Running TSDs

It’s 11:38AM Day #2 and we completed our third TSD an hour ago. We have 5 hours to get close to 300 miles to the next TSD and that is not enough time. Over the radio right now, we are listening to the organizers discuss how they planned the event in much better conditions. We are driving over snow and ice and it’s raining, so it’s sliding all over the road and Josh has to drive carefully. He is seriously focused as I write this and I have a feeling tonight, we’ll both be exhausted as we have over 620.53 today with 2 TSDs scheduled. But we aren’t alone. There are about six of us rally cars driving in a line together, with one of the “sweep” trucks in the rear. The “sweeps” are the trucks that make sure no one is straggling and have the gear to pull us out if we get into trouble. We are carrying similar gear ourselves.

It turned out my spreadsheets to calculate rally times actually caught three mistakes in the official Alcan rally guide so far. They mistakes for today were announce about 90 minutes before the start time this morning and I don’t think everyone was able to adjust their checkpoint times but I already had them. Josh and I are feeling like these…

(Pause for now: He just told me to put the laptop away in case he has to slam the breaks and it goes flying.)

6:01PM – now Mountain Time. We made it through that scary icy portion. Josh said it was like driving on marbles for about 70 miles, trying not to let the truck slip sideways again. I took pictures of the road and turquoise frozen waterfalls. The last gas station between our 1^st TSD and 200 miles up the road lost power so no one could gas up and they wouldn’t let you use the bathroom. Josh pulled the gas can off the roof and filled us up so we could make it. I had to pee behind a snowbank. (Well, this blog just got candid, didn’t it?) The rally participants are predominantly male and everyone was congregated trying to calculate their gas mileage to the next state 150 miles away, so I had to hike out in the snow to find some privacy. I didn’t expect this to happen this early in the trip.

The roads cleared up and we were able to make up time, stopping at the Mile 0 Alcan sign, the beginning of the Alaskan Highway, and making it to the second TSD of Day #2 with minutes to spare. And the commentary on our group frequency is pretty hilarious. We always know the mile marker were the RCMP are lurking. “I see donut crumbs at mile 568.” There are even another pair of Southerners on the trip, who sign off, “Yeah, buddy!”

So, I started this post to write about TSDs. The first few days we have many of them, and then when we head up to Inuvik, we won’t be competing for a while…

This morning I woke up with a headache but after a coffee and the first TSD, that combo of caffeine and adrenaline cleared it right up. TSD sections are FUN. I could get into this. The numbers came back from yesterday and we still need to learn how to interpret them but we did hit a couple spots right on time.

We feel like we are getting more and more in sync with each run. I’m checking our times as we hit checkpoints and constantly calculating time and distance to make sure Josh is travelling at the right speed and telling him to “Go, go, go! Bump it up to 40mph!” Or, “Slow it down, we are two seconds fast.” He holds the car at an average speed and navigates, turns, ice and slush and oncoming vehicles. It’s like Mariocart without characters trying to knock you off the road or throwing turtles at you. Since cars leave one minute apart, the rule is “stay in your minute.” We had a little trouble with someone getting in our minute on Day #1 but asked them politely to cut it out. This last race, we came in within the second. Though that doesn’t matter, because they measure us from hidden spots along the race, so you really have to keep the average speed as consistent as possible.

We still have 216 miles to climb north tonight to the hotel. We heard about a “trucker food” restaurant up the way, where many of our new buddies are meeting up, and while I’m not sure what that means, I assume there will be a lot of meat of suspicious quality. Josh and I have been living on salami and crackers, beef jerky, apples, bananas, nuts and Girl Scout cookies. We got to the restaurant so late last night, they were out of food. Today, we have sandwiches with us in case it happens again.