Hells Bells

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Mud glorious Mud, and Champagne, Cheese and Bikkies

Team Lost Control / 27.07.2006

Saturday 22nd July 2006. ARQ Round 5 - Hells Bells 24hr Adventure race. Team – Lost Control.

One of the best things about 24 hour races is that they usually start at midday. This means that you can get up at a civilized hour (like after the sky starts getting light). I was up at 6am and eating as big a breakfast as I could and boiling some chunky soup to put a vacuum flask for the race. As usual it all took longer than expected and I was at Darren’s place 15 minutes late. Race HQ was nice and close this year at Toorbul (on the mainland near Bribie Island) so it wasn’t going to take long to get there.

First thing was to drop our bikes at the transition area. This navigational task was given to Darren while Matt and I drove the cars. We drive into Race HQ and park the cars… “What about the bike transition Darren?�, “Bike transition? Is there a bike transition?� This did not bode well for the race – we’d made our first team error already. Good thing we were there with a little time to spare so we dropped the bikes off and got back to Race HQ in time for the release of the maps.

This year we had a full 2½ hours to plan the race and pack the three 55 litre containers (these containers are transported to specified transition areas (TAs) around the course) so there wasn’t the panic we had last year. Still, we managed to waste 45 minutes trying to figure out how the 6 A4 size maps fitted together. For some reason I was expecting a lot of overlap but it turned out they just butted up against each other – doh! We highlight our proposed course, mark the locations where the containers will be, pack the containers with way more stuff than we need, contact the maps, etc. etc.
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