2011 Texas Water Safari

Getting started is the hardest part. It shouldn't be. The Texas Water Safari started when we pulled up at check in, 2:30 PM on Friday. That's a reasonable starting point for a story. But, after 83 hours on the river and an experience this big, it's very hard to focus in on the beginning. Trying to remember the experience is like trying to watch a movie in fast forward. There's flashes of bits and pieces here and there. It's difficult to grab onto any thing. My mood and energy levels have been up and down since we finished the race. At times, you're high from the experience and the thought of doing it again next year. Other times, you're a bit bored and maybe depressed, because it's over. Not just the race, but the whole life you live leading up to the Safari, which is driven by training and preparation and obsession and the need to cram all of this into your “regular” life and responsibilities.

It's fair to say that the Safari is a traumatic experience. What you subject your body and mind to during the course of the race, just to finish, is significant. Simply put, you're asking yourself to paddle, nearly non-stop, for 262 miles, with minimal sleep and what ever food/hydration you can manage along the way. Paddling becomes your reality. When you wake up, you paddle 70-90 miles. That's your goal. That's your job for the day. Checkpoints help to break up the monotony and to give you a re-charge. Even if you're not sleeping, there's still some thing about finishing a section, being cheered in and out of the checkpoint, seeing your crew, that wipes the slate clean and allows you to focus on the new task: paddle to the next checkpoint.

Make no mistake about it though, this race is relentless. There are few, if any, “breaks”. Nearly every section is demanding, either technically or because of the distance you have to cover or because of the time of day. When a section isn't demanding, fatigue and boredom start catching up to you and it's a battle to stay awake and in a productive mode. THIS RACE IS RELENTLESS. You don't say “The World's Toughest Boat Race” with out having some substance to back up the claim. As though they still needed to prove the point, the race ends with a 6 mile bay crossing. That's 6 miles of potentially rough, windy bay AFTER paddling 250-260 miles of river in a boat that's more than likely not very sea worthy. People DNF (did not finish) in the bay. It happened this year. That's just brutal. You'll hear more on this later.

Overall, this was an absolutely amazing experience. I mean that with 100% sincerity. I'm sure it's difficult for most to understand, because you can only imagine the pain and suffering. There's nothing worth while that you will ever do in your life that won't involve some amount of pain and suffering. Great stories don't come from happy, comfortable times, they come from pain, suffering, and overcoming significant personal challenges. If you're as new and as inexperienced as we are, you're going to tear yourself down to the core at some point during this race. What you find there and how you respond is up to you. I was just about fed up with the whole experience on Tuesday. Almost too tired to stay awake or paddle. By the time we paddled into the bay and hit those headwinds, I felt like I might as well just quit. Why not? We had already survived the river. Then, I started responding. I know how to get us across this bay. I know where we need to go and what we need to do to make consistent forward progress. After that, it was just 3 hours of pumping away until we hit the steps. After walking up those steps and falling down (I intended to sit down), I realized how hard I had stayed on it for the last 3 hours and especially the last 1.5 hours. I may not have been satisfied with the overall pace and effort level of the race, but I was sure as hell satisfied with the ending.

103 boats started the race. 78 boats finished. At least 1 boat DNF'd in the bay. We finished in 83 hours, 4th in the Novice Class (out of 23 starters and 17 finishers), and 41st overall. I didn't know we were 4th Novice until I got home and checked the unofficial results. On day 2 I realized that, for a number of reasons, we would be stuck running a slow race. When ever a Novice team would get serious about passing us or staying ahead of us, I'd joke with Matt saying “yea, let's hammer ourselves to battle out that 6th place Novice finish”. I thought we were some where in the middle of the class. Our main goal was just to finish this race and trim as much time off of our finish as possible. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place Novice boats were far ahead of us. They hit a pace on day 1 and stayed with it.

Excuses, excuses, excuses...but our canoe was SLOW. Haha. In all seriousness, it really was. This was not a total surprise. Every one told us this before the race (Erin and Roy, you guys were right) and I'd seen it myself any time we tried to run fast in training. Had money not been an issue, we might have switched to an Alumacraft Voyager, which is pretty much the standard for aluminum canoe racing. We didn't. I have no doubt we would have been significantly faster in this race, although, I still don't think we would have competed for 2nd or 3rd. We were a seriously mis-matched team and aside from my annoying, antsy, impatience, no one else seemed to have a “this is a race” type of urgency. At some point I'll sit down and calculate the amount of wasted check point time, because it certainly is useful information. Needless to say, it was WAY TOO MUCH. 10-15 minutes doesn't seem like much, but over the course of 262 miles and how ever many checkpoints there are, it adds up. It would be realistic to say that we wasted 2-3 hours at checkpoints. Sleeping is not wasted time. Body maintenance is not wasted time. Canoe maintenance is not wasted time. Every thing else is wasted time and results in a less efficient race. This is important to learn from for future races.

I suppose this is a start. At the least, it's a really crappy summary of the experience. Next post, I'll dig into the real story, starting with check in and what we learned about showing up prepared so you don't have to make 50 trips to the store and hang around as one of the last stragglers, still tweaking on your boat. No idea how many posts this whole thing will take. We'll just have to see how good my memory is...