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| Eric's "6.5 mph - Adaptive" route: https://ericallanwest.github.io/hullabaloo/ |
This weekend I attended Mark Latannzi's Blacksburg Adventure Skills Hullabaloo. I was interested in the Saturday events at Pandapas: a 4-hour rogaine preceded by the Trail Not Taken (TNT), a route optimization problem with time limit. The challenge was to complete as many of the 40 trails and 40 unique miles in the trail system as possible. No matter the length or difficulty, each trail completed was 1 point. Additionally, each unique mile completed was 1 point, so a total of 80 points was possible.
TNT was meant for mountain bikers, but Mark let me go it on foot. He speculated that no biker let alone runner would be able to score all 80 points within the 7 hour time limit. This challenge brought back memories of my 2020 Great Smoky and 2022 NC State Park postman projects while also introducing the twist of triaging. I knew that I'd have to make up for my suboptimal fitness and lack of wheels with careful route planning... Enter Eric West.
Eric's prowess for solving route problems dates back years. He's developed a route optimizer for the Smokies, which I hope to someday fully utilize. Eric seemed as intrigued by solving the TNT challenge as I'd hoped he'd be. In fact, he went above and beyond to create a similar route optimizer for the TNT. I used his tool to come up with a workable strategy to get as many points as I could reasonably hope for: 55.
Taking into account fitness, terrain, heat and humidity, I estimated I'd maybe get 50K. But I didn't want to be wrecked for the 4-hour rogaine happening right afterwards. It was hard to abandon the highest possible score, but the prudent choice from Eric's menu was an "adaptive" route that had options to drop mileage if I started to run short on time, or energy. The route I chose also passed a water drop several times, another plus.
Turns out I ended up deviating from this plan around 20 miles. Things were going great for the first 10 miles when I was up on pace by about 10 minutes. Then I got turned around at a couple junctions and lost more time than expected refilling water at the drop. I started to look at my list of skip options. I felt that I would need to combine at least a couple of them at this point. The ratio of savings in time to points lost was not to my liking.
As I hiked up the mountain, I began to think outside the spreadsheet. I really wasn't feeling another climb from Poverty Creek to Brush Mtn. What if I eliminated the Skullcap/Jacob's Ladder loop? This wasn't part of the plan, but fuzzy trail math showed it saving a whopping ~1 hour and costing a little over 5 points. I didn't need a full hour buffer so I identified a shorter loop down Joe Pye to add about half the points back. I had little time to decide.
I went for it and ended up with 30 of 40 trails in 33 miles. I had about 30 minutes to get ready for the 4-hour rogaine. I switched map, clothes, shoes and reloaded the pack. I wasn't sure how quickly I'd be able to move. I made it to 18 of 30 checkpoints in about 8.5 miles. My navigation was pretty solid, but my body was just spent. I decided to stick around for the Sunday fun at Claytor Lake. Many thanks to Mark and Lora for creating such a unique set of challenges!
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