Adventure Race Report

Burger and I did our first ever adventure race this weekend. We did it with FS who we worked with in the Hyrdo lab...

The total distance was supposed to be 40+ km so I figured my base fitness level would bring me to the finish line along my group. To tell you the truth, I was afraid that I was going to be the "weak link" that slowed the other two down. The race: paddling, mountain biking and hiking. Most of the mountain biking was on the road, but there was some that was on trails. In previous races FS had done the trails were easy trails with no technical sections.

So we drove up on Friday night to register and get our stuff together and spent the night at Dr. NK's house 20 minutes away for the night.

Saturday morning we were up bright and early, back to the start place for 8:00 am. At 8:30 they had a captains meeting and we were given the UTM co-ordinates, a map and the race direction. We also found out we were being shipped off 25 minutes to the race start and that we would have to bike literally right past Dr. NK's house!

The race started at around 10:15 with a 10km paddle. I'm a strong paddler but I've never raced in a canoe, hard stuff! We finished off the paddle last place of the co-ed teams, and 4th last out of about 40 teams. (one of those teams was out of the water at the same time as us and they passed us on the way to the bikes!). We ended up passing two of the teams in front of us on the 15 K bike to the first hiking portion. One due to pure speed and athletic talent (was a co-ed team) the other missed a check point and had to go back for it.

During the first hike section we had to find two checkpoints at the bottom of a gorge, one in a river that required going in chest deep. As the strongest swimmer on our team, I was nominated for this job. It was so cold! but fun nonetheless. Out of the hike quickly, we had caught up to a bunch of teams and had actually passed one more (but were passed by a team as well).

The next section was about a 15 km bike ride on gravel roads followed by < 5K cross country. Part way through the road section burger and I stopped to relieve ourselves and FS went on. He was struggling on the uphills and knew we would catch up. In that section one of the other teams passed us. When we caught up, I noticed that FS's wheel was pretty flat, so we stopped again to pump up the tire, and there was such a change! we started to catch up to the other teams big time. By the time we got to the cross country section we had caught up to the two teams ahead of us.

The first 1 km of this section was on the Bruce trail and was pretty crazy. None but the hardcore mountain bikers would be able to ride this whole section. I road probably <100m of it. Not cool. Something I really need to practice. The next 2 km was on double track with the odd obstacle, much more my style and I biked all of it BUT 100 m. No teams passed us, and we passed a couple. The last 2 km was back onto dirt/loose-rock road pretty much all uphill. I made it the first 500 m, but when I realized it wasn't ending got off my bike with my other team members and hiked up pushing my bike. We got into the second hike section and the first cutoff point in 5.5 hours. If you got to this point in >6.5 hours you had to head to the finish line then.

We had to find 3 points here. There were trails, but they were pretty obscure, and we got pretty lost, well, not lost, but couldn't find the points. It was not well organized and we are convinced they gave us the wrong UTM co-ordinates for two of the points. We eventually found the three points after joining up with one of the other teams and working together. It took us 2 hours of bushwacking, and sinking into the mud but we got all the points and caried on to the finish. (The person managing the transition area said that a lot of the teams didn't find all the points). We got into the finish area at 8 hours and we had one more point to find on the property, but were told that there was a 7:30 cut off so ran into the finish area where we were told that we could go find the last point if we wanted to. We ended up wasting 40 minutes looking for the point but never found it, and came back with no more points, but 40 minutes later. I'm not impressed. We were apparently really close to it, but we didn't have time to mess around, we needed to get to a bus terminal to get back to w/loo (FS was continuing on to lindsay to his wife's uncle's house so wasn't coming back last night)!

I don't know how we ended up ranked according to the other teams. We got all the points but the last, but I'm not sure how we would be compared to teams that got the last point but missed one of the points partway through the race. I guess we'll have to see the results.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how it went. I think the organization was pretty poor, so I think the next one I'll do will be in a different race series. I had lots of fun, and *fingers crossed* no poison ivy this time, but my legs are totally scratched up and sore. I was supposed to run 25 km this morning, but I didn't get to bed last night until 2 am, so I had to rework my schedule and make this week a rest week. I think I deserve it!

In other news - nada. Nothing going on, hence the lack of updates.