,this is it, I know in an instant that this is fate. I willbe riding in that truck.

Bobette waves him down and the driver pulls over

(he has to, it is my destiny). He is the spitting imageof Juan Valdez, except his name is Jose. I start bab-bling at him in my best pidgin Spanish. As near as Ican tell from the maps the town on the other side ofthe hill we want to be dropped in is La Juana. Theproblem is that many of these small towns consist oftwo or three homes and are only known by name tothe few people in them.

Jose indicates he is going to Quepos, on the coast. Thats too far north for us and I cant tell what route hes plan-ning to follow. He does seem to know where La Juana is though. After a bit of back and forth Miles gets my at-

tention. He has been following the conversation and feels that Jose has agreed to take us to La Jauna and justwants us to hurry up and get in the truck. In other words, stop selling and start riding.

We load up the bikes. David suggests I sit up front with the maps so we have some idea of where we are when thtruck stops. Good idea. Miles, Bobette and David jump in the back with Licky and Sniffy, Joses farm dogs. Thetruck lurches off up the mountain.

The dream begins to fade immediately. I cannot find the air conditioning controls. As a matter of fact I would settle for just turning the heater off. I am sitting on a pile of tools and a huge coil of rope. The fumes and heat com-ing from under the dashboard are stifling. Jose lights up a cigarette. I am carefully following our progress on themap, focusing concentrating zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Living the Dream:

Jose and Team Dark Horse. Somewhere above La Juana.


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The truck slows to a near halt and banks a hard left turn onto a dirt road. I realize I have been asleep for a while.Not sure how long. I am drooling on the coil of rope. I look at the map. We must be at this turn herezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The truck stops suddenly. I realize I am practically asleep in Joses lap. I sit up and discover two guys peering inthe window next to me. Jose is speaking with them. I fervently hope the team is not being sold into slavery. No,they are migrant workers and they jump in the back with Bobette, Miles, David, Licky, Sniffy and our four bikesIt looks cozy back there. I go back to sleep.

When I wake again we are descending a ridgeline on a dirt road. I can see the Pacific in the distance. Cant bethat lost. I go back to sleep. The truck comes to a halt again, this time Jose gets out. He is clearly indicating it istime for us to get out. The two workers jump out and disappear into the vegetation. I havent the slightest ideawhere we are or how long we were in the truck. Oops.

David comes around the side of the truck.

So, have you got a good fix on where we are?

My first instinct is to lie like a rug. Cant think how I would then

cover up the fact that I havent a clue where we are though....Without a good first option I go for honesty.

Ah no, I was asleep the entire ride. Havent the slightest ideawhere we are.

Asleep? I saw you nodding like a bobble head doll the wholetime, I thought you were reading the map and agreeing with Joseon which way to go!

Nope, I was sound asleep.

I explain, in my defense (weak at best) that the combination of engine heat, gas fumes, exhaustion and Josessmoking had pushed the heat index to 120 and the oxygen content to near zero. I pointed out that it was a verynice morning and we could see the Pacific from where we were standing (very distantly) so it was merely a ques-tion of locating a few checkpoints between here and the ocean. How hard could that be?

To Davids credit he found the whole thing amusing. It was a beautiful day adventure on. He figured out wherewe were in about five minutes. Jose indicated La Juana was below us and he was taking the next right to Quepos.That pinpointed us pretty much exactly on the route we had intended to follow. Miles had been right. Jose knewexactly what we wanted to do.

Bobette, of course, had already unloaded the bikes and said goodbye to Licky and Sniffy.

Goodbye %$#@ dogs, we *&%$# so *%^@ lost!

On the Way to La Juana:

10:00 a.m. Friday April 25th.

Wherever Jose dropped us off

The descent to the ropes section below La Juana is a blast. We start at 900 meters and drop to 100 meters. Over2400 feet in just under 6 miles. It is all switchback dirt road and we scream down it. The turns are tight and thegravel is loose, I almost end up in the woods a couple of times. This is good stuff.

Shes a beauty!


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We arrive at the ropes course before 11:00 a.m. and gear up for a series of zip lines and a rappel at a place calledCanopy Safari. They run a zip line course up this valley and bus in tourists from the hotels along the coast. Thereis a large group there when we arrive and we are pushed in front of them. They are American tourists. We are un-shaven, smelly, grimy, sweaty racers. They stare at us like chimps at the zoo.

This section was a lot of fun. The guys running it lose patience with us quickly. We are completely loopy fromlack of sleep and want to jump off the platforms to get more speed. This creates problems at the far end of the zipline. Its like Bowling for Costa Ricans. We come into the platforms too hot and take out the guide. They arent

amused.

We finish up but are reluctant to leave the Canopy Safari camp. They have a nice shaded base camp and theyhave a machine that serves free iced tea. We go to sleep. The owners become alarmed when we drain the iced teamachine and spread out on their picnic tables in the shade. We are like locusts: big,stinky, dirty locusts. They finally ask us to move because they have another groupcoming in and are afraid we will scare them.

We really should get going but the temperature is now in the 90s and the bike stilldoesnt work. We need to go about 20k up and down small hills to the kayak put-inbut we lack the will power to leave the free iced tea dispenser. We drain it twice.

Finally we pull out. The owners are very happy to see us go. We grind up and downsome small hills, Miles continues to tow on the flats and up-hills. The bike is mak-ing horrendous noises as the bottom bracket shreds (sorry Roy). At one point Milessuggest that he ride the fix gear for a while (the whining pays off!). He rides itabout 100 yards when the chain breaks. Too much power.

We are pretty much out of the hills and it is a flat 10k to the kayaks through palmplantation. The chain is too short to re-build. We commence a seldom used doubletow. We swap out seats so I am riding Bobettes bike while she sits on the Truth.Miles tows me while I tow Bobette. We can actually make pretty good time this

way.

This brings out Davids inner porn director. He commences tovideo while recommending different tow combinations.

Tom, you swap spots with Miles; Bobette change seats withTom.

No wait, Miles you get on Toms bike, Tom you get in backwith Bobette in the middle..

We just keep going.

Hotel Kayak-inn.com

1:30 p.m. Friday April 25th.

Damas

We locate the kayak launch in the little town of Damas on the Pacific coast. We are not actually on the coast yetbut separated from it by a large mangrove swamp. We pack up our bike gear; get together our paddle gear andhead up the narrow canal that leads to the sea. David is in a hurry. He has learned from talking to the kayak guideon site that we have hit the tide at dead slack. If we can gain the main channel before it becomes an incoming tide

How would you like to have th

parked in your Safari Camp?

Double Tow: There is no chain on Bobettes ride
http://www.youtube.com/v/p-X1b2Nyhzghttp://www.youtube.com/v/wtKuIo0Solshttp://www.youtube.com/v/eol1gCD5H-Ihttp://www.youtube.com/v/-bm3txWy5d0http://www.youtube.com/v/-bm3txWy5d0http://www.youtube.com/v/-bm3txWy5d0http://www.youtube.com/v/eol1gCD5H-Ihttp://www.youtube.com/v/p-X1b2Nyhzghttp://www.youtube.com/v/wtKuIo0Sols


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we wont have to fight it on the way out and it will push us up the main channel (the direction we will be going)when it starts flowing. Despite having to paddle like we are in a 15k kayak race this works beautifully. We areout of the kayaks in 1 hour 56 minutes. The shortest time for any other team was over three hours.

On the Beach

3:53 p.m. Friday April 25th

Playa Palo Seco

We are on the beach. Knock out a 17k trek and we are done. Well not exactly. We are told to take our PFDswith us; there are some rivers to cross and they may get deep. One of them is known to have crocodiles in thembut everyone agrees that it is unusual to be attacked by one. Were OK with that and we head down the shore.There is a sand road in back of the beach and we stick to that.

I know what is coming next. No team I have ever raced with in Costa Rica can resist some sort of mad dash to thefinish line. I have alternately run, biked or kayaked to the finish of every race as if it were a sprint. We just canthelp it. We dont need to conserve energy anymore and we really, really, want to be done.

After a brief negotiation we alternate running 5 minutes with walking 2. A couple hours of that and I am slowingI whine. I am wearing a PFD, its in the 90s and both knees are feeling cranky. Ive been going for most of 125

hours. Obviously theres a flaw in my training. The muscles in the front of my perforated shin are going berserk.Miles runs next to me and encourages me. He looks great. I vow to eat more Chef Boyardee next race. In themeantime I whine some more.

We cross a river or two. One gets a little deep but we stay on our feet. One section of this beach is accessible byroad and we meet up with Renee and her guide Sebastian and Mauricio from Team Sarapiqui. She jumps out ofthe jeep to join us and Sebastian drives off to go collectour kayak. Renee doesnt realize we are running and getsleft behind immediately. I am vaguely uncomfortable withthis.

Twenty minutes later Sebastian and Mauricio come back.They ask if we have seen Renee. There is only one beachroad and there is no way to go left or right. They have lostmy wife at dusk on a deserted section of beach in CostaRica. Sebastian has safely guided Renee across this coun-try three times, he looks sick.

We come to another river and cross it. I will have no wayof knowing if they find her until we finish. To paraphraseOscar Wilde; to lose a parent is tragic, to lose both is sim-ply irresponsible. I stop whining and keep running.

Playa Palma

6:45 P.M. Friday April 25th.

We have come to a major river crossing. It is near high tide and there is a strong current flowing in from theocean. It is dark and we dont have any way of gauging the width or depth of the river. For reasons not clear toanyone on the team we have one tiny little LED and a 4 glow-stick between the 4 of us. There is a light on thefar bank but it is easily a mile away. We wont learn until later that the Costa Rican teams walked 10k to getaround it. This is the one with the crocodiles.

Renee took this picture, just before she went missing.


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I suspect the river is not as wide as the light would suggest. Based on that scrap of un-informed intuition we de-cide to swim it. We dont know how wide it is or how deep and the current is running hard. Hey, weve gotPFDs, lets swim!

I tie the glow stick to Bobettes PFD, snap it and take her pack. The water is much more than kuku deep and Iknow she will leave her feet first. I am the only real swimmer in the bunch; I keep her next to me.

Bobette: &$%* river, @*%^ deep! *^$# thanks, Tom!

At 6-2 Miles might not go under at all but he only weighs 125 pounds now. I put him up current of me. Whenhe gets swept away I would like the chance to say goodbye. I dont worry about David. A croc might get him buthes not likely to be swept away in anything short of a tsunami. I would give him even odds with the croc as wellShould a croc attack Bobette we will all be wearing crocodile skin shoes in the morning.

We head across. We stay on our feet briefly and then start swimming. It is a pretty good current and I start head-ing up to stay aimed at the light. Move towards the light. Hmmmmm

Everyone seems good even though the light is still a long way off. I begin to wonder if we should have put morethought into this. It is pitch dark and there is a good wave break as well as a ripping current.

Our feet hit bottom no more than half way to the light. We come up onto a huge sandbar that we couldnt see inthe dark. It all works out fine. We can see glow sticks coming at us across the sand. It is Sebastian and Renee andsome of the other race people. She had wandered off the beach road somehow, they had figured out where andlocated her. Bonus: I do not need to find a new wife tomorrow. We are about 20 minutes to the finish.

I am glad the river crossing worked out but sometimes I wonder why we just jumped into a river of unknowndepth and width in the dark with a ripping current. I think after a few days of this we are suffering from two problems.

1) Rational judgment is not our strong suit. Now it is non-existent.

2) I sincerely believe it is not my fate to drown in a river in Costa Rica or be eaten by a crocodile. I am agood swimmer and not very tasty.

Playa Bejuco

7:10 p.m. Friday April 25th

We cross the finish line after 129 hours and 10 minutes. As always itis extremely gratifying to be done. We crack a bottle of champagnewith a large group of racers, support people and family. We head forthe hotel just off the beach.As we walk up to the hotel Alvaro pulls up. He finished the race solo

on his bike. This is excellent timing and we all celebrate together. Hetakes his pack off and pulls something out of it. He hands me Milesraincoat. He explains that he found it at a service station in San Mar-cos and knew it belonged to Miles. He has carried it all the way here.All fifty pounds of it. The jacket has claimed a fifth victim. We vowto burn it in the morning.

I would like to thank my teammates David, Bobette and Miles. Despite having our goals dialed back early in therace no one lost heart or their sense of fun. Miles did lose lunch, but never the determination to finish. He madean incredible recovery, a testament to his training and tenacity. He could not have done it without teammates de-termined to get all four people over the finish line. Sometimes thats the best accomplishment.

Finished! We could use a shower and a nap.


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Next:

Next stop: The Bull of Africa. 560 kilometers. I am notworried about lions and elephants. I do not believe it ismy fate to be eaten by a lion or trampled by an elephant.I have good night vision and terrific acceleration.

Alvaro and I at the finish. He rode solo to get here

Upe!

David: hydrating at the finish line

The best place to sleep is wherever you are when youre sleepy...

David on the zipline

c2c 08 race report

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