The Audible

KC and I finished the Teton Ogre 8-hour in second place, coed. Here's how close it was: the third-place team scored the exact same 80 points we did. What separated us wasn't a checkpoint — it was about twenty minutes. We came in around 7:35. They came in around 7:55. When the points tie in a rogaine, the clock breaks it, and every decision we made out there is what bought us those twenty minutes.

The Ogre is not Michigan. There were 13 controls scattered across the mountains above Irwin, Idaho, and 8 hours to grab what you can — map and compass only, no GPS to bail you out. My Garmin logged 12.65 miles, with 3,297 feet of climbing packed into them. Back home that's a season's worth of hills. Out here it was Saturday.

It started on the bikes. The first checkpoint, L, sat right on a stream — you had to get off, step in, and wade to punch it. KC went in and got it. From there it was a long, steady grind up toward M, the kind of climb that never lets up and never gets steep enough to give you an excuse to stop.

The whole race turned on one decision, about an hour in, when we topped out at M. My plan had been a western loop — two high-value checkpoints, A and C, both worth double points, the kind that win or lose a rogaine. But by the time we reached M I could see KC was cooked on the bike climbs, and the map was telling me M to A was another monster ascent with a walk-the-bikes descent waiting at the far end. So I called an audible. North instead of west. And drop the bikes right there at M.

Dropping the bikes is what saved us. From M up to E was a brutal climb — 500 feet or more of steep mountain — and most teams tried to hike-a-bike it, dragging their rigs up the side. We went on foot. We paused a lot to let our legs come back, but we kept moving. And here's the part that still makes me grin: coming back down, the ground was so treacherous the bikers had to get off and walk their bikes down anyway. We outpaced them the whole way on foot. Had I stuck to the plan and gone west, we'd have been the ones cooked on that far climb, walking bikes down slow. The audible won the race.

But mostly it was up. J to F was the worst of it — no trail, straight up the side of a mountain, the kind of climb you don't route around because there's no way around it. My calves locked up more than once. It was pushing the low 80s by afternoon, and I'd rationed my water to make it last the full 8 hours — I paid for it by the end, flat-out dehydrated and needing another liter I had no way to carry. Here's the number that tells the whole story: 7:35 on the clock, and my watch counted just 2:38 of it as moving. The rest of the day was spent grinding uphill too slow to register.

The reward came at the very end. Back at M we grabbed the bikes and pointed them down that same long incline we'd ground up hours before. KC rode the brakes the whole way down, nervous about the speed. I did the opposite — let caution fly and let the hardware do the work. Garmin clocked me at 2:44/mile, the fastest I moved all day. I also took a tree branch straight to the helmet flying down, which ripped it clean off my head. Luckily just the helmet.

KC was the difference. We've raced plenty of these together, and she came through where it counted — grabbed a couple of controls I might have left on the table, and those points are the reason we're standing on the second step and not the third.

The scoreboard: 8 of 13 controls, 80 of 150 points. Second place, coed, decided by the clock. My 29th race, and the hardest one I've done.

Would we do it again? Neither of us knows yet. And honestly — that might be the best thing I can say about a race.