Wow! What a great day for a race; and what a great group of folks who came out to enjoy 8 hours of trekking, biking, and paddling around Umstead and Lake Crabtree. The spirit of adventure racers really bouys me, and makes all of the effort spent organizing an event like this trivial in comparison to its rewards. Thanks to all who showed up!

The race consisted of 4 loops, each starting and ending at our shelter in the south of Umstead. The loops could be done in any order. Loop 1, a favorite starting loop, was a short trekking loop. Loop2 was a medium-sized biking loop. Loop3 — the only loop that everyone did — was a beast, featuring gravel grinding, single-track, paddling, and a bit of trekking. One racer commented that Loop3 alone could have been its own mini adventure race. Loop 4 was another beastly loop — all trekking, with an expected winning time of about three hours.

Spend some time with this event on Livelox to get a sense of how people approached their day. In my opinion, the LiveLox for an event like this is much more interesting than usual.

I wanted to make the course clearable in 8 hours, but again designed things a bit too big. Next year we’ll have a clearable course! I also wanted the course to be do-able completely on foot for racers who wanted to make it into an ultra-distance orienteering event. However, one control on the lake was on an island, and the park prohibits swimming in the lake. So I placed a huge rubber ducky at a good attack point for the island, hoping that anyone doing the loop on foot would be able to get out to the island without technically swimming. What a surprise that the only team to visit the ducky was Frog & Toad, on a kayak:

We kept track of everyone’s time and score on each loop as they came in. Some runners were able to use the board strategically, to figure out how to approach their next loop. For example, when one racer notice that someone had earned 26 points on Loop2 — a loop supposedly worth 21 points — they were able to infer that there were bonus points available on it. Good job guys! The final time and point tally looked like this:

I announced Pioneer AR as the winner of the race on Sunday, but only later realized that I had not scored Matt Kirk’s two manual punches on Loop 3. The 10 points from these controls catapulted Matt into first place, despite his 4 point overtime penalty. Great job, Matt! Once you decide to start paddling, maybe you’ll be able to clear one of these courses! Also huge shout out to Kevin, who was neck and neck with Matt all through the race.

Loops 2 and 4 shared control #57 at which was a small map with instructions to score bonus points on a Line-O. Sorry to those who went after the bonus control and never found it. Only about half of the people who tried to find it did, which is a lower proportion than I would have wanted.

Finally, I want to express my enormous appreciation for the volunteers who helped with this event. Foremost, Jeff Rezeli, who named the event and created its logo. Stellar in-the-woods work came from Lina Lindberg who set many of the controls in the 286 area and Umstead West, as well as Matt Smith, Paul Emmerson, Debra Rezeli, and Sandro Gisler who helped with control pickup. The control pickup crew was especially noteworth — getting everything out of the woods in time to set it up again on Bear Island in a couple of days. Thanks guys!

Loop by loop results follow

Old Skool 2025, Split times

2025-10-19

Created 2025-10-20 14:06:27 with SI-Droid Event 1.17.1

Filed under: Event Results, Latest News by David Waller