AuSable River Canoe Marathon Feeder Recap 2014

Smiling! The last feed!

The AuSable River Canoe Marathon is done for another year and we had a great time of it. My husband Tim and his partner PO placed 15th, out of 83 teams. It was a long and grueling night and the boys finished happy. The feeders went from panic to elation every 2 hours and also finished happy. The 120-mile race is considered America's toughest, richest canoe race and referred to as "The World's Toughest Spectator Race.”

9 p.m. - The start: A double rainbow dawns as the teams line up to start. They line up in the street and must sprint, carrying their boats on their shoulders, to the river and put in. Hearing and watching over 160 athletes and their boats thundering through the streets is amazing and fearsome. The put-in at the river is mass chaos with its usual tip-overs and boat-over-boat action.

But then there's the feeders. In a few short minutes, we have to navigate our cars through a mass put-in on M-72 with streams of taillights as far as the eye can see. All with one eye on the road and the other on the clock. If we pick the wrong road to leave town on (there are a multitude to pick from, all of which dump out on M-72) it means we get to the first feed in good shape or all-out panic. They may have a 15-hour paddle ahead of them but we have to navigate the 10,000 fans, in the dark, every 2 hours, starting now.

11 p.m. – First Feed: All the tension from the start line is gone. In its place is a huge weight on our shoulders. If we can pull off this first feed smoothly, we will be handed our confidence for the night, powerhouses on the river in wet shorts and yellow tees. If we flub it up, the night becomes a catch-up game of second-guessing.

We scramble down the grassy steep side of a bridge, muck our way into the river, out around a deadfall in the water and hand them bottles of drink and a container of food and pain pills while a crowd roars above us on the bridge. It’s clean. They are on their way, in 15^th position. We high five and skip back to the car.

1 a.m. – Nap Time: We are so confident after one successful feed, we break the rules. We are going to attempt sleep. Unheard of at this point in the night. We are still high from the adrenaline of the start, but I set the alarm for 20 minutes. We have an hour to sleep if we were really brassy. We aren’t.

We are parked where there is no light. It’s completely dark. Very few other feeders have arrived at the second feed yet, we are that on the ball tonight. The stars are out. I see a shooting star. It’s gorgeous.

We recline our seats 1 inch, the only space available against the coolers in the backseat. We close our eyes. I’m in the driver’s seat and Anais (PO’s girlfriend) is in the passenger’s seat.

Complete, precious darkness envelopes the car. Silence. Peace. Quiet.

“I am in heaven,” I say quiet in the dark.

“It’s amazing,” Anais croons from her shotgun seat.

“It’s better than I could have imagined,” I say.

“I could do this all night long,” she sighs.

A stillness comes into the car.

“Wait,” I say, quieter yet. “Are we still talking about sleep here?”

And the giggles begin. For the remaining 19 minutes, we make explicit and implicit comments. We laugh until we have tears in our eyes. Other feeders start to show up and before we know it, it’s time to go. While we didn’t rest, the nap was a complete success. Spirits are high and we’ve taken our relationship to a new level.

7 a.m. – The Banana Situation: It’s daybreak. It will be our 5^th feed. While we wait to do our feed, standing in the water, we watch another feed team freak out. They are on walkie-talkies. One at the top of the dam, the other at the bottom with us. They are having their own polite but terse debate over what they should feed the team. They end the conversation with, “Let’s discuss the Banana Situation later.”

Anais and I look at each other. We can’t help laughing. Only here would a Banana Situation be apropos.

This feed gets a little hairy. Our team shoots past us at the put-in after the portage and we end up feeding in deep water, throwing shirts, water bottles and curses. It’s a bad scene. But as they paddle away, we note that they have their fresh shirts on, sorta, Tim has fished his bottle out of the water and put it in the boat and they are, once again, paddling downstream. It wasn’t pretty but we classify it a success. We wait until we get to the car to freak out on the near-miss.

The night wears on from there. We end up in a polite but terse debate with a parking guard over what exactly is “double parking.” We can not and will not be waylaid by a man with a glowing baton who thinks I can make it through a ditch in my little car loaded to the gills with Perpetuem and Hammer Gel. I leave the field with dirt and grass wedged in the hitch receiver. We later refer to it as the "Parking Situation."

There are more stories shared and witnessed. We have a night of panic and celebration and finally, we are done with our last feed, eight in all.

Noon - The Finish. We spread out a blanket and wait for them to arrive. Anais is on her 4^th dry outfit, I’ve given up and am trying to dry in the sun. We tried a total of three 20-minute naps all night. We think we actually got 8 minutes worth.

When they arrive, there is jubilation. Very quietly, though. They are hurting and tired. We carefully hug them, watchful of the wear points on their bottoms and hips and hands. We give them fresh clothes and half a sandwich. We give back rubs and ask how it all went on the river. They’ve paddled 15 hours and 39 minutes and some 500,000 paddle strokes.

But all the while, we are very barely containing the feeder stories we have to share. Enough about their marathon, we are waiting to tell them what we saw and did in the crazy, long night… and another year of rehash and war wounds begins!

Marathon Feeders: Signs that you're a lifer

A 120-mile canoe marathon is virtually unheard of by most normal people. But I’ve got a bunch of friends who do something that’s one step closer to crazy – we are the marathon “feeders.”

We feel nothing.

As our team paddles through the night, we wade into the river every two hours and give them fresh food and drink. This means entering the river in the blinding dark with flashing red lights. This means scrambling down the backside of a dam to meet them with a fresh shirt and paddle. This means finding two tracks that lead to a tiny slice of river in the middle of a Michigan night to “check on them.” (At which time, they will flat-out ignore us or shout something unintelligible.)

And after you’ve done it for 10 years, something scary happens. You become a veteran.

First off, you do not want to become a veteran. Everyone will ask you for advice and expect answers. Good ones even. You will be asked to give directions and, horrors, sketch maps for them. You will be expected to know the remedy for everything from nausea to concussions. And, in a shocking discovery, you’ll realize you do. This is when you know you’ve come too far, you’re in too deep. You might be a lifer.

Signs that you are a lifer:

You feel no weather. 

Just a few days ago, I was trading war stories with another feeder. It was only her second marathon. She mentioned the fact that last year’s marathon was so, so cold. The conversation slammed to a halt.

“Cold?” I asked.

“Freezing!” she said.

I grabbed her arm. “Ohmygod, I don’t remember it being cold at all.”

“At all?” she whispered.

“At all,” I whispered back.

Diagnosis final. With robotic precision, I gather, I marched into the river, withstood its subzero temps, delivered the goods and marched back out. I mixed bottles and chopped fruit and pro-offered paddles. I drove back roads and forged rivers. I served with militant focus, repelling precipitation and barometer readings wherever I went.

If I were pressed, I might remember enjoying taking off my cold shoes after the last feed. But overall, I remember feeling neither warm nor cold, wet nor dry. Like veterans everywhere, I had forgotten the pain of childbirth.

You need no sleep.

For the first few years of feeding, your biggest concern is not your team. Your biggest concern is you and your lack of shut-eye. You haven’t pulled an all-nighter since college and, then, booze was involved. This will be a sober endeavor, complete with responsibilities and motor vehicle operation.

With any luck, for the first few years, your team is slow. This means your feeds will be well spaced-out, allotting a few minutes of rest between each feed. These are the golden years. Enjoy them. You are not rushing to each feed, you are only hoping your team will make the cut-off time.

But each year your team will gain speed and, in direct correlation, you will lose sleep. As the years pass, you reason that all you really need is 20 minutes of sleep to survive.

It usually happens at Alcona dam, just after daybreak. You will be so desperate and done at this point that you will knowingly risk the livelihood of your team as you recline your car seat ever so slightly.

You will set 5 alarms in the car for fear of oversleeping. You will ask another 5 feeders to come get you in 20 minutes. You will then close your eyes and have one pounding minute of deep, surreal, gorgeous sleep… before jerking awake at a moth landing on the windshield of a car two doors down. You will go into a full-blown panic before realizing you have 19 more minutes to sleep. You will repeat this 18 more times.

By year 10, well into your veteran years, you will realize it’s just easier to stay the hell awake.

You need no food.

You pack enough for dinner, breakfast and lunch, in that order. You also pack a late-night snack and a late-late-night snack. (You also count out enough drinks for a 15-hour stint in the car. But in the end, you will drink almost nothing. After one trip into the backwoods with Kleenex, you are determined to dehydrate for the rest of the event.)

At first you try to eat. You want to be in tip-top shape for the job at hand. But as the night wears on, you realize you have no appetite (robbed at each feed when things teeter between going very right and very wrong at every second). By 3 in the morning, you reason that you would never eat at 3 in the morning on a normal night, so why now? By 7 a.m., you force half a banana down. By 9 a.m., you realize you’re well on your way to the longest dieting stretch you’ve ever had. If you can tough it out another 6 hours, you’ve got the makings of a scale-detectable weight loss. Your appetite disappears altogether.

When your team finishes, it’s about 2 p.m. on Sunday. You come out of your stupor and realize the sun is shining, you’re starving and you would kill a man to sleep in his bed at that very instant.

But you hang on. It’s still another hour before the hotel check-in. You order a pizza. You sit in the parking lot of the hotel and you very, very slightly recline your seat. You wait for the pizza man. One more feed to go. Like a true veteran, you will not rest until the last job is done.

AuSable Marathon - HUP all night

It's July... time for a canoe marathon! Here's a piece I wrote for Traverse Magazine a few years ago about the AuSable Marathon - I love how the year we did this, the very first stop involved a major repair and fire. The story wrote itself!

Here it is: I hope you enjoy!
AuSable Marathon - HUP all night, Traverse Magazine

If you like this article, here's a first-person account of being a feeder I wrote too!

My Teddy Bear: Letting the kids sleep in my room

My Teddy Bears

It’s happened again. Somehow the boys have started sleeping in our room like the old days. When they were much littler, they slept in bed with us when they were scared and they brought in their teddy bears with them. Now, they’re on the floor next to the bed. One on each side. It started as a sleepover one night after a scary movie and expanded from there.

It initially involved nothing more than a blanket and a pillow. Sacked out, just one night, sleep tight.

But a lightning storm arrived the very next evening, and they begged for the safety of our room again. On the second night, I couldn’t bear to see them sleep on the hard floor. So I built them a little bed out of couch cushions. I threw a sheet on and fluffed their pillows and tucked their comforters in around them, admiring my makeshift handiwork. The dog tried to lie on it and I shooed her off. It might look like a dog bed, I told her, but it’s for my petrified children.

The next day, it happened that we got home very, very late. They begged to stay another night. How could I argue? I was half asleep already, waving to them from over the edge of the bed. Much easier to close my eyes than to walk the length of the house later tonight after falling asleep next to them in their beds.

The next day, I found myself in an aisle at Target considering the pros and cons of traditional inflatable mattresses and the new-fangled three-foot high ones. Wouldn’t the boys just love these? Five-percent-off later, I had purchased them. Five hours later, I was blowing them up in my bedroom as a surprise.

“What are you doing?” This from my husband, booming through the bedroom door.

“They’re for camping. But we can try them out in here tonight.” I pushed a new 10-person tent across the floor to him. “Look, it was on clearance.”
He did not look.

"Ten? There's four of us."

"I know, roomy!" I could not be deterred.

“We have a camper.”

“But we always say we are going to take them tenting!” I was indignant over the whirl of the automatic mattress-blower-upper I’d also purchased.

“You’ll never sleep on a tent floor,” he said.

“Not with these I won’t!” I triumphantly bounced my hand off the towering tippy gray mattresses that stunk the room up with fresh plastic.

It was clear the investment in the mattresses would result in a few more nights camping out in our room. The tent stayed in quiet accusation where it was, in its package, on the floor.

A week in, Tim laid down the law. He unplugged the mattresses, which the kids loved (did I not call it?), and deflated our cozy one-room-house dreams.

“Out!” he said. “Why do we have a bedroom for you kids if no one uses it?”

“The bird uses it,” Nelson replied.

“The hermit crab does too,” Kendall added.

The eviction lasted two weeks, max. Soon enough, a new terror came on the scene. This time it was a “Dog Man” reference made on a late, late nighttime walk in the woods behind the house.

“Can I be your teddy bear tonight, Mom?” Nelson asked.

“You most certainly can,” I said. I did not look Tim in the eye and I did not bother to inflate the mattress this time either. There is no way I am giving up sleeping with a teddy bear, no matter how old I am.