The Fog of War
A How-to Guide for losing the Epic Race in 28 Days and being totally OK with it.
We shall not cease from exploring
And at the end of our exploration
We will return to where we started
And know the place for the first time
~T.S. Eliot
Where did the last month go and why does everything hurt?
~E. C. Edelstein
I’m sitting here on a couch in NYC at a staggering altitude of 360 ft, looking out at a very unfamiliar set of storm clouds rolling in over buildings to drop warm rain on a city filled with cold people.
The deep valley villages are gone, as are the comically beautiful peaks rising above them, and it all happened too fast. The hardest part of coming home from this kind of trip is realizing that what makes a chapter like this in life so unique is its intrinsically ephemeral nature and pure lack of repeatability. Sure, the highs are attainable again in some other form, and soon when I make some money to refill the fully emptied coffers I’ll find something that draws me back out to explore. But for now, it almost feels harsh that a life of pure unknown adventure transitions back to normality with almost no warning. A rushed 5 second airport goodbye and assimilation back into everyday life is a weak replacement for what we had. It’s here that I’m reminded that life doesn’t usually have epilogues….
…..unless you make one.
Das Epilogue:
We owe everyone out there (friends, family, stalkers, strangers on the road, etc.) who has followed us, supported us, and often found themselves randomly checking the the Epic Race Leaderboard at 2AM one last story. Not to mention some good closure is in order. Aferall, some crazy stuff happened.
So as I laze here in my trusty pair of stolen Spongebob Squarepants boxers with only nine remaining toenails trying to figure out what time zone my body thinks it is and wondering why Nathan isn’t next to me checking Reddit, here goes.
We gotta be clear on one thing from the start: losing sucks. That being said, 9 weeks ago when Nathan and I were somehow awake at 8AM to read that fatefull email and instantly decide that yea, we’d drop everything, grab our skis, and travel thousands of miles in pursuit of one exceptionally silly objective, we did so expecting to lose.
This may sound strange to everyone back home, that such and undertaking would be done with the full knowledge that with finals, travel, and our generally busy lives, we most likely couldn’t beat the pack. Some mid-race rule changes and specifically the updated end date of December 20th changed everything, put us back in the race, and even though we were happily in the mix of competitive racers, one thing held true: if we did this race 100 times, we’d still lose about 96 of them. I was, am, and will always be totally ok with that.
We left off on the blog, 3 or 4 days ago, having scouted the entire 10-15 km stretch of potential mountain/village terrain we would have to cover. We both fell asleep on the night of December 19th and proceeded to have a series of uniquely terrible nightmares.
People usually have 4-5 dreams in a night and remember 0-1 of them. This time I remembered ALL of them…..because they were exactly the same. Five times in the same night I dreamed that we missed our 6AM alarms and instead, woke up very specifically at 9:14AM, well past the race start, wondering why the hell we were in France and if we could still win.
Nathan didn’t fare much better. He dreamed that he found himself on the start without me but rather side-by-side with some unknown, faceless teammate. Clearly a huge loss right there.
This is not usually a great way to begin a race, but after years of competitive athletics in some form or another, I’ve gotten kind of used to the jitters coming out in this way.
We in fact did wake up on-time, hours before any form of sun had risen, let alone crested over into the valley. With our lives packed up into our two small bags for one of the last times, we scarfed down what I think may have been our 10th breakfast in a row of solely simple sugars. I’m in dire need of some vitamins and/or a nutritional IV drip.
We stepped out into the darkness carrying everything we owned, and drove the winding roads up the mountain to begin strategically at the base of one of the lifts. We still had no idea what the locations would be for the day, nor how we would find out, so we decided to hedge our luck near the top of the highest area—Meribel. Little did we know, the entire world was in a cloud.
If it hadn’t been pitch black in the valley when we left, we may have anticipated such fog. Later in the day this scene explained the white out, but for the morning we were pretty surprised.
Visibility ranged from absolutely terrible to “NATHAN, WHERE ARE YOU??” but as with all other things so far, we knew we could push through this. With my running shoes clipped to my bib and Nathan’s hiking boots hanging around his neck, we locked into our bindings alongside several other anxious Epic Racers awaiting the 9:00:00 AM email that would tell us where to go. In traditional Vail fashion, said email came a bit late. In nontraditional Vail fashion, it was cleverly cryptic.
Locations, as we had anticipated, would not just be given to us, which would have likely promoted a dangerous footrace. Rather we’d have to solve a bunch of trivia to unscramble French names of locations. What kind of trivia you ask? ….Vail trivia.
Having never skied a Vail mountain before this race and the whole Vail culture having not really grown on me at all, I wasn’t super sharp with my Vail knowledge. It’s actually fair to say that I knew nothing. But that’s why I paid $25 for an international smartphone data plan. iPhones know everything. Thanks Verizon. Nathan and I were pretty confident in our quick solving ability, and despite the building chaos of a few dozen Americans crowding around a tiny lift for opening, we guessed one of two starting direction and just went with it.
We had planned that on a 10 minute gondola ride up we could unscramble some clues, and we were mostly correct…except for one letter. Turns out when you’re not sure of either the orientation of letters, or even what language they’re in, every letter kind of counts. Luckily we were solving multiple locations simultaneously. Unluckily, the one location we actually figured out halfway up one side of the mountain was for the total opposite face…across a nice large and slowly traversable valley.
Giving up on our current track to a known area was equivalent to defeat, so we held out for a few seconds, and then accepted it. Standing on that absolutely gorgeous summit above the clouds with zero idea where to go, we took in the view for a fraction of the second. Looking wasn’t going to get us anywhere though, so we bit the bullet, and carved down 3500 vertical feet as fast as our heavily battered skis would take us.
We pretty much knew this was the end. Sure, everyone directly around us was also confused and lost, but with countless square miles of potential terrain and limitless starting points, it was guaranteed that at least 10 people out there must have had a better trajectory than we did. We of course didn’t accept defeat as we bombed down the entire mountain without the ability to see more than 50 feet ahead. White-on-white isn’t great for skiing, and while so much of the sport is reading the fall line and texture of a slope, that all goes away in a cloud. Might as well just close your eyes. You’re just moving fast and hoping you can absorb the surprise bumps and accept the even more surprising jumps you don’t see coming. A few stumbles were inevitable, one potential disaster, but we survived.
The same cannot be said for our race chances. We got to the first location, equally high on the other side of Meribel half-an-hour after the start, grabbed the shortest allowable length of video, and repeated our less-than-safe blind descent in the clouds. By the time we got to the gondola to download (as trails did not run to the lower vilages we needed to access) people were already coming up, meaning they had only one location left. Our ensuing 30 minutes dangling in a slow moving carraige that was sure to knock us out of the race. But we had no choice, so fighting the fear than any left behind gear would be stolen, we abandoned first our skis and soon after these bad boys…
Best things ever for skiing, worst things ever for running.
…in exchange for these speed demons and a necessary boost on the ensuing village roads.
Vroom. Vroom.
It didn’t matter how fast we ran. We had lost by this point. 10 people had already uploaded. But after months of work, we weren’t exactly going to just sit down and take this. So we unscrambled our penultimate clue, sprinted through the streets until we found the random phone booth it was pointing too, nabbed are pic, and were back on the gondola. I know what you guys are thinking, how do you take such stunningly beautiful selfies while running so fast?
Weeks of practice.
That last selfie did it. Somewhere around 8 miles of mountain and three villages had been navigated in 90 mins. A respectable time, but a losing time.
To get to that last selfie taken at an obscure gondola in a forgotten French village with an annoying large fake kiss passed on, it only took 16,000 miles of traveling through about 52 cities and 28 days on the road. There were plenty of mistakes along that month-long road of course—we learned as we went—but the only mistakes that mattered were on the last day, and just about none of them were really preventable. Losing sucks, but when you can’t control it, you just have to accept it.
In the end, it came down to dumb luck. With no idea what the format of the race would be or where any locations would pop up, everyone out there had to gamble on a starting location/strategy and just hope it would work. For us, in short it didn’t, but four other pretty impressive dudes from Dartmouth, struck gold.
Trevor, Alex, Caleb, and Arlin are four patrollers from back on the New England side of things that from Day 1 have gone about the Epic Race in a totally different Fashion. While we first finished up finals and then hopped couch to couch and from one borrowed abode to another out West, they took their homework and finals on the road with them, completing one exam in a roadside diner, and lived out of the back of a truck for a few weeks. Everyone we’ve been competing against no doubt lived and breathed the race for the past month, but something about their path to the last day just seemed more put-together than everyone else’s. As we scouted the villages and potential sites with them the prior day, neither Team Friendelstein nor the other four were set about final plans. But as Nathan and I made our to begin at the base of the mountain fully aware of the risks, they decided to roll the dice even more.
They woke up at 5 AM and began the 2.5 hour hike up the mountain, gambling 100% that the summit to which they were headed would hold a location. Only a small amount of time was necessary to really separate you from the pack, a few minutes would do, and saving one lift ride up was the ticket. But being there wasn't enough, they also had to find the checkpoint quickly and this is where I fully believe they were destined, truly destined, to win.
Out of their four man crew, Trevor is the only snowboarder, and as they finished the climb that morning he sat down to buckle his boots as is the custom for snowboarders. On a cold bench outside a French ski patrol hut with the sun rising, he looked up and saw something—6,000 miles away from Vail, CO, on the top of Meribel, was a giant snow man with two Epic Race stickers nailed on it. Before even learning we were supposed to be looking for these stickers as markers, it was pretty obvious to the crew they had found Location #1 well before anyone had even made a move at the base. Some quick skiing and good prior scouting had them through thelower villages of Les Allues and Brides-Les-Bains in under an hour, and by 9:58AM, Dartmouth Ski Patrol held spots 1, 2, 3 & 4 on the figurative podium.
Nathan and I couldn’t be happier that those four guys won it. They’re not only nice, honest, and fun competitors, but they’re also just good guys who, like us, are in this for the skiing and could actually use some free passes. The hedge fund manager from Monaco that wore a designer skiing onesie and hired a private guide to show him around the European mountains doesn’t get the same thing from a free pass that more impoverished idiots like us do. (Though we did get to watch him wipe out hard on the last day, which was kind of entertaining) Not to mention, while pretty much everyone was ok with losing (considering 96% of us lost), it’s still a lot of fun to celebrate with the winners. And that we did.
Vail got over some of their world famous stinginess and put together a decent Apres party for the whole field which sadly still featured pitiful amounts drinking. TWO beer tickets Vail? Are you mocking us? How can we re-hydrate with two beer tickets? Whatever, we made it fun. And bought our own beer with our non-existent money.
We said goodbye to some of the new friends we’d made on the road with plans to ski some more mountains with them in the near future, and the celebrations continued. With 36 hours left in Europe and zero responsibilities remaining, it was time for proper reveries. But being entirely broke, this also had to involve both creativity and an appropriate amount of being utter bums. So Nathan and I moved in with our victorious patroller friends, making us the fifth and sixth men in a European quad, which is a four-fold over estimation of the number of people who should actually fit in it. It was perfect. Flasks were filled with the finest bottom shelf Red Label money can buy, beers were pourd, offensively priced pizzas were eaten, and finally at some point a night of luxurious sleep face down on the floor half under Arlin’s bed was thoroughly enjoyed.
But the true squeeze came the next day, when we realized that there wasn’t enough room in Nathan and my badass mini Volkswagon to get all six dudes and several hundred pounds of gear to Geneva. So we stripped every non essential item out of the car, including parts of the interior, loaded it up so full that as the driver I couldn’t even reach the gear shift, and got our friends to a train. With three total seats filled with five large guys in addition to some absurd number of skis, it was so full in the back, that Caleb, sitting nicely on Arlin’s lap, had to stick his head out the window for appropriate amounts of air.
Following closely behind the patrollers, Nathan and I packed up and drove to Geneva to spend another night on their floor and enjoy the last of the reveries before heading back to the US the next morning. On minimal sleep, and more minimal food and water, coming into Geneva I got my last real test of the trip—trying to find parking in a totally foreign city that apparently had zero people but millions of cars. After over an hour of driving in circles feeling tired and faint enough to pass out, I not only fully understood every street in downtown Geneva, but also managed to find parking. Pretty quickly, the six of us were once gain out for “cheap” shwarma and potent liter cans of unknown brews that would probably be illegal in the US.
In fact, eating was so reasonably priced for the first time in weeks that we no longer had any need for the pounds of bulk cheese we had been dragging with us. By 2 AM we were in a proper enough state of mind that hurling the chunks of surplus Brie at each other was an appropriate activity. This quickly evolved/devolved into hurling sticky chunks of the same Brie out the 5th floor hotel window at passing drivers, splattering them all over windshields and buses alike until the street was coated white and we were out of commission, rolling on the dirty carpet floor laughing.
Passing out on the same gnarly floor, half resting on a sleeping bag with my lovingly dirty flannel as a pillow, I couldn't help but feel this was the end of something great. From there, thinking about waking up in 2 hours to drive Nathan and myself to the airport for our long trek home had an air of bittersweet finality to it. I couldn't dream of a better way to end this crazy month of my life than with five good friends living and laughing the best way we knew how. Some of us won, some of us lost, but everything just felt like it was in the right place.
Dragging myself from my cozy nest (read: rock hard stained carpet floor) we filled up the car with $8.50 per gallon gas and headed to the planes. After all the incredible sights we stumbled upon over the course of our 16,000 mile tour, it felt a bit ironic that the last experience of Switzerland we would get was an empty parking garage at 5AM, taking in the last sights and sounds of a pitch black city echoing with the sights and sounds of pub crawlers making their way home at dawn.
But I guess the true goodbye came at the airport as we took off with the sun and caught our final views of those crazy mountains in the distance.
Flying through Dublin on the unofficial Worst Airline in Europe—Aer Lingus—was pretty uneventful. Don’t worry, we’d never heard of them either.
And on those wonderful shamrock planes, we left from a cloudy and rainy France/Switzerland to a less cloudy and more rainy Ireland for a few hours.
The only really exciting part came during the flight across the Atlantic when a flight attendant begin hanging Christmas lights throughout the cabin. I figured this wasn’t really kosher, and my beliefs were confirmed and a man who appeared to not be associated with the airline at all felt compelled to let her know that warping passengers in notoriously sketchy wire was a major safety code violation.
Rather than accept this one man’s valiant attempt to protect the entire plane as a really good idea, she began imploring the rest of the passengers to stand up and fight such tyranny with cries of, “I DON’T CARE! IT’S CHRISTMAS! TELL HIM IT’S CHRISTMAS!” So, yea, I’m never flying Aer Lingus again. But I am going to miss Europe—the land of zero concern for safety—for a lot of similarly great reasons.
I’ve looked back on this past month wistfully enough on this blog that I definitely don’t need to go into again, but I did want to say thank you to all those out there who have followed along and cared for so long. It doesn’t take much to make this trip an entertaining story, the sheer nature of its absurdity makes our job documenting it easy, and I’m just glad that for the first time in my life I was able to really help show pepole back at home into what it feels like to be out here.
We’ve had a really unexpected amount of followers, with thousands of blog reads on top of anxious checking-in from family and friends along the way. Nathan and I are incredible lucky to have the cheering sections like you guys along our stops on the road and back home to keep us going. This is the end of our race and this specific chapter in our lives for now, but not the end of our explorations. We’re sorry we couldn’t win it in the end, but the next time the road calls and we deem it entertaining enough for the public to enjoy, we’ll be sure to let you know. It may be a while, as we still have robots to go back to school and build, but whatever happens, this was a hell of a month in our lives that gave us so much, and here’s to many more.
It’s tough for us to say goodbye as it was exciting to let you all in on our travels and shenanigans. But, until the next time the road calls again, this is Team Friendelstein, apart for the first time in a month, signing off.
Cheers,
Eric & Nathan
