Filed on 3/11/2008:
With some warm days last week the race suddenly shifted mentally from
"months away" to "just around the corner." I found myself revamping my
training schedule trying to get in more elevation gain and more time on
the bike. Almost a hundred days until the race starts initially seems
like so much time, but I'm beginning to get a little nervous about my
conditioning and the amount of time I have left to build more endurance
and add weight to my slender frame. Many people would love to have a
metabolism as fast as mine, but it makes keeping pounds on during a race
of this length even more difficult than it would normally be.
It was exciting to receive the first official Captain Communication! My
team is finally complete, thanks to the addition of Michelle Turner, who
is in great shape due to spending most of her winter snowshoeing with
her daughter in a pack on her back. In fact, teams that just raced in
the MVP Health Care Frigid Infliction found her and her family staffing
one of our remote snowshoe checkpoints, having packed Lily in for the day.
I'm looking forward to updating our team profile this week and feeling
like we're on our way. I'm quite happy with the final team composition
and looking forward to race day with them, although it is somewhat
intimidating knowing you are probably the least fit member of the team
you'll be racing with. It certainly will be good motivation going forward.
And a closing note - make sure you are following the
bulletin board on
the Untamed NE site . There are lots of good questions and answers being
posted there. Knowledge is power, and it sounds like we'll need all the
power we can get our hands on to battle this course successfully.
Race hard. Navigate well. Have fun.
- Chris Yager, Green Mountain Adventure Racing Association,
http://www.GMARA.org, chris@gmara.org