The Chippewa Triathlon

Twenty-one years ago, at age 17, I participated in my first Chippewa Triathlon. The experience had such a profound impact on me I devoted an entire chapter in my memoir to this race. Over the next decade plus, the Chippewa Triathlon was a regular on my calendar, but then in 2016, I stopped the annual trek to Cass Lake, and haven't missed it much. It's been so long since I've done the Chippewa, I wasn't even blogging back then. 

Kathryn and I paddling the Chippewa '04 edition in a borrowed wood racing canoe!

The Chippewa Triathlon course has changed little over the past two decades. While touted as 50 miles total in distance, it has become less than that throughout the years. The canoe/paddle leg is still the same and follows an old trading route from Pike Bay to Steamboat Lake with annual slight course re-directions based on wind and water levels. The bike course has been slightly shortened and includes a mix of paved bike trail, gravel roads, logging roads, and "single track." The run course has also been chopped since my first year, now down to a meager 5.5 miles. 

Official Chippewa Triathlon course from the website.

At the finish. Probably '05.

Back in 2016, I needed a break from training for three different sports and rollerskiing. I was relatively new on the Vakava Racing Team and trying to get the hang of classic rollerskiing. Plus, I didn't miss the run-with-your canoe portages, the poison ivy, the "loon shit," the mosquitoes, sinking my bottom bracket, the sand caked on my water bottle nozzle, heaving my bike over giant down trees, the dead jog after getting off my bike, and running in the ditch along a sunny Highway 2 through the poison ivy.

 

Ha, often felt like I spent more time off the bike than on it!

But this is arguably why the Chippewa is so great. It's not one of those Tough Mudders or Warrier Dashes, It's the real deal. Just the participants in a national forest with "route finding" labeled as part of the "fun." And it's ridiculously cheap. The first year I did it, my partner and I took a wrong turn on the canoe. The last year Erik did it, he and fellow Vakaver Craig took a wrong turn on the last portage and added 20 minutes to their time. 

I've been thinking about getting back into the Chippewa for a few years now. This year, after an eight year hiatus, I returned, largely inspired to do it as a relay team with my bro biking after he went to sign up for the Lutsen 99er and found it sold out. My bro was our biker back in 2002 when my friend Kathryn and I teamed up in the canoe for our first ever Chippewa. Since then, he's eeked out a few doubles finishes, but mostly he's just posted the fasted biking leg on relay teams for several years.

 

My bro on the bike course in the early years.

So we decided that Erik and I would paddle, my bro, Leif, would bike, and in the end, we ended up tag-teaming the 5.5 mile run as we're all kinda gimpy runners these days. 

The Chippewa Triathlon has been labeled "A Paddler's Tri" and historically has largely attracted the canoe racing crowd that has significant overlap with the cross-country ski racing crowd. The best canoers do so in skinny racing boats with carbon fiber paddles. While Erik and I essentially have this equipment, we've never been able to break into the canoe racing scene. We're much more efficient at slightly slower but all-day-steady paces. This year, as we have the past few years, we've spent our spring focused on canoeing, but mostly have been paddling new rivers and haven't done many intervals. Yes, real canoe racers do paddling intervals. So while we'd spent some 70 hours in the canoe together this year before the "Chip," we didn't exactly have big expectations for the canoe leg.

 

I believe this was the second year Kathryn and I canoed together, '03.

 

Saturday June 10th, 2023, Chippewa Triathlon Day, dawned cloudy with a strong wind from the northeast. Race organizers decided about 15 minutes prior to the 7 am gun, to start the race in the more protected Pike Bay, rather than the traditional start in Cass Lake proper by the wayside rest. This created quite the confusion and difficulty getting in the canoes due to waves. Once most of the boats were assembled, we kept waiting for an official start but none came and we kept waiting. Finally about 7:10 am someone in the field yelled "let's go!" and the race went off. Erik and I were already behind as we had tucked into some weeds out of the wind rather than waiting in the main pack. After a frenzied few minutes of high turnover and falling behind, I told Erik we should just settle into a good rhythm and not burn ourselves out. Erik and I are both "come from behind" athletes in general and our strength is usually in the second half when we pass people who went out too hard. 

Chippewa Triathlon start 2004

So we settled but were still paddling hard. All the racing boats were long gone and we were paddling by a few solo kayaks and stock boats (canoe lingo for Minnesota IIs). We paddled next to two women and a number of mixed boats while Kerrie Berg and Andrea Patton (one of my contemporaries from high school) kept up a sizeable lead on us. Due to the wind, we followed the east shore of Pike Bay which adds a bit over a mile to the course. There were some giant pink flamingo floats serving as our course markers which were more fun and provided better visual guides than the traditional milk jugs often used. By the time we made it to the first pink flamingo, a little over a mile into the canoe leg, our serious canoe racer friends Emily and Chris were already out of sight. 

As we turned south along the eastern shore, we began to slowly drop the canoes behind us and catch up to the pack in front of us. We were nearly done with Pike Bay before we finally passed Andrea and Kerrie. It's crazy cause these women are my rivals in skiing and when I'm doing well I can keep up with Kerrie for quite awhile (haven't directly raced Andre in a few years). Erik is a much faster skier than both of these women. But in the canoe, even though they paddled a stock boat with wooden bent-shaft paddles (that Erik taught them how to hold before the start), and this was their first time in the boat together this year, and they didn't have foot braces, and kept zigzagging their steering, they were still stronger than us for 4 miles! 

Alas, as we finally passed them, I vowed I'd make Erik do 30 pull-ups before dinner every night. When paddling doubles, it's easy to blame the other partner for being slow. Maybe it's Erik, maybe it's me, maybe we're both weak paddlers.

 

More archives: Leif doing the Chippewa w/ Matt Grundy in 2005. Photo: Judy Grundy. Leif got that lifejacket at Sears in what is now the big Midtown building in Minneapolis.

Anyway, at the south end of Pike Bay we made it to the very short portage into Ten Section Lake. Here a whole crew of volunteers were on hand to make sure we dumped out any water from our canoe and toweled off our boats to prevent invasive species upstream. Then we embarked on the poison-ivy infested portage to put-in on Ten Section Lake. This lake is super short and we tried to pass a couple boats unsuccessfully before heading into the slew towards Moss Lake.  

From my recollection, the slew is a thick channel that we usually shove our way through and then eventually get out and portage through some mud on the left side. This is where I lost my water shoe the first year I did the Chippewa Triathlon. The local canoe club paddles this section of the course the Tuesday before the race and this year warned that we would not be dry by the time we got to Moss Lake. I had decided to wear my Alaska boots that are only knee high and really didn't want to go through water deeper than that. So when we couldn't paddle the canoe any farther, we got out of the boat. I gingerly walked along the side on some thick swamp grasses while Erik pushed and shoved the canoe up the slew. Sometimes he was only a foot deep in muck, but several times the footing underneath him gave way and he sunk to his crotch. 

Dave Harrington paused in the middle of his race to capture this wicked photo in the slew this year.

Erik thus became a bit frustrated that I was wearing those Alaska boots and didn't want to get too wet but I'm pretty sure his solo heaving was more effective than had I been trying to help and taking baby steps. 

I ended up behind Erik on the portage and so carried the stern. When we went to put-in on Moss Lake it just made sense for me to jump in stern so even though it's not my strong suit, we traded for that small lake. This also meant that when we did the next portage, a half miler, I got to carry the stern which we've both determined is easier than carrying the bow- probably because the stern walls aren't as high. Our plan was to run the portages but this one was single track and the stock boats in front of us weren't running, so after awhile we just ended up walking which was frustrating cause otherwise we could've made up some time. 

We put in relatively quickly on Twin Lake and were duking it out with a team of doubles men in a Minnesota II but they got in front of us for the "Beaver Dam" between Big and Little Twin Lakes and we ended up doing this super slow with me trying to not sink my boots and we lost a bunch of time. At least we made it up on the next short portage that we ran. 

Another gem by Dave Harrington. Erik and I were duking it out with this guy (and probably his son) just about the entire race. They got in front of us in this slew and Erik and I are right behind.

After paddling across Lake Thirteen, we took off on another portage. The first part of this follows a gravel road and I was hoping to run and make up time but Erik made a rookie mistake of not securing his paddle when we went to dump out extra water AND the teams in front of us were annoyingly running this part of the portage so we never quite caught them. The second part returns to the woods for some single/double track and we were right on the heels of a large group for the next lake, Little Moss. This is a small lake and soon we were in a line at the west end where there's a "boardwalk" to get out on. Fellow Vakaver, Maria, was doing solo canoe and holding up everyone, finding it difficult to hoist her canoe onto her shoulder while slipping on the boardwalk. 

Kathryn and I in action getting out of the boat.

The bow paddler in front of us got out on the boardwalk but the stern paddler in front of us jumped out too soon and sunk to his chest. I got onto the boardwalk and so did Erik. We pushed the canoe alongside us as the slippery boardwalk sections sunk as we stepped onto them. At the end of the boardwalk we picked up our canoe and began running, for this the longest of the portages. It was on this portage back in 2015 that Craig and Erik had taken a wrong turn. We didn't take any wrong turns this year, but my arms were getting tired holding the canoe and when to give my arms a break I put the canoe up on my shoulders, the pain was almost unbearable. 

My bro paddling bow w/ Steve Collison in stern. A couple decades ago.

Finally we made it to Portage Lake but there was another traffic jam putting in off the rickety old dock. The mosquitoes started attacking us at the end of every portage as we got back in the boat and even followed us a ways into the lakes. Eventually we got in and paddled Portage Lake. We'd practiced the next part, called the Snake Pit, a brief meandering stream paddle, two days prior and knew we would be good at it but unfortunately we couldn't paddle hard enough to pass any boats on Portage Lake and so ended up behind in the queue. This was obviously frustrating as we had to slow down a number of times to wait for the boat in front of us to navigate a 90 degree turn. After some patience, we passed three boats to come in first amongst our group although the timers couldn't make out our number on the canoe so the results don't show this (the Chippewa isn't fancy enough to have chip timing).

 

Another Dave Harrington special, showing a couple different styles of canoe portaging on the portage between Lake Thirteen and Little Moss.

From here my bro took off on the bike and set a blistering pace. Erik wasn't even ready for him when he came blazing into the transition area. Then Leif and I quickly loaded up his bike to meet Erik about two miles into the run where I would take over. The Chippewa doesn't really have many rules and we were signed up as a competitive 2-4 person relay team (there aren't even separate categories for gender), hence there are no rules against splitting up the run. Still trying to rehab my posterior tibial tendonitis, I haven't been running much. When Erik gave me the tag it was on my favorite section of the run course- a wooded low maintenance gravel road with a bunch of driveways to cabins on the lakeside. I took off super fast downhill and by the time I got to some rough single track (branches on the ground and hitting branches on the side), I had to slow down a bit. I was able to run steady though as I made my way through the first campground, then onto the paved bike trail, and then the last road where I saw my bro ready to relieve me. I definitely picked it up then. In the final 1.5 miles or so my bro was able to hold off a few fast-charging runners behind him. We finished second in the team division. 

My Garmin track of this year's canoe course: 14.10 miles. 3 hours and 3 minutes.

 

And my run track.

So, what did I think about my return to the Chippewa????

Well, I was really glad to not bike because at the end of the canoe leg, all I wanted to do was get in some clean lake water and wash off. Both Erik and I ended up with super dirty, mud-stained clothes (don't wear you're good clothes), and lots of stuff to wash and wash and wash. Neither of us got poison ivy. Running shoes with tall socks is best for the canoe. And running with a canoe still sucks.

We also are not gifted canoers. My old high school friend, David, who had inspired me to do my first Chippewa Triathlon and who I hadn't seen in 15 years since he moved out west, was volunteering at the event and when I told him I was going to start making Erik do 30 pull-ups before dinner he said, "Wow, so that's how your relationship works." Now, I was thinking that 30 pull-ups isn't very many since I do 100 pull-up session monthly and this made me realize I have a pretty deranged sense of a normal number of pull-ups. But in the end, it's debatable how much doing a bunch of pull-ups helps with canoe strength. 

I dug deep to find this photo of David finishing the Chippewa Triathlon in '05. Photo: Judy Grundy

 

As an aside, there's a huge upside to knowing the Chippewa Course. I wrote this entire report without looking at any maps. That's how ingrained the course is for me. My bro, fastest bike time, also said this is a huge advantage. There's definitely a big learning curve to doing the Chippewa and despite considering myself a washed up veteran, still feel I have a lot to learn.