Eric Batty and Ryan Atkins dash for the Finish! Photo Credit: Derek Carpenter
The 9th Annual Snowshoe Raid took place a few weeks ago and many of the country's top navigators are still licking their wounds after becoming "MATRIX'd"! What's "Matrix'd"?, well in the DontGetLost Adventure Runs a common section of the event allows team-mates to split up and collect checkpoints (cps) separately. This presumably allows teams with multiple good navigators to collect more cps than they could together. Trouble arose this year as the cps were quite far apart, the terrain was trackless and trail-less and the snow was much deeper than expected causing estimated travel times to sky-rocket. At one point three former North American Orienteering Champions (Mike Wadington, Will Smith and Mark Adams) all racing on different teams unexpectedly ran into one another while they wallowed through the deep snow attempting to exit this section as quickly as possible so as not to lose more valuable time. The havoc caused in the Matrix produced a large shake-up in the standings with perennial favorites being surpassed by those with perhaps less ambitious, but more well executed race strategies.
Top route-planning strategy and execution would have to go to Emma Waddington and Kate MacNamara of Team The Angels, they won their category and managed 4th place of all finishers in a very deep field.
Right up there with The Angels performance was that of Brad Jennings and Jake Schwass of Team Ripkin AR. They managed to capture the following video footage while going on to win the event outright! Impressive on all fronts.
The other category winners included:
Masters Male: Team Aging Mitochondriacs (Martin Rydlo and Mark Tarnopolsky)
Coed: Team Attack From Above (Chris Laughren and Julie Parent)
Masters Female: Team Tree Huggers (Barb Campbell and Denise Rispolie)
Junior: Team Fast & Furious (Noah Michelson and Owen Gadjanski)
Masters Coed: Team The Franklin Expedition (Richard Schwass and Heather Brown)
Full results, pictures and maps from the event can be seen at this link