Someone asked me where I went on my vacation a few weeks ago and I hesitated to tell them the whole story. During the last two weeks of July I spent 10 great days with my fiancée and his daughter in the northwoods fishing, biking and just "vacationing." The last few days of our vacation, however, were devoted entirely to my three other teammates of Team Gaea and our Adventure Race in the Nicolet National Forest.

I first heard about this Adventure Race during one of the Sunday Zoo runs, when I wound up running with Jeff Crosby. Jeff and I had a little history as we had both been to Sunmart in Texas for the 50K race a few months earlier. As we were running, he began telling me about an event he was training for and that his team was in need of a woman. I ran silently, thinking about the grueling events he was describing, the running and biking in mud, running around in the woods orienteering. I found myself contributing a little to the conversation by adding, "sounds cool," or "sounds really fun." By four miles into our run together I told him I would be interested in being on the team, if they couldn't find another women and if they thought I would be a good match. I got home and informed my soon to be husband, Gary Dunn, that in the midst of training for Ice Age 50 mile run, I wanted to also begin training for an adventure race at the end of July. "Sounds great," was all he said (what a guy!).

Our team consisted of three men ( Crosby, Jeff Polenske & John Fauber ) and myself; all three of the guys were on the team the previous year and had the benefit of last year's experience to help in developing our training program. In the months before the race, we orienteered, mountain biked, ran, and spent time at the Adventure Rock climbing gym (our team's sponsor) learning / practicing rappelling and ascending techniques (Ok, we did manage to get some climbing time in also). Adventure racing is an interesting multi-sport event that can be challenging to train for; some of the events are technical (climbing, rappelling) and some are pure endurance (biking, running) and some (for me) were based on pure determination and focus (crawling through dense woods not worrying about spiders or possible poison ivy encounters). We practiced pacing & reading the terrain for the orienteering and trained with our camelbacks stuffed with gear & 100 oz bladders of water.

In June we had a mild setback when one of the original members of the team, John Fauber, resigned for personal reasons. We continued to train together, meanwhile Crosby and Polenske, continued to hunt for a new teammate. In early July, we connected with Heather Haviland, who had been on the team the year before; she expressed interest & committed to joining Team Gaea. Our team was complete with the adventure right around the corner.

We all converged on the Wildman Whitewater Ranch on Friday, July 28th at various times in the afternoon and set up camp. In the early evening there were quick "safety sessions" on rafting, and later in the evening a similar session on ascending and rappelling the rock portions of the race. Later in the evening, we had a mandatory meeting to discuss various portions of the course, safety issues, and the general rules of the game. The Race Director distributed the orienteering map coordinates and our teammate Jeff Polenske, who was responsible for keeping us going in the right direction, began plotting, studying, and charting routes. Jeff was outstanding in his abilities and led us through the course without a problem. The routes were difficult - ankle deep swamps and mud for miles at a time, or steep climbs and descents - but we were always on target.

The next morning we drove a caravan of cars to the starting point. We had no idea where we were going but we drove close to a half an hour. We started 45 minutes later than the race director planned, but 5:45 a.m. was probably early enough for many. It's somewhat of an anti-climatic start; you've been mentally preparing for trekking through the woods and the race actually starts on a dirt road. Not to be disappointed the bushwhacking was soon to follow.

How do you condense more than 14 hours of activity into an article? You leave out a lot of details. The order of events went something like: run, orienteering, rappelling, running, mountain biking, bushwhacking with a mountain bike, hiking/running, ascending, bushwhacking, whitewater rafting. Rumors and race coordinators said about 50 miles in all were covered on the course. All of this was covered carrying your food, a camelback full of water and equipment, contributing about 20 - 25 pounds to your load.

The orienteering portion of the event took our team about four and half-hours to cover approximately 10 miles. Some of the "Controls" were easier to find than others, but the trick was to not give your position away to other teams who would, at times, yell out when they found the marker. The last three miles of the orienteering was primarily to get you to the next activity - rappelling. Unfortunately, it was these miles that were in thick woods in the swamp.

Rappelling was great - first of all because it meant we were done with one leg of the adventure race. Second, of course, because it was fun. We came to the rappelling station, which was also a check point, and our team suited up with the climbing gear, and rappelled down approximately 40 feet of wet, slippery rock face to the bottom. After rappelling, we ran three miles to the transition area where we picked up our mountain bikes. By this time, it was almost 11:30 in the morning.

Biking took us through a variety of terrain ranging from snowmobile trails, old fire roads, gravel roads, and thick dense forest that required either carrying the bike or walking it along side you to help keep your balance when you stepped into the ankle deep muck. All told, we covered between 25 and 30 miles on the bike. It was close to 3 p.m. when we rode into the transition area to drop off our bike.

You never know how important your team members are in an adventure race until after 9 hours, you're tired, you've bonked more than once, and you still have teams to catch & many miles to go. " You can do this Kathryn," my teammate Jeff Crosby said as I climbed off the bike to hear that we had at least four more hours. The on-going support and encouragement - whether spoken or not - was extremely helpful.

The running and hiking after biking started off a little on the tired side, but we managed to run a slow trot down the trail for a while. Thunderstorms kicked up and we were in a downpour. The rain felt great and although they didn't last very long, they added to the already existing huge mud puddles.

While we were still running and hiking to our next checkpoint, we passed a team of Marines who had lost their map, they were exhausted & slugging it out through the remaining miles. We left them at the checkpoint and I don't think we saw them again.

We finally reached a section of heavily marked trails that lead us on a very long hike (several miles) to the Climbing / ascending portion of the race. Ascending is climbing up a rope using "Jumars" which look like metal handles that "wrap" around the rope and have "teeth" that catch into the rope when there is weight on them. We pulled our equipment out of our packs and geared up. Once we were cleared to climb we all took off on different ropes with different routes up the rock face. I managed to pick a route that at the top had an overhanging "Lip", making it difficult to lift myself up and over the top of the cliff face. Luckily, one of the race officials was able to rappel down next to me and literally "give me a hand."

After ascending we headed down a steep ravine and into the woods on yet another bushwhacking adventure. After being in the woods for a while we came upon a road and decided to take it down to the river and find the rafting area. The only problem was that we were on a private driveway and we came out of the woods right near the house. Rather than a shotgun-bearing woodsman like we expected we found a nice older man and his dog that pointed us in the direction of the river.

We continued down the driveway until we hit the main road (the main dirt road). We started getting a little more excited with the prospect of hitting the rafting area which was our final portion of the race. A van came down the road and a woman inside told us the race had been called at an early checkpoint because some kids had removed the course markings and there were potentially teams lost in the woods. We were offered a ride back to the ranch or to the rafting area. We decided to continue hiking to the rafting area to complete the race as we had intended. As it turned out we were one of just a handful of teams that were referred to as doing "the full Monty".