Adventures in Denmark
John Laughlin / 06.10.2005
In our round up of last weekends racing we mentioned John Laughlin had joined a German and Danish racer as team Fusion.dk at a race in Northern Denmark, and said he might let us know how he got on. And he has ...The race was fairly low key compared to what we\'re used to in the UK, as there were only 11 teams (of three) in the long course, yet it was the biggest participation AR in Denmark. There were 70 odd teams on the short course, which was completely separate from the long course so we never encountered each other at all.
The language barrier proved to be our first problem as mine and Jorg\'s Danish is non-existant so we were clueless in the too-brief briefing. A small navigational error and then an error in the course description blew our race apart from the start as we were forced to run 40 mins back to a checkpoint that the descriptions had told us to bypass!
The weather was mostly good until we had to tackle the 50km inline skating section at which point the heavens opened and remained so until dawn the next day. Having been told by several people that my skates would slip if I practiced in the rain, I had only been out twice in the two dry days in Scotland the week before the race.
This comprised my entire experience of inline skating, and I\'d been so busy concentrating on just going that I hadn\'t really thought about practising the stopping and slowing part. Hence the comedy moment when I rounded a corner at the top of a long hill to find Thure and Jorg waiting for me, but being unable to stop I shot on past, down the hill at a full, barely controllable, pelt. Going too fast to make the sharp turn back on to the cycle path I continued on at rapidly increasing speed down the road, forgetting that they drive on the right in Denmark, and was too unstable to risk a glace round to check the traffic behind me, so I headed straight on into slightly bemused oncoming traffic.
Luckily, the traffic all got out of my way and I was able to slow when the road levelled out, letting the others catch up to give me a slightly panicked express tutorial on how to use the brake to stop! I have to admit to actually enjoying the skating despite terrible weather conditions, ankle sores, near death experiences, two small crashes and completing a distance that was ten times my entire life experience of inline skating! When will we see some skating in British races? Just as soon as they build our roads as smooth as those in Denmark.
The major night time orienteering section was a real tester, and anyone not fully conversant in Orienteering speak and signage struggled. The organisers had expected it to take around two hours, when in fact it took the leading team 8 hours!
