International Raid Temiscamingue

Raid Temiscamingue 2024 begins with the Youth

Carrick Armer / 06.09.2024

The Raid Temiscamingue started today with, as it always does, the Youth Raid. There's long been a tradition on Endurance Aventure 's races to bring a select bunch of students from local schools in and to pair them with the racers on the 'main event', in a smaller event that acts as a taster event for the Youth racers and a prologue of sorts for the full course teams. 

This year, 100 students are involved in the Raid, either racing the Youth Race or helping out on the organisation, joining the media team or the volunteers, and in a couple of notably loud cars, joining the finish line team as very enthusiastic announcers.

While for most of local Temiscamingue and Quebec teams, there's not so much of an issue, the international teams were hoping for a common language, with Lauri Hollo of the Finnish Northern Adventure Team hoping that his students spoke good English as his French isn't up to much - the pair of students who joined him last year spoke very little English, so much of their race was conducted in gestures. 

Despite the 25°c, sunny day the racers enjoyed for the opening ceremony yesterday, rain came in heavily overnight, and with more showers and higher winds forecast today the Youth course was shortened by a quarter so that, in the words of course planner Daniel Poirier, "we're not getting calls from anyone's parents this evening".

While a lot of the students have trained hard all year for this opportunity, it would be difficult to insist on them all having all the equipment the main racers do, so avoiding anyone getting too cold was a definite priority. This reduced the course down to around 15km and made it more of a cloverleaf than the originally intended loop, but the alteration at least focussed the race back onto the host location, the school at Notre-Dame-du-Nord.

The race started out on bikes, heading eastwards, with one of the first bottlenecks being a CP under a bridge, with a couple of local folk fishing from a bench right next to the checkpoint punch. They seemed bemused, but not overly disturbed, by the sudden influx of young people, and pulled their lines in until they had a little more peace.  After a short climb and good gravel road riding out to the first foot orienteering section, the racers reversed course back through town and out west.

The next run transition here brought them to a farm where the owner collects vintage Massey tractors, with one of the checkpoint descriptions being 'find the oldest tractor'.  There were a lot of very shiny, well maintained, very well looked-after tractors, so picking out the oldest was hard, fortunately the CP flags are quite large and easy to spot .

The next major landmark was another Endurance Aventure standard, a long zipline. Just for the Youth racers, this time the zip was a dry crossing of an old gravel pit, mercifully not dropping them into the water this year, given the cooler conditions. Most passengers made the trip across quite easily, but a couple of the lighter students needed a little hand-over-hand pulling to help them the last few metres to the landing.

After another short ride, the final activity transition into canoes for a short paddle on the Ottowa river just south of town, with two students and one main racer in each boat. While a lot of the Ottowa here is effectively a lake, the hydro-electric dam a couple of kilometres upstream meant there was a small but significant current to contend with, with teams who stuck closer to the shore having an advantage on the 'upstream' section, and everyone enjoying a bit of assistance on the way back to transition. 

While there are no official rankings for the Youth Race, a lot of cheers, high-fives and smiles (some wearier than others, admittedly) at the finish line marked most people's days as having been a success. Hopefully all the Youth Racers get a little bit of the bug and continue, as we saw with some returning faces from last year's race. For the main race teams, today was their shake-out and leg loosener; tomorrow, the proper racing starts.