OCD FOR OCR

I enjoy doing a variety of races and not just obstacle course races so I had The Lost Tribe Expeditions Adventure Race series on my radar for some time. I was excited when they announced the Search and rescue orienteering race that was local for me and a very short drive.

I had the option of doing either the six-hour team event or three-hour individual race and I ended up signing up for the individual version because I wasn’t able to find someone interested in doing the team version.

• Registration and Festival:

As instructed, I arrived an hour early and registration was nice and easy.

Because of the nature of this race, a festival area is not really needed, but they did have a DJ who played awesome music and a post-race party that a lot of the racers stuck around for and good times were had by everyone. I brought my dog (Murph) and two friends and while I was out in the woods racing, the staff/volunteers were awesome and made sure they had something to drink and also gave them food from the sponsors.

• The Course:

It’s not appropriate to refer to this as a course, because we had no tapped out specific course to follow a path on, but rather a massive nature preserve (Mohonk Preserve) with 30 orienteering objectives/locations to attempt to locate and obtain points for. These thirty locations were spread throughout a large body of land and the six-hour team event was bussed and dropped off several miles away from the finish line. A large amount of the thirty objectives were too far away for those of us doing the three-hour individual race, unless you are someone like Ryan Atkins that can run a five-minute mile through trails, so those of us doing the individual race all pretty much had the same plan to not travel that far away from our starting point that also happened to be the finishing point.

Besides being able to obtain points by locating the thirty locations and punching a punch card to confirm you or your team located them, additional points were also available by carrying heavy items from bonus points. I didn’t understand that the carry bonuses were limited in numbers and available to the first few to get to them, so I had planned to do the one closest to the finish line just prior to the races three-hour time limit and I began the race by heading out to the furthest two objectives I felt I could reach. I won’t lie, I am not great at orienteering an it took me much longer than I expected to locate those two objectives and punch my card for confirmation. I also made a huge error and mistake, by wearing my OCR race gear and wearing both shorts and a tank top, because I was traveling through deep woods and off the foot/mountain bike trails and I ended up getting torn up pretty good due to all the thorn bushes.

I am not going to go into detail about all the locations/objectives I tried to locate, but I will say, its was easy for me to get obsessed and convinced I was in the right area for some of them and I ended up spending way too much time looking for one specific location and I finally had to accept I wasn’t going to find it and move on to looking for the next one. I ended up working my way up to the top of the mountain and traveling on a trail that had an amazing view and in some sections with massive drops and all I kept thinking was if I slip and fall off the cliff, they probably won’t find me for a while.

At one point I was looking for a specific objective that was described as a cave and I felt like I was in the right area and I did locate a section of woods with a lot of natural caves. I found myself climbing on, over, and across massive rocks and boulders and some of the caves actually went into the ground so I was trying to look in them with my cell phone flashlight and locate the flag and punch tool that would confirm I located the right cave, but I ended up finding myself on top of a massive boulder that on all three sides of me had a minimum of a forty foot drop, I didn’t even realize it as I was searching, but I spent a good five minutes jumping from one massive rock/boulder to another and end up coming to a point I could safely go no further and I had to turn around and back track a good five minutes before I came to a section of rocks/boulders that it was safe to climb down and back on to land.

At this point, I wasn’t completely positive where the finish line was in relation to where I was and I had about twenty minutes left before I reached the three hour deadline and would start accruing a penalty if I arrived late, I didn’t use the compass I brought with me much, but I did for this and I determined which direction I had to travel to find my way back to the finish line. I made decent time back and again didn’t use the trails, but cut through some deeper brush and arrived with just over ten minutes left! I headed over to where I knew the bonus carry was, but unfortunately as mentioned above, I wasn’t able to get those bonus points. I then headed back to the finish line and at this point was out of water in my hydration backpack, so I was happy to finish the adventure race and get some cold water!

• The Bling:

The bling included a really nice finisher medal, an awesome black finisher shirt, and racers and at least my friends that came as spectators received a choice of three different trail mix snacks that tasted really good.

• Overall Feelings and Event Rating:

Search and Rescue Adventure Races are clearly not something that I am currently good at and it was easy to spot the individual and team racers that do these type of races often compared to those of us that simply showed up because we wanted to try something new and have a good time. I talked to several of the other racers both experienced and not experienced at these type of races and we all had one thing in common, we had a great time and would definitely do another The Lost Tribe Expeditions Adventure Race in the future.

Rating this is very different than rating an obstacle course race, but the bottom line is the small staff and group of volunteers did a great job all day, the bling is just as nice as what you receive at Spartan type races, the course had thirty objectives, additional bonuses, and some objectives also included sponsor giveaways for the first team or individual to locate those objectives, the DJ was awesome the entire time and everyone was all smiles after the race, so I am rating this a 5 out of 5 stars and look forward to the next The Lost Tribe Expeditions Adventure Race and plan to learn how to use a compass and orienteering way better before then.

Article Written By: Walter F Hendrick (OCRSandy)