Berryman 12hr Adventure Race Report

Well the last post is a week old so I’ll get off my ass and put up my Bonk Hard 12hr Berryman adventure race report.  That I did 2 weekends ago.

Well the Berryman Adventure Race is Bonkhard’s premiere race so they tend to make it harder than most.  This year was no different.  We started making our way down to Van Buren MO on Friday.  I met Phil at Wal-Mart in Rolla.  He was standing in front of his jeep with a cart full of honey buns, energy drinks, pop tarts, 6 pack of 5hr energy shot drinks and all the good stuff that you get to eat on adventure race days because you burn like 1,230,293 calories during a race.  We transferred his bike, gear, food, pop-up over to my truck and made the long ass drive down to Van Buren.  After cutting people off on the way down due to the extra 18 feet behind my truck we got to the race meeting on time without getting lost which is really unusual for us so right then I knew something was going to be wrong.  We like to get lost on the way to the race so we get it out of our system for the day of the race.  The maps were pre plotted which as I said before I’m not a big fan of this.  Dropped our bikes off and went back to the camp site and got very little sleep.

The next morning was an early one!  We were bussed half way across the country to the drop off.  The race started with what was supposed to be a short little trekking section but it we decided to let the other teams get a head start while we decided to re survey the land and make sure My Topo Maps got it right.  Turns out they were right and I had got us lost.  We had to of wasted an easy hour before I figured out that we were on the wrong Ozark trail.  We finally made it back to see like 15 canoes left and considering there were 72 teams that wasn’t good.  Laura looked at us like this isn’t like you guys.  I mumbled something and we decided to suck it up and work hard.  Had a good float down the river and passed a couple of teams.  The two fat guys in the canoe didn’t do half bad this time.  Next was another trekking section.  We ran what we could and made some good decisions here witch caught us up and we passed a lot of teams.  Apparently a lot of teams missed two checkpoints on this leg of the race that we pretty much walked right up to.  Finally we ran up to the bikes.  Laura was waiting there and was like you guys made up a lot of time.  I was like well duh! I told you we wanted to let other teams have a chance.   At the bike we stanched some perpetlum, gues and the worst mistake Phil made ever. 5hr energy shot.  We tore out of there like King Kong on Crack and passed a few teams right off the bat.  We decided to take a gamble and take the fire road past the meth lab to the end and then head south down a mountain and up another with our bikes on our shoulder cyclocross style and it seemed to pay off.  Now remember the worst mistake Phil made?  Well he took a 5hr energy shot + perpetlum = puke.  Phil was having some serious stomach issues at this point.  We went down a trail and we had to stop every ten minutes so he could throw up.  He is one tough dude cause a lesser man would have gave up but he sucked it up and made it to the finish line puking the whole way.  We got there to find out that we got 7th out of 72 teams.   A lot of teams DNF’ed and one guy got air lifted out.  It was a brutal race but we and by me I meant I had a great time.      Our Friends from Forum Dental in Rolla.