Race - Whitehorse to Carmacks

I noticed that for a blog about the Yukon River Quest, there's not a lot about it. So, out-of-sync, but here, this is what happened.

After 5 days of beautiful weather, the day of the race start, June 30, was wet & cold. This may possibly have been a blessing moderately disguised, as a couple of the crew were particularly heat sensitive. We all had cold & wet weather gear, so this was a chance to test it out.

Ground crew testing their gear

Despite having spent a lot of time planning how to pack the boat, come the actual morning nothing seemed to work quite as planned. Possibly this was not unrelated to the fact that nobody really wanted to stand around in the rain matching the packing with the plan; possibly people had thought of a few extra things they might need (previous optimism about weather now visibly misplaced); possibly it's a rule of the universe that the plan and the reality don't match. Anyway, the boat certainly looked full.

As ground crew (he said, affecting years of experience) you get to hang around feeling spare a lot of the time. This, in me anyway, produces mild anxiety. How is it all going to go? The Texan team, holders of the race record in 40 hours, didn't seem so anxious. Their food for the trip arrived at 11:30; 6 pizzas, which their ground crew immediately started putting into plastic ziploc bags. When you look at their timetable; 20 hours racing; 7 hours sleep; 15 hours racing; 3 hours sleep; 5 hours racing it almost seems like a different event. I mean, 10 hours sleep in 50 hours, that's almost reasonable. If you're insomniac, you'd probably say it was a luxury.True, the average insomniac isn't paddling 750 km in 2 days, but still. I was chatting to one of the Texan paddlers though, and in reality, fatigue is a their major problem, just like everybody else. Their major solution is to paddle faster; the extra energy expense has a mood-enhancing side-effect.

Seventy-nine boats entered. Fifty-seven finished. By far the vast majority were one & two person kayaks and canoes. Doing this race solo is almost too difficult for me to contemplate, but plenty try. In fact one of our team's advisers went on to win the subsequent 1000-mile solo race from Whitehorse to Anchorage, two weeks later. That's really, really tough.

Of our team of five ground crew, only one wants to do the race himself. It isn't me, although, I would like to paddle the river in a more measured way. It's a very storied part of the world.