Oh, the things I'll do for a T-shirt

Some buddies and I in med school have been working out at the school gym before class since this past August. Somewhere along the way, we started flirting with the idea of entering a local "adventure race" (yes, adventure racing is a real sport) called MedWAR (Medical Wilderness Adventure Race). After talking to people who had run the race last year, we decided to throw our hat into the ring and give it a go.

I'll spare the boring details leading up to the race, suffice it to say the only real training we did was short brisk runs before our workouts and a dry run last Saturday on a local trail.

Our team was made up of Will Potter, myself, Andrew Johnsen and Will Parker (L to R in picture). The race was to be around 15 miles and we were to work our way through various medical/survival oriented tasks in the barren wilderness over at Fort Gordon (Army base). We were told to show up with a wilderness survival/medical kit, a flashlight, water purifier, whistle, a canoe and a mountain bike.

at 11:00am, after orientation and safety briefings (something about poisonous snakes and some other animal that I can't remember because I wasn't really paying attention), they announced all the teams. Most of the teams had really cool names like "turn your head and cough," "gang-green," "toxic megacolon," and "bad prognosis." Because we were number 20 out of 27, we got to hear all these cool names go before us and I started to get really nervous as the announcement of our team name came up: "The Married Men." I definitely didn't come up with it and as they read our name off I am sure I was beet red from embarrassment that we didn't get a more clever name. However, we ended up getting the most arousing laughter and applause of any group (by a long shot) and my embarrassment melted away.

They then handed us our race packets and we headed a mile up a steep hill. At the top we were given the task to find a pigs foot under a tree and were to carry it with us throughout the remainder of the race. We then followed what we thought were accurate instuctions only to come back to the pigs-foot tree two miles later to find out we had done a huge time-wasting loop (luckly all 27 teams made the same mistake so nobody was disadvantaged, or rather we all were). We learned a valuable lesson on that first task - don't follow what everybody else is doing (something about the blind leading the blind). 

Back on track. We continue on, running 3 miles or so. Along the way we are tasked with various medical scenarios we have to complete (i.e. diabetic comas, burn victims, bear attacks, broken ankles, altitude sickness...you get the picture). About an hour or so into the race, we divide up into two runner and two canoers from our team. At this point there are probably 8 teams in front of us which we were okay with (our goal was to finish in the top half - or just not dead last). Luckily the canoe events were where we outshined everybody and an hour later we were in first place (the lead team was literally doing circles out in the middle of the lake as we passed them). I guess all those "post-test canoe/fishing trips" paid off.

Our first place lead only lasted a mile before the two muscle teams showed up and passed us. Those teams consisted of some hard core Navy firefighters who supposedly travel around the country doing these things and another local MCG team that made 3rd place last year. We were okay letting those two pass us, but we were determined to try to hold on to third place.

A couple miles later (still less than half way through) we come up to a large swamp/pond area. We see the MCG team on the other side of the massive swamp soaking wet and are told that we must cross the swamp. At this point I am thinking of how insane that sounds. We are all aware that we have another 10+ miles to go and to completely soak ourselves would be brutal. Fortunately this was a race  and so we had little time to rationalize how ridiculous the situation was and we all ran into the water. As we trudged through the muddy water literally up to our necks and even over our heads for a couple feet (yeah, trying to doggy paddle while holding your water and supplies over your head can be tough) I started to realize how crazy this day was going to be. At one  point, Will Parker was directly in front of me and I see his his head dip down under, nothing but his hands holding that running pack out of the water as he trudges along the bottom of the swamp making it back up to slightly higher ground a couple feet later. It was awesome/hilarious. (enjoy the picture of my soaking shoes and socks - believe it or not, those socks were white when the day began).

A couple miles later we forgot one of our pass-codes (we had to keep a log of our codes we "earned" from completing the scenarios). For some unknown reason, I volunteered to run back for it. It ended up being longer away than I thought and thanks to that little mishap I got to tack on an extra mile to my day's total...Luckily we still had our third place safely secured though other teams were in sight.

While the third place was feeling great, all great things will come to an end. Around this time in the race, Andrew's lets were starting to cramp up and the whole teams was showing signs of wear. Then we come up to scenario where we send one person off on a bike. We decided to send Will (Parker) and the rest of our would complete the next task. The  only problem was that the next task was orienteering and Will was our designated orienteering expert. Yes, I am an Eagle scout and Yes I should know how to orienteer, but my skills were rusty. to make a long story short, We started to head off in the right direction, but got horrible lost along the way. We started second guessing ourselves and amidst the confusion, the light rain that had been hanging around turned to a nasty down pour. Luckly, Andrew was able to figure some stuff our and we made it to our next destination to meet up with Will. He ended up waiting about 45 minutes and our health 15 minute lead over the rest became a half our deficit.

The rest of the race ended up being straight endurance. At one point we came up on a huge clay pit that we had to make our way down. We had to jump two huge crevasses - definitely not for the faint of heart. Once we made it down to the bottom of the giant clay pit we had to suture up the pig's foot that we had been carrying with us the entire time (apparently it had a large laceration on the skin of the thing that we hadn't even noticed before). It ended up that we could have gotten away with putting compression bandage on the thing, but we honestly got out our suture kit and sewed that bad boy up. When that sucker heals, I honestly don't think that pig will even have a scar (assuming they are able to re-attach the foot to the pit). As we are leaving the clay pit the moderators of the scenario tell us we have about a half hour left...

By half hour, they really meant 3 miles running/walking/trudging through the swamp. I mean we were literally up to our knees (sometimes waist) in mud. I can't believe none of us lost any shoes in that muck. It smelled, didn't have a set trail (what swamp does?), and was still raining down on us (picture is of another team - they didn't get a pic of us). Every time we thought were were gonna leave the swamp, the orange ribbons that had been marking the trail all day (except the orienteering course) would lead us right back down into the thick of things.

Finally, after being soaked to the bone (well, somewhere along the way I had the sense to put on my gore-tex jacket from cabelas - I am now a firm believer in Gore-Tex) we make it back to the final pass code. With the pass code there was a bonus question - it was a snake and we had to guess how many vertebrae it had. We had earlier stumbled upon this bonus at the very beginning of the race and had guessed 60. When we came back on the question at the end, we were tired and didn't really care anymore about getting the bonus but we looked anyway. We went back and forth on our guess of how many vertebrae. I was holding the passbook and finally said that I was just going to add a "1" to the 60 we had put down to make it 160 because there was no way we were going to guess the right number anyway.

We then run into camp with all the energy we have left (which wasn't  much after running 17 miles, soaking wet). Although we ended up losing our 3rd place finish during the orienteering part of the race, we felt like rock stars as we entered the finish line, cheered on by the crowd of volunteers, racers, and organizers. We then quickly changed into dry clothes and ate a huge BBQ pork feast. I ate a huge plate of food, including two pork sandwiches, and I think the food was already digested by the time I got up for seconds. My body was hungry.

Unfortunately, at the awards ceremony they only mentioned the top 3 race teams (damn you orienteering!). We are still on hold as to what our final finish time was but are told that they will be posted on the website soon. Hopefully they will also have some pictures from the race up soon. Not all was lost at the awards ceremony, though. It ended up that the aforementioned snake had 158 vertebrae, making us the proud winners of a stuffed snake.  

Although the race was grueling, it was one of the coolest things I have done in a long time. How sad is it that I spend a good hour today looking up trail running shoes and hydration packs? MedWAR 2009, here we come!