 By Cody TruittNow for the 16-18 mile road ride back to TA with one pit stop for a land nav point. I nailed the right road and trail but we didn’t trust that our pace count was at the right location and we went 100m too far before we back tracked and found it with a host of other teams. Jason being the Cat 1 mtb racer, carried our team on the bike leg and especially on the ride back. There were many hills along the 45 feeder and he was giving Bambi a boost going up them (a nice shove from the back). I know she appreciated that! We passed a couple of teams on the way back to TA.
The next leg of the race was a land trek, this leg seemed to have the biggest impact on the race results. There were 4 cps and we tackled them in clockwise order. We headed for the hillside cp first and identified it quickly and now on to CP 8 along the fence. Ran the trails and crossed the big bridge to dead end to the fence. From there it was up the hill and bulls-eye, found the cp. The next cp was the hardest one of the race, CP 9. It looked fairly easy on the map because it showed a well defined trail going to cp. We ran along the fence line looking for it to end so that I could know from where to pace count from heading NW along the trail. The trail was anything but defined and we had to make our own trail at one point. Bambi was keeping pace count and knew we weren’t there yet when we finally found the trail. Up the trail a 100m and I had us past the cp and asked Jason if we should back track and redo our pace count since we finally knew where the trail was. The next thing I hear was Bambi telling me he had found the cp, I had jumped the gun too early. The last cp was in a creek and I had been in that same creek last year when doing a nav course, spotted it easily and a run back to TA for our last leg. We held our own in this land trek and I was happy with our split for this leg. | 
