Endeavor 2014 Final Day

Final Day events. Final Run / Battle Drill I tired of climbing back up the mattress to where my pillow remained. The mattress was my flattened dry sack and the second 10x10 tarp. My pillow was my dirty, stinky, well loved New Balance 1210's, Leadville specials. (someday...but that's another story, another year). I climbed back up the slope one more time, found my head lamp and commenced to make some breakfast. I had beef stew MRE, Jack found a Chicken Pesto Pasta. We heated up the entrees as best we could as we cleaned up camp, dismantled out lean too, switched the SPOT3 tracker over to our water bladder pack, and generally made ready for The Final Run. This year the final run was to be uphill for the most part. That did not worry us. What worried us, (by us I mean me. For the most part Jack does not worry...he just 'does') was the quality and capability of my feet. I checked my moleskin and duct tape. I doubled up on my Balega socks. I laced up my pillows. I relished in the fact we would not be carrying our backpacks, although they weighed a heck of a lot less this morning. We gathered at the staging area with all the remaining teams. They gave the Final Run briefing, follow the yellow ribbons, cross the single rope bridge at Utica, continue up to Alpine. 14 miles +/-. We would leave in :10 minutes. "Oh yeah, here is the team standings as of the end of Night Nav." We pretended the standing didn't mean anything to us. Jack did not make a move toward the truck, where the results were taped. I sort of eased my way over. When the crowd shifted just right, I was able to glance over a guys shoulder and saw EDNEY at the top of the list. Inside I did a fist pump and grinned SUPER big. Outside I just nodded and looked over at Jack and pointed one finger at him. After the first rush of people eased up, Jack went down to take a look. When Jack takes a look at a chart with numbers on it he starts adding things up. He can look at it once and mostly remember what he saw. He did some quick math and realized we were in pretty good shape, point wise, against our nearest realized competitors, team 1 (last years winners), and the Stanford guys. He / we didn't look too much further down the list. I saw my friend Brett, last years 3rd place team, was in 7th. Holding to the common belief that no 'new' team would come in and win, we felt we were sitting in a pretty good position. All we had to do was finish in top 8-10 place in the Final Run, and do well in Battle Drill and we would probably stay in #1 position. Probably.....Common belief be damned.... We set out at our most efficient (ie. pain free) pace. A bit slower than the Crucible pace, but then we didn't have a pack on, or bricks. But then we didn't have over 43 miles on our knees and blistered soles yesterday... We let the racers go. We let the plodders go. We let everyone that wanted to, go. We eased on down the road. The first 3-4 miles were relatively flat. We figured we would catch anybody we could on the hill. (a 10 mile hill). Team 1 passed us about 1.5 miles out. They were walking. They have a fast walk. They swing their arms. We remembered to swing our arms. It helps. We guessed where the Stanford guys would be about now. We figured they were crossing the rope bridge at Utica. We were wrong. They passed us a minute or two later. They said they were stating off slowly this morning. Took a while to warm up. Yeah, us too. We were yo-yoing with a couple of other teams along the road to Utica. They beat us to the single rope bridge. When we saw the single rope bridge and saw the other teams starting to disrobe and unlace their shoes for the crossing, we splashed right on past them and commenced to get wet. The Single rope bridge was a 5/8 inch rope draped across about 80 feet of water. No way to stay dry. Plus my feet didn't hurt when they were floating across the lake... We passed 2-3 teams. We were wet but were were going to get wet again. Two more streams to cross. If they tried to stay dry at each of those crossings also, we wouldn't be seeing them again. soon. We pressed on. We Endeavored. Only one or two teams passed us the rest of the run. We caught and passed 3 or more teams on the hill, they took off too fast. To quote Micah True, El Caballo Blanco, "Start slow and see what happens.." We made it to Lake Alpine, in 9th position. Not exactly where we wanted to be but better than 10th.... Thus endeth the Final Run. Now let the fun begin at the Battle Drill. Another 'strength' event. Team 1 finished Final Run third Stanford guys finished second Unbeknownst to us unknown team 21 finished in first. (That made a difference...) they rocked it!