My socks were wet. The race wouldn’t start for four and a half hours, and I was already dealing with wet socks. I had washed them the previous night, but they still hadn’t dried. I only had one dry pair, and they were on my feet. I strapped the wet ones to the outside of my pack.
I started the race while on my mobile phone, people moving past me and asking in Russian: “Are you calling America?” Actually, I was trying to text message Diana. We had been waiting for the race to start, being entertained by a trio of jailbait singers and guys doing bike tricks. I had been told the start time of the race had been moved from 12:00 to 12:30 and figured Diana might come down to hang out and see us off. My socks were on a stone bench, slowly drying in the sun. About ten minutes later, and with Diana on her way, they announced that we would go ahead and start. We barely had our packs on when they clanged the start bell, and we were off, me trying to simultaneously jog and punch letters into my mobile at the same time, telling Diana not to come.
We ran down a hill (I thought the running was quite silly. We had 60 km of trekking ahead of us, and running with packs was going to do nothing but wear us out. But since everyone else was running…). At the bottom was a checkpoint. We turned left and ran some more. There was another checkpoint. Then we turned left and ran up the hill we had just came down, although this time on a steep dirt track instead of stairs, passing another checkpoint. Another left and we were back where we started. This was, in fact, part of the race, and no doubt the organizers thought it was funny as hell. Breathing hard, we then ran down the hill again, the checkpoint this time pointing us right, where, around a corner, ropes were set on a stone wall.
We were originally told that ascenders would be supplied for this portion of the race, making scaling the wall easy. At the last minute, at the registration and orientation we had gotten up at 7:30 AM to attend, we were told there weren’t enough ascenders, so no one would get any. As my group was already lagging behind the crowd of 40 competitors, I just jumped at the rope and started pulling myself up, hand over hand. At any moment I felt that my hands were going to slip and I’d be back at the bottom, but I surprised myself by getting to the top. While I was climbing, Carrie was tying our bags into my rope. Then, while I hauled our packs up one rope, Carrie climbed up the one beside it. She got about five feet from the top before she couldn’t go any father, but with a mighty heave I got her up. Teamwork at its finest.
Carrie free climbing the wall
Together, we then jogged for a kilometer down the river that flows along Zhytomyr, where we then had to swim across the river to continue the race. Here is where problems started. All the competitors had become spread out along that kilometer. Carrie and I, our “Crazy Hedgehog” team, was sticking with four other teams that we personally knew from Polissya, the sporting organization I’m building a climbing wall with. The ten of us decided to stick together to complete the race, rather than worrying about winning it.
The Polissya crew. Clockwise: Arteom, Ina, Ira, Dima, Vannya, Nikolya, Carrie, Pasha, Alla
Carrie and I also needed them because all the instructions for getting to the checkpoints were in Russian, and we simply didn’t know most of the words on the paper (they never taught us “chestnut tree in a meadow” in training). We had been told that English instructions would be provided, but that must have gone the same route as the ascenders.
We arrived at the river crossing with the leading teams already stripping their clothes off. A number of the men, wisely as I would discover, decided to swim the 100 meters across the river wearing nothing at all. I stripped down to my boxers, Carrie to a bikini she had on. We inflated the children’s inner tubes we had been instructed to bring along and put our packs on them.
Crossing the river
We had been unable to find plastic bags big enough to fit our packs. It seems that few other people had this problem and had thrown their packs into thick plastic bags, lashed them to tubes and hit the water. Without the bags, we had opted to put everything inside our packs in Zip-lock bags that I had brought from America. The problem was that as I was stuffing clothing into the Zip-lock already holding my fleece, it tore. I could have moved stuff into other bags, but my group was already getting into the river. I figured I’d just do my damndest to keep it out of the water and waded into the water. Pushing my bag along ahead of me as I swam across, I realized all was not going according to plan.
Water was getting into my pack, and the heavier it got, the lower it sank into the water. On the other side, I discovered that all my clothes, including my fleece, were completely soaked. This included the pair of socks I had spent all morning trying to dry out.
So was my spare pair of boxer shorts, like the other Ukrainians, I went commando for the rest of the race. The nice thing on the other side of the river, trying to wring out my clothes as fast as possible, was the eye candy. Not wanting to continue trekking in their wet bathing suits, several of the women were stripping them off in front of us and pulling on dry clothes. Ukrainians, like many Europeans, don’t think much about being nude. I didn’t mind this attitude at all.
I strapped my rain jacket to the outside to dry it and put on the fleece, figuring it would dry faster on me. Carrie offered to strap stuff to her pack, so I gave her my boxers and my once-again-wet socks.
Uphill we went from there, across a wide meadow covered in yellow flowers, past fields where people were planting their summer crops, tilling the earth with horse-drawn plows.
Horse-drawn plow
Group problems started then. There was some guy tagging along with our group, a man in his late thirties, his partner a girl in her early twenties. The girl was wearing only a sports bra and some short spandex shorts, a mistake she readily discovered when we started moving through thick underbrush. From her attitude, it was apparent she had gotten dragged onto this trip.
I never learned this guy’s name, so we’ll call him Mr. Moron. In booming Russian he started barking orders, and my whole group started doing what he was saying. Since I was beholden to the group, so did I. I hate group dynamics.
Into the woods...
This might not have been so bad had Mr. Moron known what he was doing. Instead, he turned out he really couldn’t read maps. He had us trail breaking through forest that turned into a bog, hiking through watery mud that quickly soaked my dry socks. He kept thinking something was wrong with his compass and kept asking to borrow mine. I could see on my map that there was a road not fifty meters south of us, one that led straight to the next checkpoint.
Trailbreaking
I pointed this out to Carrie, that we needed to head south until we hit the road, but neither of us wanted to leave the group, so we just pushed through the thick foliage, ducking branches and walking through stinging nettles and thorny berry bushes before the guy realized his mistake and we went down to the road we could have taken the entire time.
The guy with the beard is Mr. Moron. The butt belongs to his partner.
We were now at the orienteering section of the race, and were given maps so detailed we didn’t even need compasses, able to navigate by trails, roads and rivers instead. Ukrainian mentality came in then. Peace Corps volunteers have a hard time stopping their students from cheating, because Ukrainians don’t consider it “cheating”, they consider it helping each other and why shouldn’t they do that?
We had to find six spots and both write down a code spray painted to a tree, or punch cards with hole punchers at each spot. Rather then have each team go to all six spots, the Ukrainians decided that we should split into two groups, one team member in each group, with each group finding three spots. Since the team members would have collectively found six, this was determined to be okay.
Carrie and I just went along with it, as we found ourselves doing the entire race so as not to get split from people we needed to complete the race. Although Carrie’s group had less ground to cover, my group beat them back by 20 minutes. How? Well, of my group of three guys and two girls, one of the girls was the sports-bra and short spandex shorts girl. She was unable to keep up, so the guys decided she should just hide out of site, the other girl—Ira, a trooper whose shins were sliced up from going through the thorns and who was still pushing us to go faster—waited with her. We took their cards to punch them for them. Then, we ran.
I don’t know why we were running, but these two other guys—Vannya and Arteom—were big, strong, fit guys and felt we should make up lost time by running to the checkpoints. Not wanting to lag behind, I had to run full out to keep up with them, wondering how I was going to have any energy left after this.
We were slowed up at one point by a group of racers staring at a tree. It was the correct tree, as it had a marker on it, but no one could find the hole puncher. Three people were searching the muddy water under the tree. It became a bottle neck as more and more people reached the point, people searching for the hole puncher.
Trying to find the lost hole puncher
Finally, I took a digital picture of the tree to prove we had been there and we were off. Poor map skills came into play again, and Vannya and Arteom actually let me help them find the second marker, then let me take over as leader and lead them to the third. I was starting to feel better, that I was contributing and wasn’t simply following the Ukrainians around.
One of the orienteering markers
Once we picked up the girls and came back to the site and Carrie’s group finally returned, Mr. Moron took charge again and we all followed him.
Our next destination had us following a large river, the next checkpoint beyond a big bend in it. About a hundred meters from the bend, Mr. Moron stops and thinks we should turn around, that we missed the checkpoint. I try explaining in Russian that we haven’t reached it yet. Here is the bend on the map (not knowing the word for “bend”, I was reduced to motions), there is the bend in the river. It’s past that.
Lost at the river
Possibly because I sound like a five year-old in Russian, that’s how much respect I was given and they headed back. Carrie said she’d follow me rather then the group, so we went off towards the bend. Some of the group, still confused about where we were, followed us. Soon the whole group ended up following us and, lo and behold, beyond the river bend was the checkpoint. The hole puncher was at the top of a thirty foot tree. Rather then let each person do the challenge (and, dammit, I wanted to climb the tree), they decided to send one person up with all our cards.
Climbing the tree. Our guy is at the top, with six team cards around his neck
Admittedly it saved time, but it was cheating. Once again, I acquiesced to the will of the group. Despite being right, they still didn’t give me any respect. We were the Americans. For some reason, we needed to be taken care of.
This is not a new experience. In fact, it’s a mentality I’ve been dealing with since I’ve gotten here. We have it easier in America, they figure, we can’t possibly know how to survive in Ukraine. They're not patronizing about it; it's a genuine desire to help. But still, when you value independence and self-sufficiency, it grates on your nerves.
Anyway, things became uneventful from there, the group chewing up kilometers as we hiked on roads, through forests, through towns and through fields, passing kids playing soccer next to sleeping goats, past a guy carrying a scythe while riding a bicycle, past an old army base, rusting hulks of tanks on the other side of a barbed wire fence.
I call this one: Man on bike with scythe
We ended up on train tracks, feet killers, and Carrie’s knees started to hurt. A few kilometers later, she was limping.
On the train tracks
We hiked a few kilometers on blacktop, cars rushing by and kicking up dirt, clothes getting stripped off in the hot sun. I began rotating the clothes in my pack to the outside, letting them dry before moving the next item. It would have been nice to have a dry pair of socks at this point, but somewhere in the forest my boxers and one of my socks had fallen off of Carrie’s pack, lost forever.
It would have been better to just leave them hanging to dry in my bathroom.
Arteom asked us to sing an English song he learned in school: Old McDonald. Carrie and I obliged for a few verses, Arteom joining in for the only part he remembered: "E-I-E-I-O". We then launched into the other song most Ukrainians know: "Yesterday" by The Beatles.
We pushed on. Once again, we had map issues. The map showed the checkpoint being where the road (running on a ridge) met a stream. Mr. Moron decided that we should get off the road down the embankment, to be closer to where the stream would eventually be. But why not wait, I wondered, until we see the checkpoint so that we know what side of the road to go down on? The group followed him, so we followed the group. He picked the wrong side, of course, and after half-sliding on the muddy embankment through stingy nettles, we later found ourselves having to climb back up it, cross the road and slide down the other side.
There, we came upon our next challenge, and my final challenge before I gave up on the group. We had to cross back through the embankment by way of a concrete pipe, water up to our calves. We left our gear outside it, so no pictures of this debacle. After going through the muddy water, we found a message spray painted on the other side for us.
We were moving too fast for me to read the Ukrainian, but I did see “150 meters” and “30” degrees. Simple: take a bearing and go 30 degrees for 150 meters. I had left my compass in my pack, but it didn’t matter because the group was now trudging upstream through a small river, straight from the end of the pipe we had just came through. Trying not to loose them, I followed. This made no sense, as we were moving 90 degrees from the mouth of the pipe, and we needed to be going 30. I figured that they had read something on the wall and knew what they were doing.
I was wrong.
We waded up the river for about ten minutes before they decided to go to dry land. Carrie, who had come barefoot to keep her shoes dry, opted to go back to the bags and wait for us. She would wait for an hour.
These people, who had made me jog from orienteering spot to orienteering spot, were now slowly meandering in the woods, no one with a compass out, trying to spot a point I was sure we were nowhere near. I wanted to go back and take a bearing with a compass, but they kept walking, spreading out and stopping every minute to pick one of the hundreds of tiny, wild strawberries that were growing at our feet. Periodically, they’d ask one of the women picking these strawberries and putting them into glass jars if they knew where the checkpoint was. Each lady would send us in a different direction. Finally, we were out of the forest and at some train tracks, far more than 150 meters from the pipe, and they were still walking, looking around for the checkpoint. I stopped walking. We had been hiking, jogging, swimming and wading for seven hours. My feet had been wet the whole time. My legs were scratched up from where I had pulled up to wade, and then crossed onto dry land—following everyone else—through thorns and stinging nettles.
Arteom picking wild strawberries
My desire to keep going with this whole race was minimal. I was dependent on the group, but the group—much as I like and respect each of the members—didn’t know what it was doing. Finally, the sun slowly sinking and most of the race to go, they returned from their fruitless walk along the railroad tracks and I pulled aside Alla, one of the group members that I know better than the others. In Russian I told her: we need to go back and use a compass to go 30 degrees from the pipe. That’s what the instructions said. She agreed, called everyone together and we started walking back.
Along the way, we came across a man in a much-repaired gray suit watching his grazing goats. They asked him where to go and he pointed us in another direction. They went where he pointed. I wanted to kill them. We had been wandering around for nearly an hour on a challenge that shouldn’t have taken five minutes. My impotence to convince them of what we needed to do frustrated me. I told Alla I was going back to the pipe, and she said to just come with them, that they now knew the way.
They didn’t. We ended up along the embankment, several hundred meters north of the pipe. I don’t think they even knew what compass headings are because I tried explaining, with my arms, that we were at two or three degrees in relation to the pipe, and that 30 degrees was a wider diagonal from it. Instead the guys in the group kept running around, looking into old pipes and aqueducts for the checkpoint, figuring it had to be close, me wanting to yell “it’s nowhere near here!”
Then, ironically, they did find a checkpoint. It just happened to be the wrong one. Whichever checkpoint was 150 meters at a 30 degree angle into the forest must have pointed to this one. It was a tiny pipe that lead through the embankment. Once again, rather then all of us crawling through, they sent two guys with all our cards. We walked to the other side, and there found another challenge: a deep well, about twenty feet deep, that led to fast moving water. You had to climb down a rope, bracing yourself against the well walls, and then use the hole puncher that hung just over the water.
That’s what I love about Ukraine: whether it was climbing that twenty-five foot high tree with no protection or doing a challenge that would kill you if you slipped and fell into the water, personal safety gave way to cool challenges. You would simply never see this challenge in America without being in a harness and belayed from above. As is, it was an adrenaline rush.
They tried to take my card down for me, but I told them I wanted to do it. That’s the point of an adventure race: to actually do the challenges. I was sick of being babysat.
Going down the well
After I came back up, someone had gotten the code we were supposed to get from the missed checkpoint from another racer. Handing my card over, Alla wrote it on there. Cheating, cheating, cheating.
With all current checkpoints completed, we were given a new map. I thought we had been making decent time, but the new map showed otherwise. We had nearly two-thirds of the way to go and the sun was two hours from the horizon. Looking at the map, it was obvious that the cool parts: the rafting and rope challenges, were going to be near the end, to be done in the morning after the sun came back up. Between now and then were a lot of miles to be done in the dark. That was the part I had been dreading. I hate hiking on trails at night, even for an hour or two. I had never done it for an entire night, and wasn’t looking forward to it. Along with the new map came more instructions, all in Russian. Once again, we would have to be dependent on the group to get through the race.
Carrie and I took stock. She had rested for an hour and felt better energy wise, but her knees had stiffened up. I had spent an hour slogging around in wet tennis shoes with no socks, following people who wouldn’t listen to reason.
Could we keep going? Yes. Could we finish the race? Doubtful. Extrapolating our current progress, we’d finish the race a few hours past the 23.5 hour deadline. Also, Carrie said her knees couldn’t handle going all night. My feet, the skin soaked and shifting, were getting near to blister-formation. The next time we crossed a major road would be in the middle of the night. We were as close to Zhytomyr as we’d be for the rest of the race. If we were going to quit, now would be the time.
And you know, I felt no regret in quitting. The race had been fun, a lot of fun save for the periodic frustrations. I’d never done anything like that. Hiking and backpacking are usually relaxing. This had been balls-out for seven hours, going as fast as possible, the only break when we waited 20 minutes for Carrie’s group, and the odd three-minute breather now and then as we took bearings on maps. The pace, the challenges and the push-yourself mentality made for a really exciting day. Frankly, I’d like to do more multi-sport races, and I’m sad we missed on the ropes course and rafting portions of this one. What I’m not sad about is missing the all-night hiking, the feeling of absolute exhaustion that I knew would come over me about 3 AM, having been awake for more than 20 hours and needing to push on, that mindless slog that meant I would return home absolutely exhausted and physically torn up, which is not how I wanted to experience the Moby concert I was going to the next day.
Carrie and I calling it quits
Instead, Carrie and I had a fun day and then got to walk back to Zhytomyr, another five kilometers along the banks of a river, before we caught a marshrutka to a local pizzeria to order carryout to take back to my apartment.
The river we followed to Zhytomyr
We finished the night drinking the cold Pepsi, eating pizza and munching on popcorn, watching Family Guy on my laptop and periodically saying, “you know, it’s 10:00 PM and guess what we’re not doing? Hiking in the dark!”
And now, as I type this, it’s 1:30 in the morning and out there, right now, are a lot of people hiking in the dark. Oddly, that makes just sitting here quite an experience, a nice little pleasure that puts a smile on my face.