ACE Races 1-Day Series - Ashdown Forest
An Ashdown Forest Adventure
Samantha Mitchell / 09.05.2006
I was looking for a new challenge when I came across the SleepMonsters website. I joined a thread of conversation about being new and before I knew it I’d been asked to make up a team of 3 with Ian Wilson and Julie Jefferies who have raced together a few times before. Shortly afterwards we signed up for the 1 day ACE Race at Ashdown Forest. Embarking on my first race with people who had competed before proved extremely valuable, both before and during the event. They were brave to take on a first timer and gave me lots of advice on the kit I’d need so I felt more relaxed and well prepared on the day. You’d think it would be difficult to take part in a team event with people you have never met, but very quickly you get on and by the end of the day you feel like you have known them forever. I’m not sure what I expected, but despite being in the middle of a field, the race base was a well organised camp with water and isotonic drinks to fill up with before the start. There was also a tempting food stand to look forward to on our return.
The format of the race meant you had the option to plan your own time. You have 5 hours to finish and you can miss out checkpoints if you need to, so long as you do everything in order. This means that people of all standards can take on the challenge and do as much or as little as their capabilities allow. As a team we didn’t talk about that at the start, probably because we were waiting to see how well we’d do together. How much we could do, we would sort out later.
So we set off on the run to find our maps, which reminded me of my long gone cross-country school days, although it wasn’t raining, not yet anyway. Deceptively we ran around in a big circle and before I knew it we were back at transition and picking up our bikes. This was the bit I was nervous about, I hadn’t done a whole lot of mountain biking before as running is more my thing, but that first downhill stretch of path with lots of bikes and plenty of speed was awesome and served up enough adrenalin to get me through the muddier, smaller and harder trails that were to follow. See All Event Posts
