24/07/05: Adventure Racing
Yesterday Jenny made her adventure racing debut as part of Team Compasspoint
alongside fellow rookie Dickie Wren and comparative expert Andy Simpson. The
race was the final in the ACE race 1-day
series at Cannock Chase and the format consisted of a trail run followed by
a navigation run, bike and then run again picking up checkpoint punches on the
way with various challenges at some of these.
Those of you that know me well will probably be slightly surprised that I managed to enter, complete and in fact finish on the podium in an adventure race since I have no mountain biking experience and am generally know to be a bit soft when it comes to getting wet and muddy and doing silly things like challenges! Fortunately Helen lent me her bike last week and Oli took me out to Beeley for some last minute fine tuning (ie how to change gear, etc) which helped a lot. I was very nervous before the day but once we were there and getting ourselves sorted I guess the adrenaline kicked in.
Andy and Dickie were great team-mates and really supported me throughout the race (literally quite a lot of the time!). We started well - fastest on the first trail run to collect the maps and first to the transistion area checkpoint to get on our bikes. By the time we had finished the biking and got the majority of checkpoints and challenges, which included one team member (me of course) being blindfolded and lead through very muddy ditches with a cup of water that couldn't be spilled, we were in 3rd place only behind the experts: Team Saab Salomon and Team North Face. The final run saw us hold on to bronze medal position comfortably despite dropping the frisbee twice in the penultimate challenge!
All-in-all it was a great day and we picked up Buffs and Sigg bottles for taking part, a nice little perspex trophy each for finishing 3rd and a few cuts and bruises from falling off my bike! I would certainly recommend the ACE race series to anyone looking to get into adventure racing. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would but I don't think I'm ready to drop orienteering in favour of it just yet! Check out sleepmonsters for more reports and photos.