Winter Death Race!
Race Report:
The official start time was at 6pm on Friday night but apparently Joe and Andy were "running a little bit late" so one of the guys who works at the farm told us to dig out all the firewood from under a heap of snow. All 19 of us who started the race set ourselves to the task and it was soon finished. Then we waited. It was not at all how I expected my first taste of a Death Race to be. After what seemed like an hour Joe and Andy arrived. Joe walked over to where the wood had been and told us to dig out the pallets which the wood had been resting on. These pallets were buried in hard packed snow and digging them out was no small matter but gradually we managed to pull a dozen or so out. After an hour or so Joe came over and told us to stop and that our next task was awaiting us at the barn. When we got there Andy handed out a small piece of rope to everybody, perhaps a foot long. We were told that we had to hold the rope over our heads with both hands on the rope for 5 minutes. If you dropped your hands then you would face a penalty later in the race. At the 4 minute mark everybody still had their hands in the air (Joe and Andy included] so it was decided to extend the task to 1O minutes, then 15, then 2O, then 3O, 45 and finally when it was clear nobody was going to quit we ended at the hour mark. The next task was a much larger beast to tackle. We would complete a marathon, but not just any marathon. From the farm to the top of a nearby mountain is a 6 mile loop who's trail is covered in deep snow. We would have to complete 4 laps with all our gear (mostly an axe, clothes, food and water] and a log. Each time we completed a lap we would add another log to our load. The first lap was done without snowshoes because Andy had convinced us that the trail was well packed and that we wouldn't need them...of course that was a lie. For the second lap we were required to use snowshoes because we had been damaging the course that would be used Saturday morning for other races, with all our post holing. For lap two I was told to meet Joe at the top of the mountain and "no matter what, return to the farm". I expected to find Joe at the house on the top of the hill with some diabolical task laid out, but there was nothing there, so I just hiked on. Lap three and four were just more of the same. Finally, after finishing our marathon Andy told us that our next task was to build a tower three feet tall out of rocks we retrieved from the stream which was ~3/4 of a mile from the farm. My racing partner Nate and I made two trips collecting rocks and although he succeeded in constructing a tower, I couldn't manage it with the oddly shaped rocks I had collected. On my third trip I decided I really did not want to have to make another rock run, so I waded out into the middle of the stream and collected 5 of the biggest flattest rocks I could find. It made for a hefty pack, but it worked. Upon completing the tower I was told to construct two birdhouses from a kit. Simple work that didn't take long though they weren't the prettiest birdhouses. Then it was on to fetching 3O logs from a nearby shed, quartering them and stacking them. I like chopping wood, so this really wasn't a problem. After the wood chopping we were handed shovels and told to dig a corridor between the green houses. The greenhouses are perhaps 5O yards long and the snow between them 5 ft. deep so getting all the way across them was going to be quite the task, however, many of the other Death Racers had already finished and I had heard that most of them were digging in the snow for less than an hour, so when I was still digging after two hours and nobody was even watching I started to get a bit frustrated. At this point there was only 4 racers left, everybody else had either finished or had dropped out of the race. Every hour or so somebody would come look at how much snow we had cleared. They would hem and haw and compare how far each of us had gotten, then they would tell us to keep digging. After about 4 hours of digging one of our four decided he'd had enough and quite. This was quickly followed by another of the four so that the only two that were left were my race partner Nate and myself. We kept digging for about half an hour until finally I went to the other side of the barn to grab some food and fluids. Joe just happen to pull up right then and he asked my how the digging was going. I told him that it was coming along, but that there was just two of us now. He seemed pleased by that and followed me over to the snow trench I had been digging. After taking a quick look he told us we were done and to head up to the pond. As our final task we had to sit in the 33 degree water up to our waist for five minutes and then recite the tongue twister that had been on the wall of the barn the entire race that read:
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
Where is the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
Results:
Finishing times are irrelevant (seriously though, just shy of 28 hours]
Notes:
Looking forward to June! Oh, and Jack Cary owes me a donation to charity.
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