Conquering Castlewood

On August 18th, Dave Hagen and I set out to race the Conquer Castlewood Adventure Race in Ballwin, Missouri at Castlewood State Park.  Our Off the Front teammates, Zdenek Palecek and Adam Rybar, were there also to race in the 2 person male division. There were a total of 134 racers, 69 teams, and 17 coed teams in our division. The race was broken up into 2 waves which was around 64-70 racers in each wave.

 

The Paddle (~1 mile)

Dave and I were placed in the second wave. The first discipline was paddling. The first
wave went off at 8:00 AM.  Dave and I watched to see how fast the teams were exiting from the water. At 8:30 AM, it was our turn. The gun went off and we sprinted to the beach to grab a canoe with our bike shoes and helmets on. When we got to the beach, everyone kept grabbing the same canoe we would touch so it was a little frustrating. I finally yelled "this one is mine!" after going through 6-7 boats. We ran the canoe to the river and I was disappointed to see how many boats were on the water already. I got on one knee in the boat, put my head down, and tried to hammer this section to make up time. Dave and I were able to make up a lot of time and exited the water in 4th overall. Dave yelled at me to go while he carried the boat up to the mandatory spot.

Mountain Biking (~5 miles)

I ran from the beach to the road where I staged my bike. I
was able to jump on and take off since I had all my biking gear on already. Since we didn't have to stay together for the remainder of the race, Dave was able to take off ahead of me. I decided to only carry water on the bike for the whole race since it was so short. I took advantage of the first short flat section and drank some water.  This allowed a few more guys to pass me. But, when we started the climb up Grotpeter, I was able to pass several of the boys again. I didn't see any females in front of me but, I didn't have any idea how the coed teams were doing in the first wave.

 Trail Run (~4 miles)

I came into the transition area after the fun bike section and exchanged my biking gear for running shoes. The first part of the run was flat along
the river. Then, we headed for the newly resurfaced long climb up Lone Wolf.  After the climb, the rest was downhill with a sprint down the road to the finish line.

I crossed the line in 1:10:30, 1st place overall female, and Dave was in already at 1:01:02 giving him 9th overall male. This gave us a combined time to win 2nd place out of 17 teams in the coed division and 8th overall out of 69 total teams. Yay!! The real kicker was we lost first place by only 16 seconds!

Big congrats goes out to our teammates Zdenek Palecek and Adam
Rybar who won 3rd place in the all Male Division. Speedy Zdenek also got the 2nd fastest individual time overall out of 134 racers...wow! Congrats also goes out to our Alpine Shop friends, David Frei and Jeff Sona, for 2nd place and Al Beers and Erin Fuselier for 3rd place coed. Always a blast hanging and racing with friends. For complete results click here http://www.fleetfeetstlouis.com/racing/race-results/conquer-castlewood.

Big thanks goes out to Matt for a great job organizing this event, the volunteers who help so we can race, and the awesome sponsors. Everyone was super friendly, course was well marked, and it was a super fast fun race! I had a blast racing with Dave and I'm sure I will be back next year.