If you’re out on the Katy Trail the last week of July and you see someone paddling past who looks like they haven’t slept in two days, they probably haven’t. The Missouri American Water MR340 — billed as the world’s longest nonstop river race — is back for its 21st year, and our stretch of the river is right in the thick of the course.
Here’s how it works. Racers check in at Kaw Point Park in Kansas City on July 27, then launch the next morning, July 28, for a 340-mile push downstream to St. Charles. They have 85 hours to finish, according to the MR340’s official race information — paddling through the heat of the day and the dark of night, checkpoint to checkpoint, on almost no real sleep. (The organizers do keep a backup date in their pocket — if flooding or other safety issues force a postponement, the whole thing shifts to a check-in on August 24 and a race window of August 25–28.) The event is put on by Missouri River Relief, the Columbia-based river nonprofit that’s spent nearly two decades getting people onto, and looking after, the Big Muddy.
Right through our neighborhood
Our neighborhood shows up twice on the official race course. Cooper’s Landing — the riverside bar and hangout just downstream from us — is one of the race’s volunteer-run paddlestops, where racers can pull out for snacks, cold drinks, food trucks, and a few minutes off the water before pushing on. Huntsdale, hosted by the Nature Conservancy of Missouri just up the road, is another. Both sit on the river between two mandatory checkpoints that bracket our stretch: Glasgow, with a Wednesday 4 p.m. cutoff, and Jefferson City, with a Thursday 4 p.m. cutoff. Somewhere in that window, the fastest boats in the field will slide past the bluffs below Rocheport.
That makes the riverside stretch of the Katy Trail east of town one of the better unofficial viewing spots on the whole course. You won’t get a loudspeaker or a finish-line tape — just the trail, the bluffs, and a steady trickle of canoes, kayaks, and the odd stand-up paddleboard working their way toward the Missouri River bridge.
What last year looked like
Last year’s race drew more than 500 racers and some 300 teams, according to KOMU 8, which caught up with paddlers and their cowbell-ringing support crews at Cooper’s Landing. One competitor’s mother told the station she’d been waiting at the landing since 8:30 that morning just to catch her son at lunch — a reminder that for every paddler in the water, there’s usually a carload of family and friends leapfrogging down back roads to meet them.
If you want to see it up close, Cooper’s Landing is the easier bet — it has a store, food, and parking built for exactly this kind of crowd. If you’d rather stay closer to home, walk or ride out along the Katy Trail east of the Rocheport trailhead any time between Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon of race week and keep an eye on the water; you may catch a boat or two working the current below the bluffs. Either way, it’s worth remembering that the same stretch of river that carries our Sunday afternoon paddlers is, for one long week every summer, carrying some of the toughest paddlers in the country — headlamps on, current at their backs, still a hundred-plus miles from the finish.
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