When the race is an adventure, and Alabama's waterways are the course

Going into what almost certainly is the most grueling athletic challenge Alabama has to offer, Ryan Gillikin has the confidence of a four-time finisher. For fellow competitor Dirk McCall, the self-imposed challenge will be unlike anything he's faced before.

The disparity illustrates something essential about the Great Alabama 650: It is a race of extremes.

At 10 a.m. Saturday morning, Gillikin and McCall will hit the waters of Weiss Lake in Cherokee County with 20 other people attempting to paddle virtually the entire length of the state. The winding route will take them down the Coosa River, through Gadsden, past Pell City to Wetumpka and then southwest, the Coosa meeting the Tallapoosa and turning into the Alabama River, swooping into Montgomery and zig-zagging west to Selma, then twisting south to the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and skirting Mobile Bay to Fort Morgan.

Most, like Gillikin, will be in solo kayaks. Four participants make up two tandem kayak teams. The rest, like McCall, are attempting the race on paddleboards – a feat that was successfully done for the first time only last year. Along the way they'll battle physical and mental challenges including sleep deprivation, general exhaustion, potential injuries. Each has a support crew on land who'll track them and meet them when possible, their vehicles carrying food, spares and a place to nap.

This is the sixth year of the Great Alabama 650. Past winners have completed the 650-mile course in as little as four days – but the reality is that racers can expect seven to nine days of round-the clock effort. There's a 10-day limit, and a couple of checkpoints where the race can end early for those who don't make specified time cutoffs.

Greg Wingo, the race director for the event presented by the Alabama Scenic River Trail, said this is the biggest field the race has ever had. Coming on the heels of a 2023 edition that wasn't the fastest 650 but had its share of drama, there's a chance it will gain more spectator interest than ever before.

If so, that means the event is living up to the hopes that its organizers had when they created it. Alabama Scenic River Trial (ASRT) is a nonprofit created to increase awareness about the state's incredible wealth of waterways and their potential as a recreational resource and a driver of tourism. It "encourages and promotes safety and education to all levels of the public that utilize Alabama's waterways as a gateway for camping, fishing and recreation."

Not everyone aspires to be a racer. But the Alabama 650 serves as a high-profile reminder that the "racecourse" is a public resource open to all.

"Historically, the race has had huge international and national attention," said Wingo. "The paddling world has known about it since the very beginning."

"Last year was sort of a turning point year for more local media and local individuals, becoming a part of their consciousness," he said. "Which is obviously very important to us. We want people that live here to know about the race and to support it and get excited about it."

Last year's excitement included a nail-biting finish, he said.

"Our, our front of the pack racers certainly finished in, you know, what would be considered fast times," he said. "But we also had our slowest person ever who finished with 20 minutes to the cutoff. So, if you can imagine doing a race that is 10 days long and almost running over the time and only making it by 20 minutes, that's like doing a marathon and crossing the line with one second left. It's as close as you can cut it."

Wingo said that efforts to make the event spectator-friendly start with a tracking map on the event's website , and video clips and other updates that will be published on Facebook and Instagram . "Each day people will be able to go on there and get a good idea for what's occurring," he said. "So that's a good visual way somebody online can track the race and follow it."

Organizers also encourage spectators to cheer the racers on in person.

"Because the tracking map is so up to the minute with where everyone is, you can essentially go out on any bridge or out on your boat or out on a dock or a boat ramp and cheer them on as they're going by," Wingo said. "They love interaction of any kind. They love being cheered on, they love having people throw them food and drinks, they love just having people along the course out there cheering for them.

"That's really important," he said. "In fact, they'll get to the finish in Fort Morgan and they'll always talk about how many people they saw along the way who knew them by their name because of the tracking and would yell out their name. It's just really exciting for them to have that. It's certainly a morale booster because this race is breaking them down day after day."

Spectators are welcome at the start, he said, and on Saturday evening there'll be a watch party at Buffalo Wild Wings in Gadsden. So if people want to come somewhere that night and hang out and see the racers as they're going by, cheer them on, Gadsden that evening is really a good location to show up."

It's tempting to say that an endurance challenge like this must appeal to a very specific type of person, but the contrast between Gillikin and McCall gives the lie to that easy assumption. Both hail from Baldwin County, so they'll be headed for home as they paddle – but their paths to the start line have been very different.

Gillikin said she'd had experience with marathons and triathlons when she signed up for the 2018 Missouri River 340, a major event that draws hundreds of competitors. "I finished in the top 25%," she said.

It was her first distance race, and something clicked. "I was like, 'Oh, this is it,' she said. "I have found my sport at 40 years old. I finally found my sport."

Not long after that, she learned of the effort to launch the GA650. She lives in Bay Minette, so it would be coming right through her neighborhood. It was a no-brainer.

"I heard them interviewing talking about it on a podcast that they were doing out of Canada," she said. "And so I started messaging them, "How do I sign up for this race?" before they even had a website or anything. And I was the first person to sign up, so my race number was number one that first year."

"They had like 13-14 people sign up, but most of the people dropped out the first day," she said. "I mean, it was so new here. People just didn't even know what they were getting into ... After day two we never saw another boat."

Gillikin and Susan Jordan were the only finishers in the tandem category. Bobby Johnson of Dunedin, Fla., was the only male solo finisher, and he went on to win it twice more since then. Salli O'Donnell of Fort Walton, Fla., was the only finisher in the women's solo category, which she has won every year since. (The ranks of finishers have increased quite a bit since that lean start.)

In 2023, ASRT gave Johnson and O'Donnell a special "3250 Club Achievement Award" for completing the race five times. Gillikin missed out because of injury: In 2021 she didn't race, but she did assist Wingo, and that experience led to her joining the staff of another event, the Suwanee River 230, for which she now serves as race director.

It's fair to say that Gillikin, who's gunning for her 3250 award this year, knows this event inside and out. She knows well what it's like to see Alabama the way only a few people ever have.

"When I'm on the river, I don't really know where I am," she said. "Like, I don't know what the nearest city is. It's a completely different mindset. I know the river. I know that at this sand bar, I have to make sure I turn right. I don't know what city I'm close to but I recognize that tree. I know where the night herons nest.

"My mom's following me with the van," she said. "And to hear us talk about our experience, she's like, 'What river are you on?' and I'm like, 'What city are we close to?' It's a completely different way to experience the state than any road trip will ever give you. Most people who paddle stay within five miles of the boat ramp they launch from. So if you look at the state, you know, the paddle spots are little circles next to each boat ramp. Whereas we see things that nobody else sees. We see wildlife - hogs, bald eagles, deer, alligators, snakes.

"And then the other thing that we see that other people don't, you know, lots of people see sunrises and sunsets," said Gillikin. "We see moonrises and moonsets and shooting stars. You get out there in the middle of nowhere and you can see all the stars, and yeah, moonrises and moonsets are just so beautiful to me."

You might also see things that aren't there.

"It's a lot more mental than, like, even running a marathon because you're dealing with sleep deprivation," she said. "It's the biggest challenge because there's no mandatory sleep time. You can sleep as much or as little as you want. So, it's all about how little can I sleep and still function and paddle effectively and you just can't fathom, if you haven't been through it, what sleep deprivation does to you mentally.

"We actually train and we will practice paddling with our eyes closed so that we can [establish] how far can you paddle in a straight line with your eyes closed so that you can get a little rest while you're paddling? People have fallen asleep and fallen out of their boats. People have pulled over and slept on the ground and it's just, I call it 'the miseries.' It's really dark and you're out there and you're just so exhausted and just mentally wiped out, hallucinating."

The highs and the lows promise to be all new to McCall.

He's a Fairhope resident, an artist and a painting contractor, who has been making his own surfboards and paddleboards for years. He'll use paddleboards of his own design in the GA650. He's raced quite a bit, he said, particularly in Europe; he and his wife, Mette Hjermind McCall, have lived in Denmark and still spend part of their time there. But this will be his first endurance event.

Paddling 20 kilometers at full speed is something he's familiar with. This will be something entirely different. He said he's motivated partly by a personal to give himself a big new challenge in life, partly by a desire to support a local nonprofit called Starfish23, that supports youth athletics. He's using his race to promote a $5,000 GoFundMe campaign for the group .

One of the leaders of Starfish23 is Mike Ebert, a former college baseball player and coach at Foley High School. McCall said he's been blown away by Ebert's work to help give kids a chance to play, when they might not otherwise have one. "It's very expensive to play travel ball," McCall said. "He gives an opportunity really to kids who are outsiders. A lot of kids who are not on high school teams that want to play. He gives them something to do during the summer."

McCall knows that participating on a paddleboard gives him little to no chance of competing for the win. He's not concerned about that.

"It's not like a race," he said. "It's more of an adventure ... It's just to even finish. That's a big deal, personally."

Another part of it seems to be testing his boardmaking artistry. He's built some very specific concepts into his main board, crafting it to glide smoothly when propelled from a rearward position, and to leave no turbulence behind for maximum efficiency. He's testing another that he might use part of the time: a foil board that can lift itself out of the water under the right conditions, much like a hydrofoil boat, for a huge gain in speed.

"I mean, it's art that you can use," he said.

McCall said he's lost 12 pounds since he started training a month ago. And training is a big subject for both he and Gillikin. It's hard to train in a way that replicates the deep, days-long effort ahead. Suffice it to say that both of them spend a lot of the time on the water. She often does an early 26-mile loop in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta before going in to work as an occupational therapist. He said he's been approaching it like a marathon, just trying to do a little more each day, watching his nutrition and being mindful of pushing things to the point where the effort become counterproductive.

The idea of standing for most if not all of the race doesn't seem to bother him. Sitting on a paddleboard is hard on the back, he said. "The real problem is actually your feet numbing up," he said. "The first time I did a really long paddle, I couldn't stand for two days. I was really surprised how numb my feet were."

Lately, he said, he's found a secret weapon: Crocs. Which just goes to show that the Great Alabama 650 isn't all about carbon-kevlar kayaks and featherweight carbon-fiber paddles.

Again, he just wants to see how far he can make it. But he'd like to finish. And he'd absolutely love to paddle by American Legion Post 199 in Fairhope. He's a Navy veteran, and the waters off the post's beach are one of his favorite places to paddle.

"It would be so awesome if I can pass the American Legion," he said. "I mean, at Post 199 they'll have a party."

Gillikin likewise said it's nice to see people along the way.

"You're just out here and like, how do you keep your mind in the game of being in a race?" she said. "Now that it's been built up, you know, boaters will come by and cheer for you, people will be standing at boat ramps, cheering for you.

"You get that little boost every time," she said. "Maybe it's two kids on a boat ramp. But, you know, it's something."