Miscellaneous

Texas Water Safari 2008: Check-in and Pre-race

By Chris Stevenson

Every team in the Safari has to check their boat in with a race official on the Friday before the start.  We pulled in to Aquarena Springs from Houston around 2:30 in the afternoon.  Check-in runs from noon to 5 or so.  You basically have to set your boat up completely for the race with all of your equipment and gear and food.  You leave your boat there overnight although you don't leave the food in the boat overnight because of the racoons and most people take their paddles and expensive bow lights.

We unloaded our boat and boxes of gear and started loading the boat.  We said 'Hi' to a few people we knew.  Everyone is busy strapping, gluing and tying things into their boats.  There is also somewhat of a social atmosphere as people are milling around - racers are talking to racers and spectators mill around looking at all of the different ways people go about rigging their boats.  I was proud to say that our boat looked great - maybe the best looking boat in the whole Safari.  I had finished clear-coating it a couple of nights before and we had a nice new slick graphite bottom on the boat as well.  The gunnels were freshly stained and clear-coated and our red-inside-white vinly decals looked great.

We loaded all of our stuff and made some last minute decisions about what to take and what to leave.  We lifted the boat fully loaded and it was heavy.  We searched for things to toss out and made a few tough decisions (the toilet paper didn't make the cut).  We agreed that we probably had too much food, but we'd do the calorie calculations that night and toss whatever we could.  When we were ready, we called one of the race officials, Cindy Meurer, over to check us in.  We had a form filled out listing every single last item we were taking with us.  Cindy went down the list with us.  She had her own checklist of things to verify as well.  I asked her a couple of questions about whether certain things we had done were okay or not.  I also asked her opinion on whether we should take a couple of items.  She nixed the water purification tablets but strongly encouraged us to take the spare rudder.  It was the original rudder that came on the boat that I had replaced with a new carbon fiber one of my own design.  The spare rudder was aluminum and bent all to hell and cracked about halfway across.  I had not intended to take it until Cindy told us to.  Cindy signed off on our check-in sheet and we were officially ready to start the Safari.

We did some last minute rigging - Robb needed to finalize his drink tube setup and we tied in some extra bungee cord to hold in one of our dry bags.  I walked around looking at other boats and took a few photos.  I was looking for things that other people did that we had not done or some mistake we had made in our rigging, but I found none.  In fact, our boat was one of the best rigged out there.  You've got a lot of gear and equipment in the boat and obviously the goals are to minimize weight and clutter.  You want the deck fairly clear because there are instances when you need to be able to crawl along the length of the boat.  Our boat was rigged pretty clean and many people told us so.

The orientation seminar lasting about 30 minutes went off at 5 o'clock or so.  After that we went back to the boat to make sure there wasn't anything else that needed doing.  I looked the boat over hard and there was nothing left to obsess about - it was all done and ready to go.  We loaded the food, paddles and light and headed back to Austin.  We had to make a couple of stops to pick up water and to try to find a new plastic case for one of our light batteries.  One of them had been dropped and the waterproof housing broke.  We searched at every sporting goods store we could think of for the right sized plastic bottle, but none were wide enough.  Eventually we decided to look for a platic container that some product was sold in.  At the grocery store we found a bottle holding moistened cleaning towels in a roll that was the right size.

We got back to Robb's place and I started preparing and dividing the food.  Calculating the calories we needed was a fairly complicated deal.  For starters, there is conflicting scientific information about the caloric needs during ultra-distance athletic events.  The basic problem is that your body cannot process as many calories as you are burning when you are exercising at a moderate to high level for hours on end.  We were going to burn roughly 500-600 calories an hour and the body can only convert around 300 calories an hour.  The deficit adds up pretty quickly.  Our goal was to take in 250-300 calories an hour from a variety of food sources.  I added 100 calories per hour to that for reserve.  So 400 caloies per hour to pack.  I also estimated that we would finish in 62 hours if all went well.  I rounded that up to 70 hours to calculate our food needs so we would have reserve.  So 70 X 400 = 28,000 calories per person.  Half of our calories were to come from an endurance athlete's powdered fuel called Perpetuem.  To me it was like powdered milk with a little orange flavored Gatorade mixed in for taste.  They called the flavor dreamsicle, but that's a bit of a euphemism.  The other half of our calories were to come from a variety of solid foods - Clif bars, Clif Mojo bars, dried fruit, corn chips, beef and turkey jerky and endurance athlete's gels.

You have to be very disciplined about your food, water and electrolyte intake during the Safari.  If you are severly deficient in any one you will get ill and possible have to drop out.  It sounds easy to simply drink and eat a lot, but one of the main problems is that you need to be paddling constantly and stopping paddling or, heaven forbid, stopping the boat are like cardinal sins.  So you resist stopping and you don't eat or drink enough.  We have drink tubes for the water jugs so you can drink and paddle at the same time, but you still have to stop to raise those to your mouth.  Another thing that makes it hard is that there is quite a lot of math involved.  That can get hard when you are severely fatigued.  The water is fairly easy - for our body weights we needed about 18 oz. of water per hour.  Because our containers were easy factors of 16 (48 oz. jugs, 24 oz. bike bottles), I rounded down to 16 oz. per hour and just kept that small deficit in mind as we went.  The electrolytes are pretty easy too.  We had salt pills called Enduralytes that we were taking.  The target was 2 per hour and more as needed.  The food is much more complicated.  The Perpetuem powder has 130 calories per scoop.  We were doing 3-scoops to a serving in one bike bottle.  (We had already separated out the servings into individual baggies.)  That's 390 calories, or not quite 2 hours worth of calories.  Ideally, you memorize the caloric content of each of the other types of food - Clif bar is 250 calories (1 hr.'s worth), Clif Mojo bar is 190, gel is 90.  I don't remember the chips or the dried fruit and the jerky was hard to calculate because we didn't weigh each baggie.  Chances are you are going to be mixing different types of food - 3 swigs on the Perp bottle + 1 gel + half handful of dried fruit = ?  I was a little stressed about us not taking in enough calories, but we were just going to try to stay on top of it as best we could.  In the end, to cut down on weight, we decided to cut our ration to 300 calories/hr for 70 hours, reducing the total to 21,000 calories.  We got rid of 1/3 of the Perpetuem powder, which was probably 5-6 lbs. alone.

Separating the food and fixing the battery case were time-consuming.  I had hoped to get to bed by 10 so I could get a full 8 hours of sleep.  I had been sleep deprived most of the week working into the wee hours on the boat.  I had a full night's sleep on Thursday night so I was catching up, but I was still tired.  10 o'clock came and went, then 10:30.  I finally got to bed around 11 and had no trouble falling asleep even though there were a million things about the Safari going through my mind.

We were up a little after 6.  I ate my pre-race breakfast of a banana and a giant Payday candy bar with a tall glass of water a little coffee.  I did all of the body prep - Desitin, sunscreen, band-aids on nipples - and donned our long-planned Safari uniforms.  We loaded up the truck and ourselves and pulled out of Austin at 7:30; about 30 minutes behind where I wanted to be.  On the drive down I ran through my mental checklists to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything.  I had forgotten nothing.

I was pretty relaxed all during check-in and even now as we pulled into San Marcos.  I was just so prepared that there was no question in my mind that I had done everything that was required up to this point.

When we got to Aquarena Springs we loaded the food in the boat, secured the light and paddles.  My Mom and Dad walked up as we were doing this, which was a pleasant surprise as I wasn't expecting to see them until way later in the day.  We hugged and chatted with them for a while.  The race directors announced that we could start entering the water.  We lifted the boat (it still felt heavy) and made our way to the water's edge.  We got final well-wishes and I hugged our Team Captain/my fiance for a long time.  We lowered the boat into the water and got in the boat in our "You go, I go" pattern.  We paddled down the length of the lake about 2/3 of the way to survey the course.  We decided not to paddle all the way to the dam, opting instead to get in our starting position and just relax.

We were in Row 3, Position 4 and the banks were marked with numbered signs showing where to line up.  We got roughly where we were supposed to be and other boats slowly did the same.  Our friendly rivals in the She-Ra boat #18, Ginsie and Debbie, pulled up alongside.  We chatted with them and a couple of the other teams around us.  I saw some of the Safari legends getting into position - John Bugge and his Belizians, the Mynar team, solo record holder Carter Johnson and his partner - they were all there.  I started getting excited being among these people and actually feeling like I belonged.  The race announcer was listing off all of the sponsors and saying a bunch of things I couldn't hear.  Then they played the national anthem and I got chills, as I usually do when I hear it.  They announced 5 minutes to race start.

It was finally here - this thing that I had been preparing for and obsessing about for almost a full year.  The Texas Water Safari was about to begin.

Full post as published by Cursed With Ambition on June 24, 2008 (boomark / email).