Team BendRacing by Jeremy Johnson
Meat vs Tide
(Guest column by the writing staff of Race to Alaska—who, for the record, are 100% ok about this sideshow being the main event. We’re totally fine writing about the WA360. Totally fine.)
June 13 2021
In the last 36-ish hours of the race since Thursday morning, we have witnessed a few things: winners done won, sailors done sailed, and the top three teams of the human-powered navy grunted their way into history books as the first fastest teams to finish the WA360 on meat-power alone. Sometimes glorious, sometimes gross, but impressive nonetheless.
Backing up: In the most boiled down kind of basic logic, as a boat race WA360 is a simple proposition: 360 miles of water vs a floating thing. The blue parts of the map are the constant; the winds and tides are the two variables that teams can either choose to harness, battle, or ignore. The ethos of the race is agnostic and hands-off, and as such it turns out we end up accidentally encouraging all three. Without guardrails, some people take it too far.
Pre-sliced bread, pre-stirred peanut butter, Amazon-ed anything—whatever the subject, unless there’s a good reason and/or gambling debt, humans predictably choose the laziest options. Entering a sailboat in the WA360 isn’t lazy, far from it (you don’t fall asleep to Netflix and accidentally wake up in an engineless boat race), but making the choice to disregard the free and often abundant energy of the wind is the dumbest/highest calling we’ve ever heard of. From what we gathered from teams BendRacing, Pacific Boys, and Boogie Barge’s 1-2-3 finishes, their collective pursuit of human-powered glory is at least a little bit of both—and we mean that in the most impressed way.
In reverse order, Team Boogie Barge’s 3rd place human powered finish (20th overall) was the most practical/least competitive program of all of the “meat forward” teams. By our estimation, their custom pedal-powered catamaran was a DIY lovechild that had twice the imagination and half the dedication necessary for a championship belt.
We talked to Team Boogie Barge on the four-hour churn to the finish line. Their crew of three were pedaling and sleeping in the same manic, two-hours-of-pedaling, one-hour-of-bad-sleep, “For Sparta!” energy that launched them into a race on a boat they were still building at midnight before the race.
Sure they were finished, but why do this at all? “It’s really fun to be relentless.” Other than the two-day work-cation they took to make sure their jobs would still be there when they returned to the real world, Team Boogie Barge hadn’t stopped churning water since they left Port Townsend when the green flag fell.
Why pedal power? “I kayak, but only like to paddle for 6 or 7 miles.” Plus there was math. Looking for a win, the humans on the Boogie Barge reckoned that they could pedal into the wind at 4.5 knots, a tactical advantage with a reasonable assumption of how fast sailboats could go. Sailboats can +/- sail at 45 degree angles off the wind. With a forecast of light conditions on the nose, the flapping sail set would have to zigzag up and down the race course while the Boogies could motor straight ahead. Sailboats might be faster over the water, but if you math the geometry it looked like a fair fight to the finish line; at least to them, Pythagoras looked to be on their side. They were wrong, at least by day 3, but they get at least partial credit for showing their work.
Would they do it again? Even mid-route they were refining a Russell Brown (R2AK veteran and living god of multi-hulled boats) infused idea of a 33-foot, 12-person pedal/paddle craft; a fatigue-inspired Frankenboat with four people pedaling, four paddling, four sleeping on the off watch. Sounds super practical.
All in, Team Boogie Barge summed up their experience thussly: “I’m having a good time… I can’t feel my toes.”
Team Pacific Boys’ 4D.23H.9M finish was a different program entirely. TPB was using WA360 for a training run, not for the R2AK (as god intended) but to hone their chops for a romp across the Atlantic. Like Boogie Barge, they were a team of three, rowing in a rotation schedule of 2 hours on, one hour off during the day, and catching up on sleep at night by rowing solo 2 hours on, 4 hours off in the dark hours.
What hurt the most? Yes their legs/arms/backs were tired, and their feet had blisters and sores from the saltwater soaked sandal straps, but the worst were their lips. For all of the experience and open-ocean aspiration, the sum total of Team PacBoiz had neglected to bring chapstick, and salt air plus sunburn had reduced their lips to tattered flags of surrendered self-care. Even the sunblock they rubbed on too late stung as bad as it tasted.
Then there is Team BendRacing, the Godzilla tandem-kayak team so familiar to adventure racing that they casually drop “AR” as an acronym that isn’t followed by “15” and some reference to a mass shooting.
With a finish time that topped out at just over four days, at least chronologically Team BendRacing’s v-twin paddle power rumbled in with Harley Davidson swagger; leather fringe chaps implied. On the beach, the championship belt looked natural in their hands. There wasn’t surprise and elation; there was satisfaction. Team BendRacing were AR OGs. They’ve done the races, they’ve been on TV (Amazon Eco Challenge), but even for them, WA360 was hard.
If you’re just tuning in and know nothing of the first part of the WA360, you should know that TBR led a pack of much faster sailboats and assorted all-comers for three of the four days from starting gun to finish line. In that vein, if WA360 was the boxing match our championship belts implied, TBR won three out of four rounds and the bout by decision alone. This ain’t that, but it doesn’t diminish their accomplishment. By all measures, these guys more than won, they crushed it, and if they weren’t so nice we might bet on them in a fight with Team High Seas Drifters for all-around winner.
Looking at their trackline is like looking at the laser beam of victory—regardless of risks and conditions mark to mark, they paddled on (and on) with a little regard to tide and weather but with a couple of stops to flop on a beach and breathe gravel for an hour. “We never set up camp, we just flopped.” While they might have relied on their AR cred to get them through, it was a different race than they were used to. WA360 had no transitions to other race elements. “When we got to the 100km mark, we were ready for a transition to bikes, running, or whatever. In this race we just had to keep paddling.” Even if they were falling asleep.
How did they sleep? They didn’t, at least not really, and far less than the four hours/day threshold the UN would use to try them as war criminals if this torture was anything but self-inflicted. Paraphrasing Cardi B: if it’s up, then it’s up—and Team BendRacing gutted out the 4 days and change with as little as 90 minutes of sleep every 24 hours. Yes, they hallucinated. At some point their dog was in the boat, so was one of their wives. “Our superpower is that with two people we’re not going to go crazy at the same time.”
Then there’s the gross stuff. Repetitive motion and hard corners wore a hole in their neoprene that wore into an open sore in the flesh mid-back. The pain could be tolerated, but only by jamming the wound into the offending rub spot. Better to lean into the wound than risk the injury to muscle and tendon by changing the geometry of paddling for the last 60 miles. “It was definitely goopy and oozing.” The solution was to peg the open sore against the boat and paddle on. Ewww, and owww.
“The catheters were a total failure.” Open sores be what they may, but this is the grossest. Except for communities with a specific kink, urine is far worse than saltwater—especially in terms of what havoc it can wreck when it’s trapped against skin and rubbing against an abrasive. “The back of my knees are the worst.” Imagine a caustic acid of your own making, leaking from wherever and trapped inside your waterproof layer and rubbing against your tender bits. Gross, yes, and pooling into the lowest place gravity will take it; rubbing into the soft regions whose natural habitat is soft cotton and vertical orientation. Other than, “Our food dry bags leaked,” “The bilge pump mostly got rid of the pee.” was the worst finish line testimony we’re ever heard. Don’t worry, we’re not monsters, we threw up later and out of sight. Respect.
In the Meat vs Tide game, three teams that crossed the finish line in the past 24 hours rep three different sets: a contraption infused with friends and the hard stop reality of work schedules; the test run of an ocean of rowing; translating standard-form adventure racing into a lap around the PNW while sitting in a slurry of urine and sloughed off knee skin.
Is it faster to pit the sum total of your meat and determination against the race course designed for sailing? Absolutely not. Is it more impressive? Who knows, but it’s at least worthy of respect, vomit infused or not.
R2AK—out.