The Dirty Weekend
A Dirty Weekend to Remember
Rob Howard / 11.07.2008
Traquair House near Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders was the venue for the first ever Dirty Weekend Adventure Festival on July 5/6th. Combining two long established events, the Polaris Challenge two-day mountain biking challenge and an ACE Race, along with a new trail run, called The Dirty Dozen, the weekend was a new concept for UK racing. The venue was already well known to the organisers Detail Events, as Traquair and the surrounding forests and hills are used for the Mighty Deerstalker run in the winter. So most of the pieces of the jigsaw were already known, they just had to be put together!
That job went to the organising team and race planners Graham Menzies and Paul McGreal, who had been out in the hills for months researching routes, and for many days beforehand placing checkpoints. You might think there was the potential to share checkpoints between events and across both days, and this was done in a few locations but they still placed 97 CP’s for the two endurance events! This was in part because the ACE Race course was very ambitious and wide-ranging.
With various attractions on the field, including an Ellis Brigham shop for last minute buys, and a band booked for Saturday evening, the Dirty Weekend event village was certainly a change of pace for ACE Racers and for this year there were some changes to the format as well. The race was primarily for pairs and solos and included a standard class as well as an elite category with large cash prizes on offer to the winning elite male and mixed pairs. There was a one-day option too, for those who just wanted to race on Saturday, and the promise of the inclusion of some ropes stages and night time paddling. Both the ACE and Polaris racers were also looking forward to enjoying some of the world renowned cycle trails in the area, but if the mood was upbeat the weather forecast sadly wasn’t! Wet weather was promised – and duly arrived to ensure it really was a Dirty Weekend.
The Polaris riders were the first to start on Saturday, and for this competition things were the same as for a regular summer Polaris race. The only significant difference was a slight shift of mapped area north-westwards, with all the controls pre-marked and had been specially adapted (for both events) from the OS 1;50,000 to clarify tracked features and to mark out-of-bounds routes. (This was superbly done by cartographer Jens Strain.)
The day one Polaris map was centred around Peebles and Innerleithen, with half the controls in the Glentress and Innerleithen forests where the network of singletrack riding is exceptional. (See http://www.7stanes.gov.uk.) Riders took the main exit out of the Traquair estate, stopping to collect their control values on the way, then scattered on their chosen routes.See All Event Posts
