Baja Travesia 2008 Champions

We did it! Team DART-nuun finished the Baja Travesia in 1st place for the third year in a row!
This year's race was much harder than last years Travesia.

I raced on Team DART-nuun with Cyril and Jen. Three other DART teammates, Glenn, Mari, and Sean, entered the race as DART-nuun/NW Kayaks.

Both teams began the race with the intent to beat each other and win the race, but we ended up racing together and helping each other out through the first night of the race. We topped out at 9000 feet above the Sea of Cortez where we had started 18 hours before. We finished 4 hours in front of the next teams. The two DART teams transitioned to bikes and soon got lost together. We squandered our lead by moving in circles for several hours. In the end, DART-nuun/NW Kayaks made much better navigation choices than we did, and ended up coming into the next transition 4.5 hours ahead of us. Surprisingly, we were still in second place, so all the teams were having tough times.

For the next day and a half we chased down our sister team. We kept making up time on them, but with only three sections left, we resigned ourselves to second place. DART-nuun/NW Kayaks left for the last trek in the daylight 2.5 hours before us. We left at dusk for what looked on the map like a straightforward 3 - 6 hour trek.

The trek turned out to be extremely difficult. Thorny bushes, poison oak, thick vegitation, and slippery rocks filled up the canyon. The pace was ridiculously slow and tortured.

DART-nuun/NW Kayaks almost pulled off the whole race without sleeping, but the last canyon was just too tough and long. They hit the big black wall of the third night of racing without sleep. The wheels came off. They got confused in the canyon and were forced to build a fire and sleep. To top things off, they had left for the trek in shorts during the heat of the day. Mari cut her race jersey in half and duct taped them to her legs to protect them.

We had banked some good sleep in our warm sleeping bags in a transition area during the second night. This was a difficult for us, since we were several hours behind DART-nuun/NW Kayaks at this point. We were regretting this sleep stop until we hit the difficult canyon. We were able to keep moving however slowly.

In the end this trek took us 11 hours to complete and we finished together at 4 a.m. We ended up deciding to finish the race together, so We biked together to the last section, a short Pacific Ocean paddle.

The kayak turned out to be the shortest paddle of my life. We didn't even make it out past the surf. The waves were huge, but we paddled through wave after wave. We thought we were past the surf zone when a towering monster broke directly onto us. It threw us out of our sit-on-top kayaks. It took me a while to surface and as soon as I did, another wave hit. I came up very far from Jen, Mari, and Glenn who were also in the water. I tried various ways of swimming with my paddle. It was very tiring. My paddling jacket filled with water and it took forever to swim back into the shore. None of us were about to try again. The race director ended up having us run down the beach to the finish. We got a few funny looks running through Ensenada in our wetsuits.

The two DART teams ended up tied for first after battling it out for most of the race. We won a paid spot to the 2008 Adventure Race World Championships in Brazil!

Final thought: I didn't have to fight the sleep monsters at all. This was huge for me, because fighting to stay awake when your body wants to sleep is my least favorite thing about racing. It's impossible to race effectively in this condition.