RockyMountainCancerCenters.com
NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED DOCTORS.
LEADERS IN CLINICAL TRIAL RESEARCH.
EXCEPTIONAL CARE.
From Aurora to Longmont, Pueblo to Steamboat Springs we
bring advanced cancer care and treatments, research and
technology into the communities where our patients live.
FIRST PERSON
who despite raising two young daughters
looked like zero-body-fat cover models for
Ectomorph magazine. They were in Grand
County exploring bike routes for the first
Never Summer race, an event they planned
to stage a few months later. Katie, the race
director, explained there’d actually be two
races: one lasting 24 hours, for truly ded-
icated masochists, and the other lasting
“only” six hours. She declared me a good
candidate for the six-hour contest.
competitors. It wasn’t just that they were
a fraction of our ages; they were clearly
experienced at this sort of thing. The
most obvious clue: Most wore knee-high
socks to protect their shins during a trek-
king stage that would find us all tramping
through brush that was a little like barbed
wire. As the race’s oldest rookies, we
blithely set off in our ankle-highs.THE OVERRIDING SPIRIT of adventure racing
for dilettantes like us is that of a giddy por-
table party. Team names often reflect that
fitness-and-fun ethos. The 18 registered
teams in the 2016 race included Oven
Roasted Sneakers, 2 Lost Crew, and Team
Lionel Richie Fan Club.
Some race conventions add to the gen-
eral giddiness. During the first Never
Summer race, for example, organizers
tracked the completion of an early ori-
enteering challenge by painting each
fingernail on every competitor’s right hand
a different color. By the end we all looked
like EDM festival refugees.
Our team’s inexperience showed early
and often during the race. After miles of
biking, one of our first major tasks was to
dismount and navigate by foot to a far-
away checkpoint. Sergio, the only team
member with compass skills, guided us in
precisely the right direction—at least, until
we veered off to follow another team that
seemed more confident. Confidence, we
soon learned, can be deceiving.
At another checkpoint, we were handed
a three-foot-long PVC pipe, pointed to a
nearby creek, and told to fill the pipe using
only a small container to ferry water from
the creek. The catch: There were holes all
along the pipe. Had we been thinking
clearly, we would have used the duct tape in
our packs—one of the few items organizers
allowed—to close the holes rather than
trying to plug them with our fingers.
Another hurdle involved a mental test. As
we stood panting after a rough bike climb,
a race worker presented us with a choice.
We could try to solve a riddle immedi-
ately—failure to do so would mean we’d
get no credit for the checkpoint—or spend
precious time gathering clues that had
been scattered along a nearby trail to help
us piece together the answer. We took a
chance and were presented with the riddle:A bear invades your campsite.
You run one mile south, then one mile west,
then one mile north,
and then arrive back at your campsite.
What color is the bear?I contacted my nephews Chip and Sergio,
both of whom live in Denver, and proposed
forming a team. I suspect they were swayed
by my idea to compete as the Lisa Wren
Racers to honor the memory of a woman
we all loved. She was my older sister, Chip’s
mother, and Sergio’s mother-in-law, and
she’d died the year before just shy of her 73rd
birthday—way too soon, by local standards.
Long before the starter’s signal, we
noticed how different we were from our72 |^5280 |^ AUGUST^2019