The Zenith 2026: So You Want to Be an Adventure Racer?

Zenith started well. Better than well. I cleared the first ridgeline, got up on top, and for a few flat trail lengths, I was actually jogging — legs under me, plan in my head, the whole map laid out in front of me.

The plan was the southwest corner. That's where the 30-pointers lived, the lucrative ones, the checkpoints that win or lose a rogaine. The race director had flagged them before the start: those are the hard ones. So of course I went for the hard ones. And I got them. Every one I thought I could reach, I reached.

Here's what the map didn't tell me. It showed me a good ridgeline down there — clean contours, an honest-looking route. It didn't show the greenbrier. Maps can show you where the hills are. They can't show you how much the forest is going to fight you back when you're walking through it.

And it fought. Every step down and every step back, the briars tugging at me, ripping at me, slowing me to a crawl. My watch logged a full hour of "not moving" out there — and I never stopped. I was grinding through greenbrier too slow for the GPS to believe it. That hour wasn't rest; it was the briars. My legs are a tattoo of nonsense now. Not scratches. Hundreds of them, the kind that burn in the shower and kept burning the whole drive home.

Somewhere down in that corner, clawing my way back up, the morale cracked. What I'll give myself: the navigation was on point. Never lost it, even when the terrain was doing its best to lose me. I got back up to the ridgeline, found the trail, and for a minute I was reinvigorated. Back on real ground, moving again.

Then the monsoon hit. Soaked feet, bleeding legs. I don't think I ever truly recovered. I tried — went out for a few more up “a prominent spur” the map was dangling — but my ankle was done, my cardio was done, and I just couldn't climb anymore.

So I came in. An hour and thirteen minutes early, points still on the table. It felt like a quit, and that stung more than the scoreboard did.

Then I got in the car, and before I'd pulled out I was already fixing it. Build the climbing capacity. Understand what actually went wrong — the briars, plain and simple. Learn to read that kind of off-trail resistance as a signal to turn back or find another line before it's not worth it. Though I'll be honest: I still don't know how I'd have known they'd stay that bad. Some of this is just bad luck you can't map.

Also, trekking poles. The RD told me afterward I'd benefit from a pair. He's right.

The one control you were asked to swim for — 23, out in the lake — got pulled by lightning. They handed it to everyone for free. Which tells you something about this sport: the director had to save us from the single thing we'd have done without a second thought.

Eight checkpoints. A hundred and ninety points. Nine and a half miles, twelve hundred feet of climbing, three and three-quarter hours of a five-hour clock. Solo. Legs like a topo of a place nobody should go.

So you want to be an adventure racer?

Lesson learned, 361 Adventures… I'll be back to try again with… fresh … legs.