(Photo courtesy of Scott)
Foreshadowing: “When a Yeti tracks you down as you exit the bathroom.”
Wait, that’s not the proper dictionary definition… Or is it?
After last year’s fun on the Abominable Snow Race, I decided to “upgrade” to the 10K distance for this year. Scott was on board with that, so we showed up ready for twice as much fun.
Last year, the majority of the snow had melted before we started; this year, the trails were full of snow. This made the footing much harder in places — not just from the snow, but also from the melted parts on hills where so many had already gone through.
Close to the halfway point, we made it to an obstacle that’s given me issues across OCR regardless of its iteration. On the ASR side, it’s the 45 degree climbing piece into a horizontal rope bridge into a climb down. Because of my vision, I can never tell where the transition from the top of the 45 degree part to the flat part is. This means, I almost always end up falling off the first part — which happened at least twice before both Scott and a couple others were able to help me get up and over the first piece.
Shortly after, we made it to the largest climbing hill. While Scott said we had done this last year, I definitely did not remember it. But it’s possible in the minimal snow last year that it really wasn’t an issue. But between the snow and the melted areas / ruts from other racers, it was a real bear this year. And after the second attempt failed, Scott found an “alternate” path so that we could make it to the top with more support.
After making it to the top, I threw in the towel on the 10K; the Yeti had caught me. The multiple falls on the big hill rope climb had taken too much out of me.
So we went towards the 5K finish when the 5K/10K split occurred. One big plus of this was we got to the intertube obstacle more quickly. While it was fun last year on frozen grass, it was far more fun on snow this year!
Even with all the challenges (and losing BibBoards and race belt clips in the falls), it was still a fun day. Thanks to Scott for guiding and all his help/support throughout. And thanks to Bill and everyone else from Abominable Racing for all their help and support! I’m planning to be back in 2027!
