News From a 3 Race weekend

Rob / 23.07.2002

It was a busy, busy weekend with 3 races taking place around the country, and they all had full start lists, another indication of the strong growth in AR.

The Questars series continued with their 5th race starting and finishing at Symond’s Yat, with the course on the river Wye and in the Forest of Dean. The weather was sunny and it was a great location which gave teams the rare opportunity to paddle on the rapids (almost all races this year have been on still water) and tackle some interesting navigational work on the forest. The winning team Wadenhoe High Five took a particularly surprising choice at one point, opting to simply swim the river rather than run around via a bridge! They cleared all the canoe and running checkpoints in getting 620 points, the next highest being solo competitor David Hunt competing as ‘The Recovery Artiste’. He’s a national veterans orienteering champion and was recently on the winning team in the Microsoft Challenge.

Wadenhoe High Five are on a roll as well, they qualified for the British Championships in the first Questars race, are well ahead in the series and after 2 of the Ford Ranger one-day races are well on their way to winning that series too. Their win was the more impressive as the previous day they’d been up at Kielder in Northumberland taking part in the last of Salomon X-adventure one day races this year. They struck out there though, clearing all the bike controls, but missing a cut-off time to start the running stage. The weather Saturday wasn’t quite so good, but a full compliment of 30 teams took part and it was Team Horwich who came out on top with 540 points in 7.23.00. Eddie Winslow of second placed On’t Moor commented: “Compliments to Salomon who took on board some criticisms about the over emphasis on mountain biking. They made the running and paddling longer this time around - shame they couldn\'t do anything about the midges!”

The other race which took place was Sunday’s Trailplus event at Sandhurst, with 82 teams of 3 enjoying the sunshine and some entertaining challenges. Between the trail running, a challenging Mtb course and paddling on the lakes in the military academy grounds they also had a range of physical, mental and teamwork challenges to complete. These included throwing an egg to other team members (or at them in some cases!), stopping on the run to memorize a list of 20 things to repeat to a marshal later and a ‘slippery wall’ right at the finish. The winners in a close race were Team Blue Notes who also won the first race in the series.

We’ll have more detailed reports and some pictures for you very soon.