MEDWAR!

March 30th, George and I participated in the Mid-Atlantic MED WAR with our good friend Calvin. Calvin had signed up to do it a while ago, but the guys he was planning to compete with were not able to go, so George and I filled in at the last minute. Thanks to my mom and George's parents who watched the boys the night before and the day of the event.

Basically, it's a race between about 30 3-person teams where they "combine wilderness medicine with adventure racing to create unique events designed to teach and test wilderness survival and medical skills." George had completed a wilderness medicine rotation last year and Calvin is well-versed in outdoorsy activities, so we figured we'd be good.

George and I were excited to do this and spent most of the night getting our gear in order. We were told to bring any supplies we thought would be appropriate (meds, first-aid, splinting material, etc) to treat emergencies found along the way. We also needed to know how to orienteer, since we would be allowed only a compass and a starting point to send us on our way. In my mind, we were going to be hiking around the woods rescuing people left and right, splinting imagined injuries, building fires and shelters, and administering first aid.

In reality, it was mostly orienteering. In fact, I don't think we broke out any of our survival/rescue equipment we so carefully planned and packed. Oh well. We had a good time anyway, although we were a little disappointed we didn't encounter any staged emergencies.

We drove early that morning to Newport News, VA to begin the race.

Looking over the instructions and starting point.

Ready to begin!

The race was composed of 4 different loops and each team was told which loop to start. We started on the canoe loop. There was a HUGE lake and we had to orienteer to 10 different check points along the shore. At each point, there was a paper with a password (you had to write down the password to get credit), a question/scenario and the coordinates for the next check point.

You had to be pretty good at finding the right point because these papers were hard to find! They even hid one behind a bridge so you had to canoe passed the bridge to see it. Sneaky!

Thinking hard. See the lake? That's only about 1/3 of the lake and we canoed from one side to the other multiple times.

Calvin getting our bearing for the next point. We had a small poorly done topical map that we were given to use to get from one point to another using our compass. It was very hard.

They were not nice with the placement of each point. We had to canoe through this bog and at one point had to paddle to shore, get our canoe out of the water and hike it through brambles across an aqueduct to get to the next point.

At a couple points they had personnel on the scene to present a scenario, but instead of actually doing anything, they just wanted us to talk through what we would do if we came across this situation in real life.

It took forever! We ended up missing a couple points and had to go back and retrace our steps to find the ones we missed. A hard thing to do when you're orienteering and the exact point is given to you at the previous point. Basically, we had to almost start over to find the points we missed. No fun at all. On a happier note, most of our group missed those points as well, so we didn't feel toooooo bad.

Our next loop was mountain biking!

We each had to do one 3-mile circuit before moving on to our third loop.

Calvin went first and finished fast!

My turn next!

And George picked up the last lap.

Our third loop was our "Advanced Loop". When we signed up we could either do a 3 or 4 loop course, so we picked the 4. Go big or go home, right? It was a mistake.

The last two loops were like the canoe loop: you were given a starting point and the coordinates to the next point where you would find a scenario/get a question to answer and you had to get from point A to point B. George and Calvin are good at orienteering and I was learning, so we thought we'd be okay.

It seriously took us hours to find the first couple points.

If you've never orienteered in the woods before, it's difficult. It involves a lot of planning and plotting and finally counting steps as you walk to some unseen point in the direction your compass is telling you. These points weren't just 100 yards apart, either. Each point was 1/4 to 1/2 mile away leaving a lot of room for falling off course. Even a degree or two to one side would send you off your course completely.

Here is an example of the paper we were looking for. Stapled to a tree in the middle of a forest.

Seeing as we were hiking through this:

it's really no wonder we struggled to find more than two or three check-points. (Can you see George?)

After trying for a couple hours to find another check-point and coming up empty-handed, we scratched the third loop and went to do the 4th loop. We had a time limit and it was fast approaching, so we were hopeful to knock out a couple check-points from the final loop.

Nope. With our time so short and our frustration mounting, we didn't even get past check-point one. Oh well!

We made it back to the start with the rest of the teams where they fed us a much-appreciated meal and awarded prizes to the winners.

It felt so good to take off our shoes! 

Since we were not able to finish all our loops, we were disqualified. I am disappointed, although I don't feel too bad since almost half the teams were unable to finish and were disqualified as well. Oh well! It was a great experience and I ended up learning a lot about orienteering. I'd really like to go back next year and complete it for reals!

Before we left, one of the event staff gave me a deer skull she found so I could show it to Lance.

George thought it was disgusting, but I thought it was awesome.

My mom drove the boys back down to Charlottesville for us that night so we got home at the same time as the boys. It was perfect! Thanks, Mom and Glenn and Mom and Dad for your help with the kiddos. It's wonderful to have family so close and so willing to help.

Lance did think the skull was cool. :)

A tooth!

Trying to figure out the age of the deer by looking at the wear on the teeth.

It was a great day! I was so sore from hiking miles and miles, but the MED WAR is definitely something I would like to try again. My only complaint is that we never got to really "rescue" someone, build a litter, make a fire, or splint a leg. Bummer. That was what I was looking forward to the most.