September 12-13, 2025

Redemption was the one word to describe my hopes for the USARA Nationals this year. Ever since the announcement that it would be hosted in Bentonville, Arkansas, my hopes were high. We had an average, mid pack finish at Snoeshoe, WV the year before, but it was not one of my best races navigationally or strategically. I felt like the smaller mountains of the Ozarks would be more favorable to us flatlanders from Delaware, and the weather HAD to be better than the race through Hurricane Helene the year before.

My enthusiasm was also driven by the rejoining of my favorite race partner of all time (my wife Andrea) to the team. She had taken about two years off from racing when she had our 5th child in January 2024, and this would be her first time racing at USARA Nationals, an experience that I was looking forward to sharing together.

So, on Tuesday, September 9, around lunchtime, together we set out on what was perhaps the greatest challenge of the race – stuffing our family of 7 into the Ford Excursion and driving 19 hours to Bentonville! Our travel strategy was to drive the rest of the day, then through the night (and hopefully pass our sleeping race partner Dennis, who was already about 6 hours ahead of us and also driving with his whole family) and hopefully take advantage of the kids sleeping much of the night drive.

Overall the plan went well, despite the brief roadside naps, the 19 month old voice saying “help me” in the dark from the back seat (aren’t 19 month olds supposed to be too young to say ‘help me’? lol) and the overall terrible night sleep. We all arrived safely in Bentonville the following afternoon.

Late the next day, we found ourselves at the pre-race meeting, where we got our first preview of the course. It looked epic – and challenging, with noteworthy highlights consisting of class 3 rapids in an aluminum canoe, an orienteering relay where we each would have to navigate solo in the dark, and over 30 miles of single track mountain biking at the end of the race when sleep deprovision would be at its max.

We went to bed early that night, with the goal of getting a good night sleep (Callie, our youngest, generally sleeps through the night pretty good). But at 2:30 am, that same 19 month old voice that haunted our overnight drive - “Moooommmmy!” came echoing through the room. (Footnote: this same 19 month old is already a seasoned adventure racer with 2 races under her belt – one in mom’s belly and one in my backpack). She quickly fell back asleep in our bed, but I was left lying there awake thinking ‘this isn’t going to go well when that alarm goes off in 2 hours’. So, I snuck her down to her big brother’s room, where after one failed attempt followed by some dad ninja/yoga slow-motion moves that could have evaded a laser security system in a bank, I had turfed her off to her brothers for the next 36 hours.

Morning came quick after that, but we felt pretty well rested and ready to go. We arrived to the bus pickup in the dark, and took our 45 minute bus ride to the start location. Everything felt great, the sun was just coming up, the weather was clear, and being cold was certainly not going to be a problem at any point on this course. I felt strong both mentally and physically, and felt determined to stay that way and avoid some of the mistakes made at Nationals last year.

We eagerly received the course book and maps and began planning and plotting. I started with a quick read through the course book to familiarize myself with the overall flow of the race and then quickly diverted my efforts to marking up the 14+ maps. Stage 1 was a point to point trek that we were warned at the pre-race meeting was a big one, and that the strategic decisions made in that stage would likely separate the top teams from the rest of the pack. Since nearly the entire stage was contained on only 1 map, I chose to skip route planning for that stage for now and move on to the longer stages that involved as many as 3 to 4 separate maps. Stage 2 was a two part, point to point paddle with very easy nav, and stops at manmade whitewater parks at the midpoint, and at the end. I quick skimmed this, then looked briefly at stage 3, which was a point to point trek taking us from the end of the paddle, back to the midpoint stop on the paddle, where all our bikes would be waiting for us. It looked very straight forward and checkpoint heavy, so I made a mental note that we would try to clear that whole stage.

From there, I began to mark up the 4 big bike stages (stages 4, 6, 8, and 10), each one serving as a point to point route to take us between the remaining orienteering course treks on legs 5, 7, and 9, and then finally to the finish at the end of stage 10. Route selection on the bike legs was straightforward for the most part, with the exception of a few choices to make on one of them, which Dennis quickly narrowed down for us with his map wheel. Stage 10 was the big singletrack stage leading to the finish, which we knew would be a lot of fun, but would also be one of our bigger challenges, as mountain biking is one of our weaker disciplines, and we would be hitting it after 20+ hours of non-stop racing. This stage was unique in both strategy and route choice, containing a total of 5 lettered pairs of checkpoints and bookended with CPs 40 and 41. After punching 40, we then could obtain as many pairs of the CPs as we chose, but the pairs had to be collected as a set (like we couldn’t get half of the A pair, then half of the B, and then go back and get the other A both points of the same letter had to be collected in order). Initially the route choices looked complicated, but with a bit of study, we were able to determine the best route to get all 5 pairs, and identify which sets would be good to drop if we ran short on time.

“Time to start making your way to the start,” we heard called out. ‘Shoot,’ I thought, ‘I still haven’t really looked over that first trek leg that much. Oh well, we will just wing it.’

We found ourselves near the front of the pack lining up for the start, and it felt great to finally be moving as they called the countdown and said “Go!” We jogged the first mile or so, and quickly and effortlessly snagged CPs 1, 2, and 3. CP4, I told Dennis and Andrea, was the point where we would have to make our first strategic decision about skipping points. Up to that point all the CPs were essentially on the main flow of the trek. But CPs 5-11 were located kind of in their own little loop off to the east, before the full course would rejoin the main flow of CPs leading into the paddle with CPs 12-15.

The course designers had placed a reasonably aggressive time deadline early in the race also: to make it to CP 16 (the whitewater park at the midpoint of the paddle) by 4pm, just 7 hours into the race. Failing to make this CP by this time would result in being “short coursed” by skipping the second half of the paddle, and all of stage 3, and immediately moving onto the stage 4 bike (the start of which was conveniently located at CP16). The greatest impact this would make however, was the fact that being short coursed would result in you having to skip TA 2, which was a mandatory point.

In hind sight, the greatest mistake I made of the race was failing to realize that this was in fact, two separate races, with 2 separate finish lines and time deadlines. Since the first trek and first half of the paddle would not be clearable by most teams in a 7 hour time window, I should have focused on the first 7 hours of the race as a separate event, and then moved on to the 23 hour race which remained from CP 16 to the finish line after that. However in the moment there were a variety of distractors 4 pm seemed a long way away, our navigation to each point was going flawlessly (even still brushing elbows with some of the top teams 2+ hours into the trek), the pre-race communication said we would see our paddle bags 4-6 hours in (which stuck in my head as a subconscious “5ish hours on this trek is no big deal”). So we pressed on, with flawless accuracy to CPs 9, 8, 5, and 6. Somewhere in the mix of those 4 CPs, we suddenly heard the call “COOO-EEEE!” ahead of us in the woods. “It’s Elke!” we all laughed and joked. “She’s here in spirit and leading us to the next CP!” The Coo-EEE call is a sort of Marco-Polo locator call invented by our 4th teammate, Elke Dolder, who tragically couldn’t race with us on this one because of the lack of 4 person team sizes at Nationals. It has been extremely useful to us in past races involving the thick bushwhacking through the Rhododendron of Pennsylvania, where you can loose your race partner only 15 feet away from you!

We all knew we were running an aggressive race up to that point, and it was starting to get hot. REALLY hot. CP 11 became our first dropped point, but we made a pro level bushwhack to CP 10 and quickly found it. Andrea and I both shot parallel bearings while Dennis kept pace count to track our distance travelled. I always like to do parallel bearings with two team members when we can, because usually the point will lie somewhere in-between the slight variation of the two bearings that were tracked. Not this time, I was off to the left just a bit and Andrea was dead on.
As we started back out to the road, the reality set in quickly that we had pushed a bit too hard. Dennis and Andrea were nearly out of water, and my supply was super low as well, and then the heat cramps hit Dennis hard. On our way back out to the main road from CP 10, we had to stop for about 15-20 min while Dennis lay under a tree and fought through wave after wave of various cramping muscles. At one point, he asked “What comes next after cramps?” to which I answered, “Once you stop sweating you should be concerned about heat stroke.” We could both see that he was still sweating quite profusely, so he answered along the lines of “I should be still good then.” We knew we were dangerously close to missing the time cutoff, so I pulled out the course book to review the info. And there I saw the terrible words I had missed that morning: “The paddle from TA 1 to CP 17 is 8.2 miles.”

Adventure Race Tip #1: Always pay attention to every detail in your course book.

For some reason I had convinced myself from my quick glance that morning that the first paddle section was only about 6ish miles. With this new info in mind, the harsh reality set in that we would need 30 minutes more to complete the paddle than I had budgeted.

Dennis’ cramps eventually recovered enough to be able to get back on his feet, although walking was still difficult. We opted to take roads back to the TA, even though the distance was a bit longer, because being able to shuffle walk on flat ground was definitely easier to make forward progress with leg cramps than was bushwhacking. He pushed on, despite the fact that the cramps were alternating making his leg turn inward, and then outward in his stride – something he chuckled about with us – and something only adventure racers would find amusing. As we trekked closer and closer to the TA, the reality that we weren’t going to make the 4pm time cutoff became more and more clear. We made a quick grab of CP 14 on the way in, but left CP 15 behind, because in my mind, at that point the priority was to somehow make that time cutoff above all else.

We rolled into TA 1 at about the 5 hour, 28 minute mark, and proceeded to make one of the best and quickest transitions in my adventure racing career. Wasting absolutely no time we got on the water in our canoe with our paddle bag still mostly loaded, and then took turns sorting out our gear and hydration while making some forward progress on the water. 1 hour, 23 minutes to paddle 8.2 miles. ‘Never going to happen,’ I thought, ‘but we are going to paddle as hard as we can just in case.’ Just in case we make really good time down the moving river, or they extend the time cutoff (since so many teams were still around us and apparently going to miss it too, including some other very veteran teams). Maybe the heat had slowed down everyone and this would cause an alteration in the cutoff.

The paddle was very scenic and it felt good to be off our feet. Dennis’ cramps had now moved to his arm muscles instead of his legs, but at least with all 3 of us in the canoe he could take brief breaks while we still made forward progress. A few light rapids kept it interesting, but despite our valiant efforts we made it to the Siloam Springs Kayak Park about 30 minutes after the precious 4pm time cutoff. As we approached, we were informed by a safety guy standing in the river that the TA was just beyond the two rapids in the whitewater park. We managed to cut a nice clean line through both rapids and not capsize, despite many other fellow teams that were not so lucky. Pulling out of the water and rushing up to check in, we were greeted with the news – we had not made the time cutoff and were now short coursed.

This caused us to have a bit of a reset moment. We had come into the race with the goal of being in the top 1/3 of teams. Now, even an all-out fight to clear everything left on the course would still not put us even in the middle of the pack. As discouraging as this was, we continued on, at a bit less aggressive of a pace, and a new goal in sight of enjoying as much of the course as we could and crossing the finish line as a team.

A gentle 8-9 mile ride awaited us on the way to the town of Siloam Springs, Arkansas. The ride was pleasant, with a lot of it being on a paved “bike highway,” complete with road paint and everything. As we rode along we suddenly saw a post on the side of the trail that said “Welcome to Arkansas,” – wait, I thought we were in Arkansas? Upon further examination we noticed that the reverse side of the post, which faced the direction we had just come from said “Welcome to Oklahoma.” Evidently we had briefly biked across state lines into Oklahoma and were now crossing back, and I hadn’t even realized it! I’ve always thought it was cool when an adventure race crosses multiple state lines, it just adds to that ‘big course feel” and reminds you just how much distance you are covering under human power.

After a brief bit more biking we arrived in the town center where we dropped the bikes at a beautiful park to complete an urban orienteering course. Even though the afternoon was late and the temps were starting to fall a bit, Dennis got hit with some cramps yet again. It was at this point that Dennis offered to drop off the team if Andrea and I wanted to go on alone. I thought on it briefly, but quickly came to the conclusion that we started the race as a team, and if he was willing to push on at whatever slower pace was needed, we would finish as a team. We rested a bit and Dennis continued to work on rehydration and electrolyte replacement before setting out on the urban-O at an easy pace. This paid off and we made it through, completing all 6 checkpoints, which consisted of walking to a location on the map and then matching the real-world location to a photo on a sheet of photos that we had been given – very cool idea on the course designer’s part! As we rolled off into the sunset on our bikes, enroute to the trek relay at the end of the 20 mile bike that lay before us, we came up on the most beautiful Dollar General we had ever seen. It immediately became a mandatory stop as we filled up on Red Bull, about a gallon of Powerade, tuna and crackers, Lays chips, and trail mix. It was life saving, and several other teams joined us around the ice machine in the parking lot as we devoured our loot in the last bits of daylight.

Onward we pushed on the uneventful bike ride, over a mix of gravel and paved roads as darkness set in. The temperature was pleasant and the night clear – at one point I remember noticing the planet Mars in the sky, super bright orange. We arrived without incident at the trek relay TA at around 10:45pm, which was actually just across state lines and back in Oklahoma once again. This TA was awesome – a big indoor room with hot food, a TV screen to watch our teammate’s GPS tracker progress as they completed their part of the relay, and places to sit and rest (and maybe even sleep!) There was some strategy here – three separate O-courses, one for each team member, a beginner, an intermediate, and an advanced. Each one increased in distance as well. Dennis was doing a lot better, but still not 100%, and with the advanced course being 3.8km straight-line distance for only 1 point, we decided for Andrea to do the beginner, me to do the intermediate, and to skip the advanced.

Andrea set out first – this was her first time ever navigating in a race of this caliber, and her first time going solo. We looked over the map together and I began to try to offer suggestions to make it easier, only to quickly realize that my mind and teaching skills 14 hours into this race were quite inefficient and confusing. She finally took the map from me and walked off into the night, and said “I’ll figure it out,” which I had full confidence that she would. She is actually a fairly decent navigator I have offered to let her lead navigate other races when we race together to build her experience, but her competitive side always takes over and she opts to have my navigational speed over her own personal development.

I went back inside to reorganize maps for the next bike stage, and grab some of the pancakes and sausage that Dennis was also enjoying. After getting all that done as quickly as possible, I went over to the live tracker screen to check and see how much time I would have to try to grab a quick nap, and to my selfish disappointment, Andrea had already obtained her checkpoint and was halfway back. ‘Maybe I can grab 2 minutes,’ I thought, as I half lay/lounged on a couch and tried to quiet my mind long enough to fall asleep for a bit. But in what felt like only 15 seconds I heard the voice of Dennis through my closed eyelids, “She’s back.” Oh well, sleep must not be meant to be.

I set out next to complete my leg of the trek relay, which consisted of 3 checkpoints over a 2 mile distance. One of the three would be a revisit of the same CP that Andrea had just hunted down, and the other two were new ones added onto my assigned intermediate O-course. The first of these was pleasantly easy to find, on the edge of a pond in an open field. Next, I crossed the field to get down into a series of creek beds to get the other two. A heavy fog rolled into the field as I walked, making it difficult to see anything other than blinding white with my headlamp, so I took my handheld spotlight and held it as low as I could, making a makeshift “fog light.” This worked well, and I was quickly down in the creek beds, which were mostly dry and littered with broken and crushed limestone fragments, and gave the sound and feel of walking on a vast sea of broken glass as you trekked along. I quickly snagged the second point, and then began the trek down the wide creek bed to the third one (which was the same one Andrea had went to earlier).

The moon was up by now, and there were surprisingly few racers on this section of the course at this time. This was about to become one of those surreal moments that are experienced in adventure racing from time to time, where you come to the realization of the uniqueness of what you are getting to experience in that moment the exact conditions of which you will likely never experience again in your life.

I passed another racer or two on their way back to the TA, and then I was completely alone in the creek bed, which felt foreign and almost otherworldly in the dark. I turned off my headlamp, and the white limestone reflected just enough moonlight that the river looked like a glowing road laid out in front of me. It was actually easier to see where it went with nothing but the moonlight, as your eyes quickly adjusted to the dark. Soon enough I had found the point at the end of the creek straightaway, and was headed back to the TA. By now, other racers had filtered down into the creek bed and that moment of solitude was over, but that dry creek bed at midnight in total isolation and darkness somewhere in Oklahoma will definitely standout in my adventure race memories.

Shortly after that I was back with the team in the cozy TA, and we all pried ourselves away from the comfy couches, chairs, and light, and were off again on yet another bike stage, which would take us to our final trekking orienteering course. This bike covered 22ish miles of dark county roads, some paved and some gravel, and this is where grind time set in. Not much conversation occurred during that 3 hours, and in fact, I have so little memory of most of it, it almost becomes unbelievable that it took 3 hours to complete. In the overnight hours of a multi-day adventure race, many times you will feel as though you are in a time warp. Hours can feel like minutes, as you somehow plug along forward in a state of sleepiness, resolve, and muscle memory. Or sometimes minutes will seem like hours, as you stare at your watch in disbelief of how much of the night still remains.

Without incident we rolled up to the next TA at around 4am, where another off-road trekking orienteering course with 5 CPs awaited us. Dennis had been able to mostly recover from the heat we had experienced earlier by now, but as we started walking, cramps proved to still be a bit of an issue, particularly when contorting your legs in all the required angles and positions that bushwhacking mandates out of you. For this reason, we started out for the CPs that appeared to be closer to trails or roads first. CP 37 proved to be a fairly easy out and back, so we then set off down the road towards the trail that would take us close to CP 36. We were about 20 hours in at this point, and this is the point of a multi day race where staying sharp on your navigation begins to be a real struggle. You still know all the right things, like keep a pace count, don’t trust trails/roads on the map, the compass never lies, etc., but it is easy to let yourself get deceived or complacent. You WANT it to be easy, so when the easy way is just slightly wrong, you can fall into the trap of thinking ‘its probably right.’ One of these traps lie directly in wait for us.

We located the trail that was supposed to lead us to CP 36 fairly easily, and all the compass bearings matched up, so we confidently set out down the trail. The trail was followable, but was definitely overgrown in sections, and there were multiple other trails in the woods as well that were overgrown and not on our map. As we reached what looked like a Y in both the trail and on the map, we turned left and set off down the overgrown grass highway that was to lead us to CP 36. As we went along, initially the compass bearings seemed to match up, but after a bit, my bearing started to fluctuate between due west and a little southwest, instead of the west/northwest direction it was supposed to trend. My instincts told me something wasn’t right, but the trail was easy to follow, and I WANTED it to be easy. And, there was no other trail marked on the map in that area, so it had to be right, right??

Adventure Race Tip #2: The compass never lies.

In reality what had happened was we had turned onto an unmarked road just south of the intended road, which tragically was leading us out onto the next spur to the south. But I kept holding onto the false hope that we were on the right trail, and the CP was just beyond the next turn. When the original road we had started on came into distant view, the devastating reality that we had made a giant circle hit. At least I took solace in the fact that we weren’t the only team in the area, and therefore not the only team that had made the same mistake.

We quickly backtracked to the original Y in the trail, and then continued on down, where I was able to find the correct trail just slightly further from where we originally turned off. So frustrating. But when we had gone only 150 or so meters, the “correct” trail suddenly seemed to end in the woods instead of continuing on down close to the CP like the map seemed to indicate. Where in the Okla-Arkansas-homa were we!?! By then we checked our watches and realized that we had spent over an hour so far and only come up with 1 point. So we turned around and headed back to the TA and figured we’d give ourselves the extra time on the final bike leg ahead. (Spoiler alert – our GPS tracker data later revealed to me that when we turned around, we were in fact on the right trail to CP 36).

We set out on the final bike around 6am, and enjoyed an easy ride on paved roads as the sun rose. Andrea even managed to somehow grab a brief nap while riding her bike – Dennis said he glanced over and saw her just cruising down the road completely asleep. “Andrea, wake up!” he called out. She somehow kept the bike upright and moving through the whole thing.

We arrived at the gateway to the singletrack section (CP40) just after sunrise, and since we still had 8 hours in the bank, we set off on our original route to start with the B1/B2 pair of CPs. These looked to be the hardest of the 5 sets on the map, but they were also the first to come to. Covering mostly blue intermediate singletrack, we made our way to both of the B points over the next 2 hours. The trails were super fun, and would have probably required less uphill hiking had our legs been fresh. After snagging our first set, we realized that our singletrack speed and energy levels were lower than they needed to be to complete the full section, so we had a team meeting to discuss which CP pairs to get vs. drop. We could feel the finish line calling us, so we decided to grab the E pair and then head in. E2 was a piece of cake, we literally had to pass it on the way out. But E1 proved to be a bit more of a challenge. The map showed a “green” trail to get up to it from the south, but curiously also showed a blue trail and a black trail that all were parallel to the green. Interesting, I thought, but green sounded good so we started up the hill. Maybe it was just because we were tired, or because by now the heat of the day was upon us again, and Andrea and I were starting down the same dark path Dennis found himself on yesterday. But the trail just kept going up, switchback after switchback. It was then that I realized that the green, blue, and black lines were probably not separate trails, but were in fact switchbacks on the same trail to get to E1. Oops – looks like the C pair may have been easier after all. But it was too late at this point, we were committed. After a hard fought struggle up our last singletrack covered mountain, we were finally headed back to CP 41 to “clock out” of the singletrack and head into the finish in downtown Bentonville on the paved greenway.

It was hot, but knowing the finish was practically in sight was an amazing feeling. About 3 miles out from the finish was a bike trail with jumps that ran parallel to the greenway we were on. A few bikers rode past us as, and as I was zoned out in the bike pain cave I heard Andrea call out “Was that Dawson?” (Dennis’ son). It sure enough was, as well as Jonny, Andrea and my oldest son, who quickly caught up to us and joined us on their own bikes for the final few miles to the finish. What an awesome experience as we got the escort in by some of the up-and-coming stars of the Delmarva Adventure Sports racing team!

The finish was absolutely epic – the roof of the 6-story Ledger in downtown Bentonville. This unique building had an external ramp going up to the roof, ridable by bike. As we climbed the final manmade hill, we could hear the cheers from above. And as quickly as it had started, it was over – we crossed the finish line and punched the final control. We were all filled with a great sense of accomplishment, as we had all just completed a feat that few humans will experience in their lifetime. It was not one of our best finishes, or the redemption from last year that I had hoped for. But it was an amazing 118 mile long experience on an amazing course, with amazing people – including the most amazing person (my wife of course!) We found the strength and resolve to work through the heat emergencies, misread course books, and disappointments, and came out a stronger team on the other side. And we will just have to rain check that top 10 finish until Oregon next year!