6 Attachment(s)
TR: The Grand Traverse (2019)
WARNING: Long, mostly words, about a nordic/skimo race. Read at your own risk of boredom, irritation and displeasure.
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At the beginning of the 17/18 season I had mentioned the Grand Traverse to my long-time friend and occasional ski partner living in Boulder. We both kinda chuckled at the idea, then got a little serious and considered it. But he had a work trip conflict, and I had nobody else I would've felt comfortable asking to partner up with me on something I wasn't sure I would be physically capable of doing. Then winter began in earnest, and I forgot all about the GT until this past October, when my friend brought it up more seriously: did I want to partner up and take a serious crack at this? I said "yes" right away; it had already snowed in the Wasatch, and I was on day 2 of my human-powered season, the first time I had ever skied in October in fact. We were both pretty excited, but signup wasn't until December. So, ostensibly committed but with little else to do until December, I slowly forgot about the GT again.
Winter began in earnest this season around Thanksgiving, with a giant dump of snow sufficient to ski the backcountry on, and I started to remember that we had agreed to race this thing. I don't think I had even looked at the course map to be honest, I just knew that it was fairly long. I was excited at the prospect of having something to motivate me to get up early and ski a bunch, and the fact that my partner would be depending on me to do so would mean that I would feel myself accountable to something other than my own desire to ski. Full of motivation, I skied 5 of the last 7 days in November. Registration for the race was at midnight December 1st; the last day I texted my partner to make sure he was still willing to sign up. He hadn't managed to get any skiing in yet and had some reservations, but the race did have a "partner switch" option, and he agreed to race with me with the caveat that if (because of work or life or whatnot) he was unable to train, I would be on my own to find another partner. I was psyched; I had discovered some new-to-me touring options closer to home, we had good low elevation coverage, and I dove right in, skiing 16 of the first 19 days in December.
The Grand Traverse is listed as being 37 miles long with 6800' of climbing and begins at midnight, which sounds long and unpleasant but not terribly difficult until you make a serious effort to think about just what that means. That is an average of 183' of climbing per mile, an absurdly low number; I must be missing something. Maybe, I mused, there were long and continuous sections of downhill. Maybe the elevation profile was wrong. I had skied to Porter Fork Pass a number of times, which is a ~4.5 mile ~3300' climb (so 9ish miles round trip), and that felt pretty flat. I just figured there was something unusual about the way the course was laid out, and didn't make a big deal of it in my head.
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I got used to watching the sun rise from the skintrack, and carried on enjoying the winter.
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My wife is a marathon runner, so I had some vague notion of how one builds up to train for a thing like this. She'll typically do a series of increasingly long runs before a marathon, spaced out in 2 week intervals, with a rest week or two before the actual race. Working backwards from the date of the GT, I set my sights on 5 weekends: 4 "big days" (a concept I had yet to fully give form to) and the Wasatch Powderkeg, the annual skimo race held at Brighton that I had been doing the past few seasons.
I eventually (and quite arbitrarily) decided that a "big day" should be something like 20ish miles, and 10k'-ish feet of elevation gain, and I would aim to start as close to midnight as I was able, to get used to spending long stretches of time in the dark. The first one of these was on my calendar for the end of January. It went swimmingly:
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The next big training day I decided to add some flatter sections to increase the mileage. That one wasn't bad either:
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The Powderkeg came and went (I beat my previous best time by nearly an hour), I rattled off another long training day or two, and eventually my race partner came to SLC. I had plotted out a variety of potential training courses, but he had been somewhat more attentive to the actual GT course layout than me, and was concerned at how little horizontal distance we'd be covering on skins. We had stable powder conditions, and my feeling was that we should just go ski 10 or 12 thousand vertical feet of powder, race training be damned, leave the suffering for the GT itself. We compromised and did a 25+ mile 12k'+ day. Both of us were convinced that what we had done would be harder than the race itself.
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The Grand Traverse is a highly gear-intensive race. Due to the midnight start, the long length and the uncertainty of weather and conditions prior to race day, the organizers require a lengthy checklist of equipment, much of which I needed to acquire. I had done this more or less immediately after signing up, and had been skiing all winter with my full GT pack. The day before we left Utah for Colorado and the race, I laid out all my gear and did a final check against the master gear list.
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Then it was off to Colorado. The race begins in Crested Butte, which is around 7.5 hours of driving in the best of traffic... leaving after work on Thursday, we decided to stay in Grand Junction. Friday morning was gear inspection / checkin / packet pickup, so with a light night's sleep we were off early and made it to Crested Butte around 11 in the morning. I met up with my partner and we made our way through the paperwork and rigamarole with relative ease, then to the provided pasta lunch, and a mandatory pre-race meeting. In case you were living in a cave, Colorado had a pretty wild year in terms of avalanche activity, and there was much uncertainty whether a) the race would happen at all, and b) if it did happen, whether it would be able to go through to Aspen as intended, or whether it would be a "Grand Reverse" course and loop back to Crested Butte. The whole perverse allure of this race was the point-to-point nature of it, so the room exploded into cheers when it was announced that the full Crested Butte -> Aspen course was a go, with good snow coverage the entire way. The low that night would be 2F, which was a bit colder than I had anticipated, but not any colder than we'd been skiing in all winter. The meeting had started off on a sober note, with a moment of silence for Owen Green and Michael Goerne, two racers who had died in an avalanche in the Death Pass area in February while training on the course. But it had ended on a high note, and full of pasta and nerves, we headed to our hotel in Gunnison to do our final packing, eat some dinner and hopefully get a few hours of sleep.
It ended up being about 1 hour of sleep, bringing me to a total of around 7 since I woke up Thursday morning. I also had been sick the week immediately preceding the race, taking 4 straight days off skiing, my longest inactive stretch since traveling east for Xmas. Feeling about 60% of my normal self, tired with a sore throat and somewhat runny nose, we dragged ourselves out of bed around 9pm, got suited up and headed back to CB for the start of the race. We were told to arrive at 10:30pm for some reason, so we did, which was of course unnecessary but there we were. There were a lot of other folks there too, and through tired eyes they all looked a lot fitter than us, with lighter gear and a lot more spandex to boot.
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The GT was originally a nordic race, but nearly everyone there was on some sort of AT gear. A lot of full-on skimo kits, 160cm 65mm skis and so forth. There were also a lot of light AT setups, which was what both my partner and I were sporting. I saw some Carbon Bros, though I didn't manage to see whose they were:
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