Adventure Race!

A couple of weekends ago Mark and I competed in our first adventure race down in glorious weather in the Lakes District. I was 5 hours long and set out like a rogaine: collect as many points as possible in the time. The tricks were:

- One side of the map was mountain biking, one running
- We had to collect controls from both in the time
- We could only transition once
- We didn't know how many points each control was until the start
- Some controls were worth 0

We ended up biking for 4.5 hours and then sprinting for 30 minutes to make sure we got some running controls. We thought we'd done okay, but obviously need to practise our tactics as we came 25 out of 35 teams in the mixed pairs. We made a couple of navigational errors (beacause our maps were duct-taped to our bikes rather than on fancy map boards) and I was a bit wimpy on the single-track sections. Also, Mark didn't have a bungy on his bike that I could grab on for a pull up the hill like the other mixed teams (and some of the girls had a harness for a tow in the running sections as well!).

For more details check out http://www.openadventure.com/open5/index.htm


Our results print-out

My car with our hired bikes (disc brakes!)