Salomon X-adventure GB

Kielder X-adventure – The Runner’s Revenge

Sarah Gorman / 25.07.2002

Anyone watching the comings and goings before the start at the fourth and final race in the Salomon X GB one day race series, would have had trouble working out what was going on. Nobody stood still for long, most were covered head to toe in an futile attempt to escape from the dreaded biting midges and almost all were shrouded in head nets, including organiser Nigel Shepherd as he delivered the pre-race briefing. Despite all these cloak and dagger antics, most managed to see enough through the head nets to mark up the maps and get a first glance at the race area.

Salomon had taken on board previous competitor comments to include more running in the event, with a run section that took racers up and over Deadwater and the surrounding fells. This provided those who wanted to with a chance to stop and look at some spectacular views from the fell tops, before descending through the forest back to the start of the bike section.

As usual the race was all about making tactical decisions, namely what to do and when to do it, in order to gain as many checkpoints as possible, with some enforced rules about which checkpoints should be collected on foot and by canoe. So teams set off in all directions, most by bike and some missing out the running section completely,

This race had a longer than normal running section which gave the winning team, comprising Sarah Gorman, Andrew Gorman and Brendan Bolland all runners from ‘Horwich RMI’ a large running club near Bolton, the opportunity to gain a leading edge over the challenging stretches across the open fells. Team captain Sarah Gorman explained, “We decided to do the run first whilst our legs were still fresh, knowing that it would be a lot harder to tackle the stiff climb up onto the fells at the end of the race.� It was a decision that paid off as they cleared all 6 running check points in under two hours, leaving plenty of time to complete the bike, rope and canoe sections.

The 60km mountain bike stage took competitors into the forest on an undulating course of fire trails, and some more technical off-road sections, and 2 stops for the canoe and rope sections respectively. A lot of teams had trouble finding bike check point 26, confused by the control card description of an ‘�eyot� and spent longer than anticipated wading up and down a river searching high and low for the elusive point.