Early on in my adventure racing career I resented having to carry six feet of duct with me. It wasn't heavy to carry but it was only one of many pieces of mandatory gear they nailed us with, and the totality of all that stuff was a heavy pack. Sometimes our packs were only fairly heavy, but for other races (depending on the length of the race, how many transition areas we had out on the course, the time of year we were racing) some of our packs were crazy heavy.
I resented carrying it until the first time I needed it, and then I was sold. There's an expression in adventure racing related to duct tape. Pardon my French (and we spoke a lot of French out in the field) "If you can't duck it, f*ck it". Meaning of course, that if you couldn't fix it with duct tape, it couldn't be fixed. I saw a whole lot of McGyver-ing over the many years that I raced. And I did some of my own. Just a couple of examples:
1. 12 hour race in North Carolina - my team was up in the mountains outside of Asheville after dark. I had a headlamp mounted on my bike helmet, but had foolishly not put new batteries into my handlebar mounted bike lights before heading out. Yes........the batteries died only a couple of hours before the end of the race, I didn't have replacements and ended up duct taping my tiny back up headlamp to the handlebars, so we could book out of the mountains and complete the race.
2. 6 day race in West Virginia - leading up to the race we had been told that we could either use our own paddles or the race-provided paddles, but if we brought our own we would have to carry them with us for an unspecified amount of time during the race. Stupidly we elected to use the race-provided paddles. They were single blade, very heavy, we were the ONLY team who was not using kayak paddles and within the first couple of hours of the race we were already at the back of the pack. We had to paddle in one direction to pick up a checkpoint. We then had to paddle back the way we had come, pass by the race start and head further down first lake and then river. As we passed by the race start we saw more canoe paddles laying in the sand. My team-mate suggested that we duct tape canoe paddles together to make make-shift kayak paddles. As I held paddles and as he taped the ends together, I doubted that they would hold for the duration of this first paddle section. They did. They lasted all 15 hours.
3. Same race in West Virginia - during the first freezing cold bike leg, my rain pants got caught up in the chain ring and they got badly ripped. Funny - when you're in the middle of a race it never even occurs to you to get upset that a $80 pair of rain pants are now trashed. All you're thinking about at that point is that they're ripped and it's freezing cold and you need to keep all of your layers of clothing functioning. I wore the same layer upon layer of clothing for almost six days straight, and my duct taped rain pants held together for the entire race.
4. 24 hour race in North Georgia - the sole of my trail shoe got caught on a rock and tore away from the rest of my shoe. I looked down at my beloved Salomon shoes sadly knowing that they were gonna be trashed at the end of the race. In the meantime I reached into my pack, grabbed the duct tape and wrapped layer after layer of the stuff around my entire foot so that the shoe would hold together for as long as I needed it.
I've seen duct tape used to cover blisters, used as a compression bandage, used to slow down leaks in canoes and rafts and bicycle tubes, to repair a ripped rain jacket, to repair a ripped pack, to repair a cracked water bottle and a leaking water bladder. The uses are endless and that sticky stuff is priceless anytime you are away from civilization. I would never head out into the woods or up into the mountains or out on the water without duct tape.
There is no need to carry an entire roll of the stuff (and most people don't need to carry around 100 feet of it anyway). While I was racing it was second nature to wrap tape in one spot around trekking poles, to wrap it around the base of a water bottle (yes........the bottle will still fit down in a bike cage), to wrap it around a small piece of cardboard or a stick.
So there you go. The Power of Duct Tape. Don't leave home without it.
One of the things we have really enjoyed about opening OAR is the people that we have met along the way and one of those people is a really nice guy who drops by the store about once a week just to chat. This man is one of my favorite store visitors and the other day he brought this gun case into the store. It is an older 4-handgun hard-shell carry case, and comes with one slide-out shelf and one static shelf. Stop by OAR soon to check it out, and don't forget that we have a March Madness Winter Gear Sale going on now - most winter gear is 30% off!
