New England Adventure Racing Series #1
A Long Day Out
Racing Ahead / 09.05.2008
The forecast was for partly sunny skies and 55 degrees ... Yeah, right! As teams registered, they may have wondered if they’d trained enough through the winter or whether their nav skills would be up to par. At the same time, the race directors wondered if the 9 mile paddle was too long or would the recent rain make the paddle too fast. Would the orienteering maps be too detailed for new teams? Had the snow sufficiently melted off the Nordic trails? Some questions were answered, others not.
Just after the gun sounded, 33 teams sprinted off in 4 different directions on their way to the first checkpoint. Someone asked “Are we all in the same race?�
After about a one mile run, Team Eastern Mountain Sports (US National Champs ’06, Runners-up ’07) and Team NENSA.net arrived at the canoe put-in on the winding Royal River with Summit Achievement and Wicked Pissah/Fitness Together right behind them. There were only 2 checkpoints on this 9 mile long snaky, muddy, river but that meant that teams had plenty of time to lose contact with their maps and nearly paddle right by the Checkpoints! While negotiating strainers and logs, more than a few teams found themselves in the frigid water, with Team Sink or Swim losing their entire canoe underwater for a few moments! Cold rain and 45 degree temps certainly made hypothermia a danger.
22 teams made the first cut-off at the end of the paddle. The top five teams to the halfway point on the river were Eastern Mountain Sports (:58), Summit Achievement (1:00), NENSA.net (1:01), Wicked Pissah/Fitness Together (1:05), and Team Choi (1:13).
The biking leg had its own interesting elements with fields freshly spread with this past winter’s supply of cow manure from the many barns that Pineland Farms maintains. There was some single track created by cows, and a bike-whack section that included spruce forest and 4 foot tall barbed wire fences to push bikes & teams through. Pineland Farms is also a Nordic Center and both the biking and running legs utilized these winding, confusing networks of trails.
Orienteering maps provided at the start were either useful for navigation or confusing to teams new to the sport. At the bike to run transition Eastern Mountain Sports (3:26) had a 30 minute lead on Summit Achievement (4:09) who were dueling with Wicked Pissah at 5 minutes apart and two miles to the finish, and Former Distance Rods another 30 minutes behind them.
The final leg was a run through fields, trails, marsh, and barn yards. Short courses and self cuts lead to a lively (or exhausted) finish zone atmosphere and by the end of the day only 4 of the 33 starting teams finished the full course.
Coffee and donuts at the finish were warming and Shipyard Brewery beer for the afterburn was welcome!See All Event Posts
