The Mission, The Men and The Mighty Mo'

The Mission:

The Missouri River 340, "...the world's longest non-stop river race." 340 miles from Kansas City to St. Charles, by canoe, in 88 hours. I'm not big on research but I can only assume this race claims dozens of lives each year as entire canoes and their crews are swallowed whole by the raging 3 mph rapids and smaller paddlers are jerked right out of their boats and carried off by man eating mosquitos the size of pteradactyls. There are probably pirates too.

The race begins August 4th, 8 a.m. at Kaw Point, where the Kansas and Missouri rivers converge in the west bottoms. Hell we'll probably be stabbed to death by hobos before the starting gun fires. If any of us survive, it will all end on the 7th in St. Charles. Stay tuned, I'll be live blogging the team's progress whenever I can find an internet connection in this God forsaken wasteland.

The Men:

The Paddlephiles, (clockwise from left front:)
Jeff, Mike, Bryan, Patrick.

What drives a man to do something like this? What makes a 40 something marshmallow of a man think he can paddle a canoe 340 miles in the most brutally hot week of the summer? As it turns out, the answer to both of these questions is Jagermeister.

4 months or so ago when Mike and Patrick told me they were planning to enter this race I said, "You're drunk." And they were. Unfortunately by the time they sobered up and realized how dumb the idea was they had already entered the damn thing and spent hundreds of dollars on gear. It was too late to back out.

The training would be difficult. They would get out on the water every weekend for all day endurance paddling, train individually throughout the rest of the week and lay off the booze for 6 weeks prior to the race. Then it was a month. But really that isn't good since there is a Killer Cars show on Friday and that will involve some drinking and Saturday is a dumb day to stop drinking so let's call it Sunday. Starting Sunday July 12th they'll lay off the booze.

Looking back at it now, I think they did go out paddling 2 or 3 times. And Mike did come and pick up the rowing machine I offered him. He hasn't used it, but he picked it up and that's the important thing. Really the bulk of the training regimen has been 12 oz curls.

Planning session 2. We made a good plan I think

but we don't remember what it was.

Jeff is taking a more 'seat of his pants' approach to things. He has been waffling between working on the support team and actually entering the race as a solo. I suspect the call of the wild will prove irresistable and he will eventually choose the latter. Jeff is more accustomed to physical exertion and shouldn't really have any trouble keeping up with the tandem efforts of Mike and Patrick.

As the support driver, I face the most difficult challenge of all. It will take me the better part of an hour to drive to the next checkpoint and I will only have 12 hours or so to get there. Once there I will have to acquire literally quarts of water and make nearly half a dozen sandwiches.

Why is this the toughest job? Because I. HATE. OUTSIDE. I seriously can't stand it. I don't even like looking out the window. The idea of sitting by a river all day in August in a cloud of insects makes me physically ill. I'll probably spend most of the day driving up and down the highway just for the air conditioning. What do I care? It's Jeff's truck and they are all paying for the gas.

Oh, and the blogging. The constant soul crushing blogging. I wonder if Booneville has a Starbucks...