Spikes Challenge Race, Grayling, MI
A week after the Curley Memorial Race and a week before the AuSable Canoe Marathon is the Spikes Challenge Race. Spikes is run similar to AuSable: you must compete in a sprint race the day before for pole position, you must line up on the street and run to the dock at the start, and then you paddle with some serious time limits to the end, about 17 miles down the AuSable River.
John and I were terrible at our sprint, but we expected that. Neither of us is a sprinter, we had limited practice time in sprinting, and we were still learning to be a team. A terrible sprint means you are further down the street from the start, thus meaning you have a longer run to the river. I don’t run. I pathetically jog the best I can, but I definitely don’t run. The most interesting thing about this start is that we got to watch all the other people run away from us within about 15 seconds. The good thing to come from this was that there was definitely no congestion on the dock by the time we got there.
In a practice run, with me steering, we ended up taking a swim as I knocked myself off the back of the boat trying to duck under a tree. We decided that it was impossible for me to learn to paddle a canoe and learn to steer a canoe before AuSable so John was the sternman for this race. We had a GPS track to guide us to the swiftest water, which we would definitely need when we paddled this section of the river in the dark during the night of the AuSable Marathon and we were happy that the GPS was working well.
We were also happy that I was definitely learning how to work the bow of the boat. I anticipated John’s commands and most of the time my anticipations were quite useful to our forward progress. John reminded me that since he could not see through me in the bow, I had to be very diligent in locating and avoiding obstacles (logs, trees, rocks) in the water immediately in front of the boat. People told us that the bowperson spends a lot of time looking down to avoid obstacles during the AuSable Marathon and the sternman spends a lot of time looking up at the tree lines to guide the boat in the dark.
Of the over 80 pro C2s entered, we ended up finishing last at Spikes and we were not surprised by that. Our goal in this race was to beat the AuSable cut-off times, which we did by a full seven minutes. We were very, very happy about this!
It was a good day.