Race Report: Muskoka River X 2024 (Algonquin Park Edition)

We came.

We suffered.

We conquered. 

The Start

The Race

90km of paddling across Algonquin Provincial Park. 

7am start... clock doesn't stop until you finish.

Over a dozen rough back-country portages and some winding rivers, the odd marsh... it was tough stuff.

The Start

The first 23.5km were mostly lake paddling with one short portage.

This flew by... we were really steady and straight. Lots of boats around, we had taken compass bearings and went as straight as one could hope. The water was super still, some fog but no navigational challenges at all!

Galearey, Rock, Whitefish Lakes

The short river section leading up to Portage #2 were much twistier than we anticipated! A little tricky but we didn't make any wrong turns.

Portage #2 was a short hop around the Pog Lake Dam - we had to stop to wipe the boat and paddles off to prevent the spread of an invasive species (the spiny flea thing). All went according to plan.

We crossed the Lake of Two Rivers and kissed "flat fast lake paddling" good-bye...

Madawaska River (28km-37km)

This section of river is a nightmare to paddle. 

Upstream, it starts off squiggly, then gets marshy, then gets beaver dam-y.

Squiggles and Marsh!

We had paddled this section a few weeks ago but it was definitely lower, which made it slower and tougher.  Turn, turn, rudder turn, tuuuurrrrrn.... oh and Portages 3 & 4 just for good measure!

It all went great, though! But good-bye average speed!

Midway through marsh hell there's a decision point - you could either keep paddling or portage.

Having paddled this section a few weeks ago, we knew there were at least 4 beaver dams to portage over and with the lower water probably more.  None of them were marked portages, so it was literally scrambling up a beaver dam, heaving it over, then sometimes falling into a deep pool on the other side. 

We elected to portage - which was lonnnng (about 1.8km).  I'll call it Portage #5.  We took turns "Mr. Canoe Heading" the boat and it went pretty OK, the trail was very well groomed and wide, mostly flat.  It was nice to use a different set of muscles (hello, legs!). The boat was a little unbalanced with the batteries for the night lights mounted, though, which meant a bit more arm than usual.

Me Portaging Again Somewhere in Algonquin Park

Then was another decision point - you could either put into the river for a short bit or keep portaging all the way to Portage #6 - we chose the latter this time, as this section of river was pretty decent.

Portage #6 was a steep and muddy and rocky trail, almost 400m (but felt like longer). 

One little "oopsie" was trying to reposition the yoke during the portage to re-center the balance of the canoe and we moved it the wrong way! Front heavy, move the yoke forward - we moved it backward and made it worse. That didn't cost a huge amount of time and once we got it right portaging was much much easier.

Back To The Lake!

Finally we were back on lakes and some paddling in a straight line!  Very calm water.

At this point I had to do my first water refill, so this is a good time to talk about...

Nutrition

This race is 100% self-supported - everything you need you must carry with you.  There are no opportunities to re-supply, so this means you're either carrying many many litres of water or you're making it along the way.

It was a pretty hot day (especially for September!) so there was no way to skimp on fluids.

My stomach rebels against solid food so I went with pure sports drink... well, homemade sports drink!

Mmmm Tang/Gatorade/Maltodestrose/Fructose!!!

Additionally I added some crushed up caffeine pills (400mg total over the 15h) and table salt.

To drink lake water you have to treat it - 4 Aquatabs per 2L... 

Anyway it ended up being about 1kg of sugar! I individually portioned it for 5 2L jugs of liquid. It was great, honestly, very little stomach anger and I had energy right through to the end.

Cache Lake, Tanamakoon Lake (37km-43km)

Flat, peaceful lake paddling - no difficulties, recovered a bit of average speed, leading to...

Portaging At The High Point (43km-47km)

This section was one we hadn't done before and I wasn't sure what we would encounter.

Lake -> Pond -> Little Island Lake -> Pond -> Lake

Portage 7, 8, 9 and 10 all within just under an hour!  These were some gnarly portages in quick succession, we mostly carried the boat by hand until the last one which we "Mr Canoe Headed".  There were a few teams we were back-and-forth with, and we encountered some recreational camping paddlers with a case of beer (we jokingly requested a beer, they declined).

The water was great, though, easy paddling for the most part (other than a few lilies on one of the ponds). Much better than I expected at the highest point!

Halfway and Back On The Lakes! (47km-62km)

7 and a half hours in, feeling alllllllright!

This was mostly lake paddling other than "Smoke Creek" (which had very little current).

Smoke Lake, Tea Lake, Bonita Lake, Canoe Lake, then back to Tea Lake and on to the Tea Lake dam!

Part of this was an out-and-back to the Algonquin Outfitters store on Canoe Lake - which looks lovely, but it was quite tough to take at that point knowing the Tea Lake Dam was riiiight there and we were paddling away from it.

Still, nice to see all the teams both ahead and behind us.

I made fresh fluids in both my jugs to prepare for the last 1/3 of the race down the...

Oxtongue River

30km to go, but it was going to be a tough 30km. 

This started with Portage #11, a pretty quick one around the Tea Lake dam.

Us Paddling on the Oxtongue River

We were paddling this river downstream (yay!) but very squiggly (boo), lots of rocky swifts which sometimes were fun (Whiskey Rapids) but other times you just nailed the boat against rocks and ground to a halt, having to lift it over.

Taking a lickin' from the Oxtongue

We still had daylight for the short Portages #12 and #13 and no trouble...

... then it got dark.

Paddling in the dark is pretty freaky, even with good lighting. On a winding river it's very tough to tell where to go at times - every gap in the trees looks like where the river will go, but sometimes it goes the other way! A few oopsies along the way even though we'd paddled it before.

Then came the beavers. We saw zero last time we paddled this river in the daylight - apparently they are nocturnal?? We saw at least a dozen, and they make this loud "smack" with their tail before they go under water... in the dark it's quite unnerving!

The other challenge is that seeing what is under the surface of the water goes from "difficult" to "impossible" when you are using lights - so those little swifts became extra annoying and hazardous.

Gravel Falls Portage #14 Ruined Our Race

There are several little rapids coming up to Gravel Falls, the next portage - but at night they all just sound like water rushing, and going over Gravel Falls is death - so we were pretty slow just making 100% sure we were going over rapids and not heading to... death.

Fortunately they had a volunteer stationed at the portage with a light to ensure nobody died, which was nice!

This was where it all went wrong. 

When we pre-paddled the river a few weeks ago, we put in just after the falls an paddled the rapids after this.

It was rough... we banged on a lot of rocks, and even got jammed up under a tree at the last set of rapids and the water was lower on race day.

So we decided we would portage past the rapids on the trail and put in after those rapids.  On the maps it looked super simple, follow the trail until you stop hearing rapids and put in!

We followed the trail and this was the result...

... about 40 minutes of going back and forth in the dark.

It was brutal - we just couldn't find anything that looked like the "right" trail. There was a creek crossing and presumably a fork in the trail but we just couldn't find the way that hugged the river.  My buddy thought he heard a large animal in the woods (which he probably did, there was poop on the trail too!) - so it was just a lot of scrambly bad decision making.

In the end we just put in before two of the sets of rapids we had hoped to avoid and carried the boat over the rocks (we were correct that it was unpaddleable!!!).

What was the mistake?  I think we made two - one was not going back and scouting the portage in our pre-race paddle, and the other was not really knowing much about "lining" the boat (walking through shallow sections while pulling the boat by rope or otherwise).

Live and Learn.

We were following another team at this point down the rest of the river to Ragged Falls, Portage #15.

This one I definitely knew as we had got lost on our pre-paddle, in the light! There's a tiny portage sign and if you miss it you end up in a parking lot - which we had done. So this time, in the dark, I made the right turn and got to the put-in.

To The Finish! (90km-94km)

The last bit of river is straighter and leads out to the final lake section. At this point we were still feeling... good!  I don't know how. We couldn't catch the team in front of us but we were paddling strong.

The Finish (but it was definitely darker than this)

Done!

15h28 and 93.91km later... we were done!

What can you say... it was wild. A proper "adventure".  Paddling through lakes you can only get to by portaging, twisting and turning through a marsh, and so much portaging...

It took a long time but I was so busy trying to figure out what to do next it mostly flew by.

Other than the portage we had a near perfect race. Maybe we could have been a little quicker here and there at a few things, but overall I think we kept everything lean and mean and light, and had the right strategies at the right times... wouldn't change much.

Not sure what they'll have in store for next year but maybe see you in 2025, Muskoka River X? Maybe.

Race Report: Storm the Trent 2024 (Short Course)

 

Better late than never? I feel like I should have written this months ago, but just forgot. 

This is going to be a super crappy (and crabby) report more for myself to look back to.

I love Adventure Racing and this one was ... good. But a few things ground my gears. 

1) The Results were wrong. Are still wrong. They didn't enforce their own rules, a team that finished just behind us should have been DNF'd for a PFD violation but wasn't.  At least they finished behind us! Another team that medalled was put in the wrong category and didn't get their due at the ceremony, it was bad.

2) The Awards Took Forever. Hours after the race before we finally got to the medal ceremony, long after the cut-off. We just wanted to go home, but zero urgency on the part of organizers

3) The Food Took Forever. This is the second straight year they tried to feed hundreds of people with food truck(s) that are so incredibly slow... it's not working, hopefully they do something else??

4) The Course Kind of Sucked... lots of difficulty came from really long climbs on the bike, not from any complexity in navigation or strategy.

OK enough complaining, maybe. It's one of the last races of this kind and I really do love them.

On to our race...

First Run

I don't know how we got lost on these super basic trails but we missed a turn and ended up following other people the wrong way... ugh! Fortunately it didn't cost us that much time, and we were able to recover... the next checkpoint we got really well that a lot of others missed, one of the few times navigation came into play.

Paddle

We were surprised to hit the paddle in second place! We're far from the fastest runners (me especially) but I guess the navigation did work to our advantage, somehow. 

We crushed it... as we should! 

Run #2

This was a long and obvious run around the lake to the bike drop-off. Nothing too interesting, but we did get passed rather predictably and fell from 2nd to 4th overall.

We weren't quite sure who was in our category but we were pretty sure the team in 1st was it. They were the ones who should have been DQ'd... but I'm not bitter.

Bike #1

The hills, holy hell.

We used gravel bikes based on what we knew ahead of time, and it was a huge advantage - this was entirely on-road, nothing technical at all.

We bombed down the hills - I hit 77km/h on gravel, downhill, it was INSANE. So much fun, so comfortable... don't tell my wife!

What goes down must go up - and the climbs were HARD. Fortunately at this point we didn't come back quite as high as we'd come down, so that's a plus?

We passed a few of the teams that had passed us and figured we were in pretty good shape.

Run #3

I enjoyed this run (hike?) the most, it was an interesting area to navigate to checkpoints and some different strategy options. We really nailed this one on navigation, I wish my pace could have done it justice.

Bike #2

Ho-lee-sheeeeeeeeet... 

The climbs right out of the Run were so steep, like "pretty good people walking bikes" steep. I saw 15%+... on gravel, it was diabolical. 

We finally got to the top and in typical-of-this-course style, we then went down....... fast! This was a curvy gravel descent that was so much fun, again we found ourselves passing uncomfortable bikey people with our sick gravel bikey skills.

One again what went down had to go up... and the climb this time was a lot. Several kilometers straight up with a quick diversion into some little trails, then back to climbing.

I died a lot, but so did a lot of people.

The Finish

Through a weird neighbourhood section then back to the start/finish.

We won our category! Yay! 

All in all a good day, except for the 4 points mentioned above. 

I didn't hate the course but far from my favourite. Canoe leg was interesting/great, the runs were decent, but the bike was pretty boring. Hard but not in an interesting way, just long. I would rather be further north in some wilderness, but everyone's different.

See you in 2025, most likely.

Race Preview: Muskoka River X 2024 (Algonquin Park Edition)

I have been very negligent in my blogging this year, but let me correct that!

This race has seen a lot of different iterations over the years, from the original Muskoka River X to the Huntsville 110 and now... a new 90km Algonquin Route.

90km is obviously less than 130km or 110km, but this route is not easier by a long shot. 15 portages, many of them knarly back country... very twisty rivers (creeks?)... it's going to be a proper "Adventure"!

It's beautiful, it's rugged, it's hard.

The Madawaska River

We pre-paddled this section last week, and whooey it's slow going. 

This river is long but these are the headwaters - the highest points, where it's more of a creek at times.

Twists and turns, rarely straight. Lots of places to get lost, we really had to read the water to see where the current was strongest to know where to go.

Beaver dams! Several beaver dams. Most of them we had to portage over - they're quick but it was a learning curve for us to know where to stop and where you could stand.

The Oxtongue River

It's rocky and twisty at the top, but mostly it was pretty good! We had good water levels, but I don't know if it'll stay that way on race day. 

With the distance we'll almost certainly be paddling this in the dark so that'll be... fun? 

We knocked up my buddy's boat pretty good near Gravel Falls, which is an amazing chute near the finish... you can put in several places, but some of them leave you running rapids! It's probably faster but the last ones we got hung up and had to get out of the boat anyway, pretty miserable.

Paddling in the Dark

We did it in the Huntsville 110 and it was awesome!  Well, awesome-ish. Challenging but so peaceful and unique. River paddling in the dark was hard on the Muskoka River, I can't imagine how hard portaging and paddling the Oxtongue will be... different kettle of fish.

Nutrition

300kcal/h of carbs, will mix it all into energy drink. I have a plan! We have to "make" water using tablets and such to treat lake waters...

Excited?

I am! I was dreading this one a bit but I feel like we're prepared and ready to rock it!