Harpeth Racing’s own Todd Essig braved the cold and rain to race the 2010 edition of the North Georgia Adventure Race. Running for 30 continuous hours, race participants paddled, ran, and pedaled mountain bikes through the Chattahoochee National Forest in North Georgia. Todd submitted this race report after successfully completing the event on January 16-17th, 2010.
I raced this event with long time friends and teammates Chris Stark & Leslie Trussler. NGAR was a “supported race”, meaning that we had a support mini-van to haul our canoe and bikes and meet us at the designated Transition Areas for clothing changes, food, fuel etc. The opposite being unsupported races where you carry all you need for the duration of the event often with some “gear drops” along the way.
At 2pm the Friday before the race we arrived at the pre-race location for paper work and gear check, and picked up maps and instructions. We went to a local hotel and spent the next 3.5 hours plotting grid coordinates and doing route planning/strategy for the weekend.
The pre-race meeting was held at 6:45pm that night, then it was back to hotel. Early Saturday morning we loaded the van and drove to the race start at Carters Lake. The prologue start was a one mile run to spread out the teams along the course. At the end of the run we grabbed the team canoe and loaded all three persons into the boat (outfitted with a snap in middle seat). We were using carbon fiber wing blade paddles, making us a pretty fast team on water. The canoe portion was a 20 mile paddle around the lake. Our instructions were to find 5 designated flags on the shoreline, punch the passport at each and paddle like hell to the next one. We completed it in about 4 hours.
Back at the take out where we started, it was a quick change of socks, light clothing change, and onto the mountain bikes. We rode North a good 20+ miles and passed through Ft. Mountain State Park where we were allowed to see our support guy Emmitt Martin. Emmit is known in Nashville as the promoter of Run for the Party and Nashville’s half-Marathon.
At this point we picked up alot of food, fuel, water, clothing and running shoes knowing that we would not see any support for next 12+ hours. The three of us continued to bike north to Windy Gap Mtnbike trail head and dropped the bikes for the next leg. It was very dark at this point with rain coming down hard. We started hiking/jogging up the mountain to find 3 flags/checkpoints in the woods. We ran back to our bikes in sideways rain and 38 degrees, quite miserable conditions. Everyone was soaking wet and very cold at this point, thankfully local race volunteers had cups of Ramen Noodles for all and that was a nice treat.
After putting on ALL of our available clothing we headed East by bike to Mulberry Gap Mountian Bike Retreat; this place is a must see and visit location. I cannot wait to go back! Mulberry Gap Mountain Bike Retreat was a checkpoint along the way and they had cookies, soup, and hot chocolate. Though it was nice to get out of rain we had to hurry and go back out into it.
Mulberry Gap Mountain Bike Get-A-Way is a mountain retreat located neear the small community of Ellijay, GA. Catering specifically to mountain bikers, Mulberry Gap is surrounded by the Chattahoochee National Forest, making it perfectly suited to enjoy a weekend of riding and hiking the more than 150 miles of trails.
For more information, visit http://www.mulberrygap.com or call 706-698-2865 (email preferred)
Biking East to the Pinhoti Trail, then North to Hwy. 52, we encountered terrain that required a lot of bike pushing. The rain making it too muddy and steep to ride. This continued for the remainder of the night. We would ride through the darkness, find another checkpoint, ride/push some more, and find more flags in woods. By dawn we returned to Fort Mountain Park.
At Fort Mountain we checked in, dropped our bikes, and took some time to thaw out, change clothing and EAT. We were given 10 orienteering points to plot on a map. The objective of this leg was to go out and collect as many of these points as possible before the end of the race at 3 pm. This was an early season race for us and we had all spent more time at Christmas parties and on the couch than training so we were pretty gassed at this point. Still, we went out, colleccted 4 points and got back to the finish by 1.30pm where we called it a race.
We Placed 10th out of 38 teams, raced for 30 hours (non-stop) covering approximately 95 miles total through Chattahoochee National Forest. A pretty solid effort. We had clean navigation, no injuries, and lived to fight another day.
-Todd
An additional report of this race can be found here: http://checkpointzero.com/2010/01/ngar-the-toughest-race-in-georgia/
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Wow. Most impressive. I’m not sure I would have had the desire to put myself through that. Nice job!