Endless Everything
A first-time expedition racer's reflection on the race that just wouldn't quit.
Survive. That was my number one goal of my first ever expedition race. Number two? Try not to slow my teammates down too much. Number three? Well, if the first two goals weren’t enough, I guess I’d try to have some fun while I was at it.
When I told people I was going to compete in the Endless Mountains Adventure Race, a 7-day, 500-mile race across Vermont, the reaction was usually the same, “What?? Why? How?” While the answer to the “why” is personal, I think most adventure racers can agree that it has something to do with an innate desire to see what our bodies are capable of, to push ourselves past preconceived boundaries and to be able to stand at a finish line and say, “I did that.” For me, the itch to achieve this began in 2020 when, stuck in the middle of a pandemic, I watched the reboot series of Eco-Challenge and found myself mesmerized by the ironclad determination and badassness of the athletes racing their way across Fiji. And while shaking my head saying, “these people are crazy”, I was simultaneously thinking, I want to do that.
Five years later, I found myself facing down the consequences of that desire. But unlike most people dipping their toes into expedition racing for the first time with the goal of simply finishing, I was in a somewhat unique position of embarking upon this adventure alongside some of the most experienced racers in the country: Glen Lewis, Kate White and Jason Urckfitz - and joining the ranks of Team Strong Machine meant we weren’t just trying to finish, but we were trying to finish well.
Which brings me to the “how?” And to be honest, this was a question I struggled with right up to the start. “I guess I’ll just put one foot in front of the other,” I’d tell people. But on more than one occasion, as the days ticked down, I’d find myself staring into the mirror thinking, what have I done? Underneath what I hoped was a calm, cool and confident exterior, was actually a festering case of imposter syndrome. While I knew that I desperately wanted to complete an expedition race, my longest race to date was 30 hours and it was a whole different question as to whether I actually could complete a seven day race. Not only that, but as the newest member of Strong Machine, a self-proclaimed people-pleaser and competitive to a fault, I was also imposing a near crippling amount of pressure on myself to ensure I did not disappoint my teammates (see race goal #2).
My worries, it turned out, were completely unwarranted. While I may have been diving into the deep end of expedition racing, I had a distinct advantage many newcomers don't: being able to access my teammates’ decades’ worth of combined knowledge on what to do, or perhaps more importantly, what not to do. From answering my never ending questions about the best gear, to sharing the uncensored details of all the “fun” things my body may experience, to meticulously outlining packing strategies, I felt like I had stumbled across a cheat code that had rocketed me straight to the adventure racing “boss level”. It was with this realization that I knew the answer to how I would survive this race: my team.
Part I: Ascent
It was 4:45 AM Saturday morning of race day and Kate and I had just rolled out of our XL twin beds in our shared dorm room. Wracked with excitement and nerves I began pulling on my race clothes that I had so meticulously selected days before, when all of a sudden my heart sank to my stomach, “Oh my god,” I said aloud, “I packed all my sports bras in my gear bins and didn’t keep one for today”. Without hesitation, Kate said, “I’ve got an extra” and quite literally peeled the bra off her own back and handed it to me, “but take this one, it’s stretchier”.
There is perhaps no better example of what it means to be an adventure racing teammate than this: always ready to problem solve and always ready to put yourself in a little more discomfort for the greater good of the team. While I was grateful I didn’t have to come up with a creative solution to this embarrassing oversight, I was even more grateful for the levity the situation brought, if this was how we handled a pre-race misstep, I knew we could handle anything the course threw at us.
And boy, did it throw it at us. The course was a beautiful monster: 500 miles and roughly 50,000 feet of elevation gain - over three times the length of the entire state and higher than Mt. Everest. The moment I saw the race schematic, I had to completely recalibrate my brain. This wasn’t about hours; it was about days. Seeing bike mileage in the 80s and 90s and trekking stages in the 20s and 30s would have given me a panic attack if I wasn't already laughing at the sheer absurdity of it. Not only that, but knowing that I was racing with a team that had their eyes on a potential top five finish, it was quite possible we would cover all 500 of those miles… if not more. It was time to buckle up, because I was in it for the long haul.
Remarkably, as we set off from the start line, the first sensation I felt was relief. Finally, after months of training and hours of fretting over gear, I had done everything I possibly could to prepare and the only thing left to do was race. For seven days, I would indulge myself in the simple task of moving forward. There would be no emails to check, errands to run or texts to respond to. A freedom, I realized, that I likely had never experienced in my adult life. As we moved throughout the course, this was a thought I’d often come back to, I have literally nothing else to do today, but this. And thank goodness for that fact, as I soon realized that continuing to put one foot/pedal/paddle in front of the other while also hydrating and consuming enough calories was, in fact, challenge enough.
It didn’t take long before we fell into a rhythm. Jogging when trails allowed for it, grumbling about tricky checkpoints, and comfortable silences occasionally punctuated by nettle-induced yelps of pain. The intermittent “foot care” stops we had decided to implement every five hours quickly became my go-to technique for marking the passage of time, and I began to warily track the status of some growing hot spots on the bottoms of my heels.
As deep night shifted to the early, still-dark hours of the morning, the heavens suddenly unleashed upon us and we were treated to an ill-timed thunderstorm just as we were about to transition to packrafting on a reservoir. Fortunately, we had opted for an unconventional route to the water (i.e. we were the only team to choose this option) and had come across a small beachside pavilion with a nice patio and protective overhang where we were able to prep our boats and wait out the storm for a bit. Once we were fairly sure our race wouldn’t be cut short by an inopportune electrocution, we began dragging the boats towards the water’s edge. As we descended to the shoreline, I looked over at one of the small boathouses and gave a shout of surprise as I saw the sign posted on the building: Mountain Top Resort. Totally unknowing, we had stumbled across and taken shelter at the exact venue where my cousin would be married in three week’s time.
My first surge of self-doubt came on the paddle. Somehow, in all my months of training, I had managed to totally forgo paddle training, or more specifically, paddle technique training. As Kate and Glen started to slip by Jay and I in their raft, I quickly realized that the brute strength I had relied on in past races wasn’t going to cut it here. I sheepishly mentioned to Jay that if he had any paddle tips, I’d gladly take them. A few instructions later, he had my stroke transformed and we were suddenly back, gliding easily alongside our teammates. My self-doubt had been short-lived, but it was a quiet harbinger of the chaos that the next day would bring.
With the hurdle of the first sleepless night behind us, day two was looking promising, until a series of unfortunate events had us making three separate appearances in Transition Area 1 before we were finally able to embark upon the first bike stage. While I know my teammates expressed frustration with themselves at some of these missteps, I was inwardly relieved to realize that even after years of racing, things will still go wrong. Tires will sometimes go flat, passports will occasionally be forgotten, but this is what makes adventure racing great, you never know what other teams are experiencing and how you choose to move past these moments is what can define a race. Not to mention, they make for better stories.
Hours ticked by and as we passed the threshold of The Longest Kara Has Ever Raced, I felt a surge of pride. I was really doing this. While my body certainly felt tired, there was not a single cell in me that wanted to stop. I was becoming comfortable with the discomfort, the incessant drive to keep moving, and the satisfaction of slowly dismantling this course.
The first bike leg eventually turned into an embedded overnight trek, and with it came our first sleep. From the moment the race started, Glen had been promising that this would be the best sleep of my life. Spoiler, it was not. In fact, curled up in nothing but an emergency bivy, using my damp clothes as the only cushion between me and the hard slats of a dilapidated camping shelter, I am not convinced that I slept at all. But when the kitchen timer finally rang to signal the end of our three hour rest, I couldn’t help but feel a wave of camaraderie and adrenaline as we began rapidly re-donning our gear and packing up, I had checked a milestone off the list, now it was time to get back to work.
While the total miles covered increased, so did the heat. Consuming enough salt and water became a full-time job and the occasional stops to filter and refill our bladders became a guilty pleasure as we indulged in a few minutes respite from the constant forward trudge. And just as the temperature increased, so did my awe of the three people around me. The quiet determination with which each of my teammates moved through this course was inspiring, there was never a question of if we would continue on, just how. Sure, there was plenty of grumbling and complaining from everyone about the various aches and pains or race course annoyances, but never an inkling of a desire to quit. Whether they realized it or not, this tacit commitment was a more powerful motivator than any pep talk I’ve ever received.
Part II: Plateau
It was towards the midpoint of the race, as days and nights started to blur together, that I found myself truly embracing the aspects of expedition racing that had never been possible in shorter races: being able to change clothes between stages, cold soaking a bag of ramen for a late night snack, the hunt for the perfect sleep location, stopping at a gas station to gorge ourselves on breakfast sandwiches or popsicles, and long uninterrupted sections of trekking or paddling where I found myself discussing everything from my career to kids. While it always felt like we were chasing a finish line, I also felt like I was chasing a transformation, a version of myself that could not only say, I did it, but would have the confidence in the future to always say, I can do it.
And while I’d love to say I was able to ride those highs for the entirety of the race, there were undoubtedly the moments where I found myself chasing off the lows. More often than not, these came during the never-ending technical mountain biking trails where I’d find myself bouncing over roots and maneuvering tight corners for the hundredth time too many. And with every descending hairpin turn (my personal kryptonite) that I’d sheepishly dismount to walk around, it was no surprise that I also felt my morale plummet and the panic rise as the thought that I might reveal myself as an adventure racing fraud would grip my heart tighter. In these moments of desperation I’d call out, “I need more information!” While I thought this was a composed way to indicate I wanted to know how much farther we had to go, I suspect my teammates could see through this façade to the underlying truth, I’m going to burst into tears if this hellscape lasts much longer.
And then there was the physical toll. Days of brutal conditions were starting to add up and I found myself falling deeper into a mental hole of fear around all the things that could go wrong with my body. Mystery hip pain plagued me one morning and gave me visions of having to drop out from being unable to walk. Excruciating lower back pain on the bike had me begging the team to stop so I could gulp down some ibuprofen. Minor annoyances of tongue sores and the pinpricks of heat fungus on my back popped up occasionally, seemingly just to give me something else to think about. However, it was the pesky hot spots on my feet that had turned into full blown blisters (and maybe even blisters under the blisters) that gave me the most concern.
Every day I’d pillage the med kit in an attempt to find some relief for the growing wounds on my feet, my internal fears eventually started to bubble over and I found myself incessantly lamenting the dwindling supply of bandaids to my teammates. Things really came to a head when we awoke from a fitful mountaintop sleep where we had chosen to rest in a bed of pine needles. Pulling my feet out of my bivy I was appalled to see one had become red and swollen. Surely, I had contracted some terrible infection and my racing dreams were about to come crashing down around me. As I battled with how to share this news though, I became loosely aware of the comedy central-style roast taking place next to me as Glen mercilessly berated Jay about the military-level precision with which he was folding up his bivy sack to then only stuff it in its… stuff sack. I couldn’t help but feel the worries start to melt away and find myself breaking into laughter as Jay stoically continued his work and admirably ignored Glen’s digs. But it was when Jay, unperturbed by the peanut gallery around him, looked over at my feet and quietly put my concerns to rest, “that’s just heat rash, you’ll be ok.” that the weight finally lifted from my shoulders.
And just like that, my teammates knew how to get me through. Beyond reassuring me that what I was feeling and experiencing was normal, they never hesitated to shoulder a little extra when I hit a particularly low moment: Glen towing me for a stretch on the bike, Kate taking my pack, and Jay - bearing the “punch monkey” burden - bounding off to punch each checkpoint uncomplaining while I silently savored those extra moments of rest.
I can only hope that I was able to provide a fraction of this support back to them. While my novice navigational skills were largely unhelpful and my foot condition limited the amount of physical assistance I could give, the one thing I had promised myself I would always contribute was a steady enthusiasm and a deep appreciation of being there. Even in those low moments, I would remind myself, how lucky am I? To be doing these things in these beautiful places? To be adventuring with these incredible people I admire? Maybe a positive attitude is cliché, but in a race that seemed hell-bent on crushing our souls, I like to think it made a difference.
Part III: Descent
For so long, I had forbidden myself from envisioning the finish line. There were too many miles, too many hills and too many unknowns between us and that goal, and it had become my personal philosophy to simply focus on the stage at hand. But somewhere around the final 30 hour mark - that shifted. While I had always known we were in a race, the previous five days of methodically collecting every checkpoint had put us high in the standings, but left us bringing up the rear and as a result, there was a diminished sense of urgency. That is, until we learned that two of the top teams in front of us had dropped out due to medical issues and suddenly we found ourselves sitting in third place with a podium spot to defend and… we were in a race.
From that moment, it seemed like everything shifted into overdrive. Our final sleep was behind us, but we still had so much ground to cover. For five hours we endured a relentless bike climb up to a ski resort, for the next several we forced our way across the sweltering face of the overgrown ski trails to capture a few more points by foot, and then back to the bikes to begin what we soon discovered, thanks to a canceled paddle stage, would end up being a century ride to the final trek.
And just like a car that’s being pushed to it’s limits, it was in these final stages that it felt like the wheels finally started to come off. After 6 days and roughly only 12 hours of sleep, the sleep deprivation was becoming impossible to ignore. Whizzing down mountain roads, I’d find myself slapping my face or shouting nonsense in an attempt to not pass out. The names of the people I’d spent the past 130 hours with suddenly became too difficult to recall and I started to feel an eerie sensation that we were traveling in a group of five people, not just four. At one point, it became too much and the team decided to take 5 minutes, just 5 minutes, to close our eyes on the side of the road. To our surprise, this proved such an effective technique at staving off the dangerous fatigue that we employed it several more times throughout the day. Although, after the fact, Kate did sheepishly admit that she’d actually been setting the timer for six minutes rather than five…
As the hours ticked down and thoughts of a shower and sleep in a real bed began to inch into our thoughts, I couldn’t help but think of what it had taken to reach this point. For nearly seven days, Glen had expertly navigated us through thick forests and tangled trails, with the occasional assistance from Kate and Jason when the navigation grew especially tricky. Watching them tackle a difficult checkpoint together was like witnessing an improvised dance, each movement deliberate, but when one partner seemed to falter, the next would step in, offering just enough assurance to keep the routine flowing. As I fought my own battles in the quiet corners of my mind, I couldn’t fathom the mental endurance it took to keep the whole team pointed in the right direction for days and night on end.
Yet even in it’s final hours, this race would not let up. What should have been an easy final ride across the Champlain Islands and the Colchester Causeway, turned into the bike leg of nightmares as darkness descended, rain started to fall and we were faced with near 40 mph headwinds. Despite pedaling with all our strength on a flat gravel trail, we were barely able to top 7 mph. The only respite came from a two minute boat ride to ferry us across a gap in the causeway. With ocean-like waves crashing around us and our voices lost in the wind, we put our faith in Captain Wick who, best described as a smiley Thor dressed head to toe in rain gear, promised us his boat was built to handle this weather and he’d steer us safely across. And just when I thought the torture would never end, we rolled into the final transition area. For the last time, we deposited our bikes with volunteers and with just under three hours remaining, we set off on foot for the final eight miles.
To be honest, I’m not entirely certain what happened in those eight miles. The final trek was an urban orienteering stage, leading us from Burlington to the finish line through local parks, streets and trails. At least I think that’s what it was, as it devolved quickly for me in what I can only assume was a result of having barely slept the last week…
As we set off in search of the first few points in a nearby park, I told Kate with absolute conviction, “I’ve been here before! There’s a tower up there and the trails continue on ahead.” I had, in fact, never been there before. Nor any of the locations that we visited that night, but in my strange, sleep-starved haze, I was gripped by what can only be described as the most intense déjà vu of my life. The landscape felt uncannily familiar: every rock scramble, every bridge, every curve in the trail replayed from some impossible memory. I moved with misplaced certainty toward checkpoints I was sure I’d “seen” before. To make matters worse, the previous grueling bike leg had left me with the parting gift of a stabbing knee pain that worsened with every mile, triggering a mild panic attack as I feared I wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to get us to the finish in time. But just as they had throughout the rest of the course, with a calming word, an extra hand, and steadfast navigation, my team pulled me through this final hurdle.
And then, just like that, after 161 hours of relentless motion - through searing heat, pounding thunderstorms, and hurricane winds; past throbbing blisters, burning saddle sores, and bone deep exhaustion; over hills that never ceased and rivers that ran too shallow - we crossed the finish line with 19 minutes to spare. My first expedition race complete, and we had earned a spot on the podium.
Part IV: Horizon
“They’re not all this hard,” was the refrain I heard again and again from seasoned racers throughout this race. Reassuring, yes, as this was undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve done in my life, but I would not have wanted my first expedition to be any other way. Crossing the finish line, the voices of self-doubt finally fell silent, replaced by a quiet certainty: I can do this. I am fiercely proud of what we accomplished as a team and of my own growth as an adventure racer, learning not only to endure the hardest moments, but to trust that I belong out there and have what it takes to keep up. And while there is still so much more to learn, so many ways I want to grow and to support my team, I’ll carry this hard-won confidence forward, in racing and far beyond the trail. Even the ordinary struggles of life seem smaller now, framed against the extraordinary ones I’ve already conquered.
Though the mountains eventually ended, my gratitude for everyone who took part in this journey will not. There were the teams we occasionally crossed paths with, whose shared struggles made the suffering feel lighter; the race staff, who crafted every detail of the adventure with care; the trail-mail fans, whose words from home nearly made me break my vow to not cry; and my family, who stayed awake into the early hours to welcome us across the finish line. But most of all: Kate, Glen, and Jason - for trusting a rookie to join them on this adventure, for sharing the laughs and struggles (and their superior camping meals), and for showing the way through every peak, valley, and impossible mile - I am endlessly grateful.
As for those goals I set at the start of this all? I think it’s safe to say I nailed the first two. And for the part about having fun? Well, let’s just say that whenever I tell people I raced 500 miles over seven days, the reaction is usually the same: “What?? Would you do it again?” My answer, without hesitation, is unequivocally: yes.
Just WOW! As if I wasn’t already in awe of you! Thank you for making me feel like I was right there on the sidelines! Well done !👏👏👏
Well done! Great race report! I hope you enjoyed our Doughnuts on day 2 :)