After the never ending stage from the day before, we were quite excited for a "short" day. Only 14.2 miles!?! That's a walk in the park... except for that 3,000ft gain in the first few miles.
Toby's ankle was still in poor shape, so based off of our performance from yesterday we came up with a game plan. Go hard in the beginning and try to put as much time into our competitors on the uphill, in hopes that they wouldn't catch us on the long downhill.
I had a blast using the tow to sling shot Toby over the water bars on our way up. As I would approach a steep section, I would go into an all out sprint that would stretch the bungee almost 15ft! This would be enough to give Toby a HUGE pull up and over each little incline.
This was working great until the bungee came untied from the caribeaners that we were using. I found it quite hilarious, Toby didn't. Probably because the bungee came undone and snapped back, hitting him square in the chest. We took that as a sign to give it a break. This was fine by me because we had reached the steepest part of the day. How steep you ask? Well, steep enough that the 4 wheel drive jeep that was supposed to take supplies to check point one, got stuck! It was kinda funny until we realized that there wouldn't be our normal buffet at the check point. No worries though because we were on a mission to destroy that uphill, so we kept motoring.
The views from the top were absolutely spectacular. By far some of the best I have ever seen!
After a long descent, we came to one of the most fun sections of the entire race. We crossed a couple of creeks, then just jumped right into one! That's right, we got to run down the creek! The cool water felt good on our sore feet as we splashed along the picturesk creek bed, smiling the whole time.
From the finish of the creek run, we had only 3 miles of dirt road to reach the tiny mountain town of Red Cliff. I was anticipating Toby's ankle to be slowing him up after being soaked in cold water for 20 or so minutes, but once again he surprised me. HE started pushing the pace. We both knew that there were several teams not far behind, so I followed his lead. At one point I stopped to dance for the camera guy (It's Peanut Butter Jelly Time!!!), and looked back to see 2 teams not more than 150 meters back! Finishing my dance up quickly, I sprinted back up to Toby and let him know that we had to keep pushing if we were going to hold them off. We crossed the line in 9th and were quite pleased with our performance for the day.
After the race it was the usual routine. Back to camp, eat, ice the legs in the creek, eat, shower up, eat, get a massage, eat, hang out, eat, meet a few more great people, and finally eat! One of the fun things we found to do today between all the eating was walking the slack line. One of the Saloman guys set it up between the trucks, so we played on that for a while.
It was early to bed as usual (9:30-10ish) because we had what would end up being one of the hardest stages of the entire race the next day. I was so excited!!!
