A Love Letter to Adventure Racing

Last September, I made my way back in to adventure racing when I lined up at the start of the USARA Adventure Racing National Championship in Snowshoe, WV, as an all-women’s team with my Rootstock Racing teammates Nicki and Karyn. I got my start in endurance sports through adventure racing (AR) when I fell in love with it after college. I spent a decade hooked on AR but transitioned away from it when I moved to Maryland to focus on the bike. If you haven’t heard of adventure racing, it is a multi-discipline sport where teams navigate a course with map and compass, choosing their route and finding checkpoints (CPs) through a combination of biking, trekking, paddling, and sometimes fixed ropes sections. Teams consist of 3 or 4 members who stay together at all times, and the premier division is coed. Races can vary in length from a few hours to many days, but for Nationals, we would be battling it out with the top 74 teams in the country (including 13 other women’s teams!) for 30 hours. Mother Nature had some surprises up her sleeve for us as well.

Pre-Race

This was my first time racing with Nicki and Karyn, so we spent some time in the weeks leading up to the event getting to know one another, talking strategy, and planning gear. Team dynamics play a significant role in AR. How well you work together, problem solve, and take care of each other will make or break your race. The team aspect is something I’ve been missing in the years that I stepped away from AR, and it is ultimately what drew me back when these women reached out wanting to form a team to make a run for the women’s title. I had a big year in 2024 on the bike, having just culminated my season the week before at the UCI XCM Marathon World Championships. It was a privilege to represent Team USA for the first time. AR Nationals was not on my dance card at the beginning of the year, and having done no running leading in to the race, I knew this was going to hurt!

Race morning arrived with dense fog and rain. We would be starting in the remnants of Hurricane Helene, with rain and high winds continuing until after dark. Prior to the storms during race week, WV had experienced an intense drought all summer. Whether or not the paddle leg would happen was up in the air due to low river levels. At 6am, we received maps and set to planning our route and strategy. An hour later, it was announced that the paddle would be cancelled, as they couldn’t predict water levels in the middle of the storm. With that, we would be trekking and biking for the duration of the race. The course was heavy on bike miles, with some technical riding mixed in, and I was really looking forward to it. It was a big, challenging course, and even with the cancellation of the paddle, it would be very difficult for teams to collect all the CPs and clear the course. In the end, only the winning team, WEDALI, would be able to clear it. We knew we needed to be strategic about what CPs we may need to skip in order to get the most out of the course in the 30 hours we had. All of the CPs were optional except for the transition areas (TAs), and there were groups of CPs known as Windows where if you collected all the points in the Window, you received extra points. This allowed for a lot of strategy and route choice throughout the race.

Prologue/Leg 1- Trekking through the Land of Dragons, 9 miles

The race began at 9am with a short prologue run around Snowshoe Village to spread teams out before setting out on the main course. The wind was howling, but it wasn’t raining much yet! The Monongahela National Forest pulled out all the stops for us this weekend, with peak leaf change, spongy mosses, and vibrant life throughout the woods. This trekking leg took us through the Enchanted Forest area around Snowshoe Mountain, and it was surreal traversing over thick mosses and around house-sized boulders in the forest.

Nicki and I split navigation duties for this race. She had the maps for trekking, and I took care of the bike navigation. Sharing the maps worked well for our team, as it allowed each of us to have mental breaks throughout the race. Nicki crushed the navigation on this leg, and we were able to run quite a bit. We made good time, arriving in transition well ahead of our projected estimate.

Leg 2- Biking through Snowshoe Backcountry Trails, Mower Tract, and Beyond, 43 miles

We left Snowshoe on a long bike leg that would take us to the northernmost point of the course. Having been on some of the trails at XCM Worlds the previous week, I had an idea of what the difficulty and conditions would be like on some of the early trails. We made a strategic route choice through the first 3 CPs that, unbeknownst to us, set us up in great position for the rest of the bike leg. We opted to skip the more technical trails in this corridor due to conditions. Instead, dropped our bikes along a fire road that ran in between 2 CPs and grabbed them on foot. The beauty of this course is there was SO much route choice, and this area in particular was chaos, with teams going in all directions, bushwhacking, pushing bikes up downhill trails, etc. 

Once clear of the fray, we headed north on a mix of trail and gravel to the Mower Tract, collecting a handful of CPs in the trail system there. We then continued towards the TA, stopping for a small foot section at an old strip mine that had become an alpine meadow. While there, we were graced with an incredible fire sunset for a few minutes after it had been gray and rainy all day. We rode into the dark and came into the TA around 9pm. Karyn had some challenges on this bike leg. She wasn’t feeling 100% and will tell you the bike isn’t her strongest discipline. The reality was this was a very technical course for AR in challenging conditions, and she was CRUSHING it. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were in the top 5 overall throughout the race. 

I have been riding and racing a prototype Spearfish all season, and if there has to be one bike to rule them all, this is it. With 120mm/120mm suspension, it has responded to everything I have thrown at it, from stage racing on both coasts, to 100 mile races, to XCO Nationals, to AR. I have put it through the wringer and loved every minute of it, and I can’t wait for others to get on this bike!

Leg 3- Overnight Trek, 16 miles

We set off on foot for what would be a 9 hour technical trekking section that loosely followed the Allegheny Trail. During this leg, we crossed paths several times with the defending women’s champs, the Women of AR. They were moving well and looked strong, and we knew we they would be tough to beat. We cruised through the first few hours, riding a caffeine high and ticking off CPs. We ran into trouble when we attacked a couple of CPs in a bog area. The rhododendron was so thick in the low lying areas that we felt completely trapped by the vegetation and at times had to crawl our way through it on hands and knees. We searched in vain for some time for the first bog CP before making the decision to drop it and move on to the next. We set a 15 minute limit on the next point, also could not locate it, and left the area to minimize our losses and keep making forward progress. The rest of the trek went smoothly. We got pretty cold overnight, crossing waterways often and bushwhacking in steep, rocky terrain. Eventually, we forded a fork of the river to get to the TA just before daybreak at 6am. We were a bit deflated having missed those two CPs, but after we started hearing stories of top teams that had major navigation issues overnight, we knew we were still in the fight.

Leg 4- Just Keep Biking…to 4848’, WV’s 2nd Highest Point, 44 miles

Back on the bike for the ride to the finish in Snowshoe Village, we had 9 hours left on the race clock and plenty of decisions to make. The morning sunshine was a welcome friend after so many gloomy days. I was a bit sloppy in the first window of CPs, but we got them all, then settled into the ride, focusing on efficiency and constant forward progress. At the final TA, we chose to skip the trekking section there and instead continue towards the finish on bike, as we were up against the clock at this point. From this TA along the Greenbrier River, which was originally the takeout for the paddle section, we would climb over 3000’ in the next 20 miles.

After collecting the CPs in the final window, we would have a choice. We could ride directly to the finish, which was a bit shorter and on paved and gravel roads, or we could do a longer route with more climbing, on a trail that we didn’t know the condition of, which would allow us to collect 2 more CPs. We had originally decided to play it safe and take the direct route, but I was watching the clock as we approached the final junction, and I knew we had time to go for it. With just under 2 hours to ride 12k, I convinced Nicki and Karyn to take the trail route. Within a few minutes, we rounded a corner, and the trail went straight up! As we began pushing our bikes, the team started to worry but kept moving. The trail leveled out before too long, and we started riding again. I’m sure Nicki and Karyn breathed a sigh of relief when we spotted veteran teams up ahead and started passing them. We were on a mission and pushed hard to the finish, crossing with a half hour to spare. To our delight, we were informed we had finished in 4th place overall and won the women’s race! The cherry on top was the we won the award for the fastest time on final bike leg. Hey Karyn, you are an amazing rider, and you proved it on that final ride! In winning the women’s division, Nicki, Karyn, and I earned the opportunity to become the Women of AR race team for the next year, so I already have great events on my dance card next season with these women and others. 

There is something really special about adventure racing. The community is close-knit, and even though I had been away for a few years, being at Nationals felt like a reunion. The experiences you have with your teammates are really concentrated because a race can throw so much at you, and how you respond as a team and support each other through the inevitable highs and lows will make or break your race. My most vivid, fond memories of any sport come from AR, and traversing a course with a team enriches the journey that much more. The sport keeps calling me back, and it’s safe to say that my love for adventure racing has been rekindled.

Credit: https://www.salsacycles.com/blogs/articles/britt-masons-usara-national-championship-recap

Photo credits: Vlad Bukalo, Randy Ericksen, Glamour Shots by Jen