FIG 2025: The Worst Map Day Ever

Every adventure racer ends up with two kinds of races: the ones they tell stories about, and the ones they get told stories about. FIG 2025 is the second kind.

Seven a.m. start in Red River Gorge country - Hop's Fork, Kentucky, the kind of terrain that looks gorgeous right up until you're holding a map of it. The course, I now understand, was meant to be raced more or less linearly: checkpoint to checkpoint, a clean line through the hollows. That is not the race we ran.

We misunderstood the maps. Not missed-a-contour-line misunderstood - misunderstood the relationship between the maps, full stop. Eight controls out of thirty-three tells that story better than I can, and it tells it in numbers, which somehow hurts more.

It ended the way all great epics end: with a phone call asking race staff to come collect us. DNF, officially. 'Worst map day ever' is what went into the logbook, and the logbook does not lie.

FIG 2026 is already on the radar. The Gorge won round one - but now we know how it fights.