Raid Caneo Nature
The Language of Adventure
Nicola McLeod (Team Helly Hansen UK) / 29.07.2008
Its day two in the big brother campsite ...Sandrine and Heather survived the hypermarche food shopping trip, Howard reached Paris and Ski managed to get to the airport. We have spent two days map marking and we're still only about half-way down the country (unfortunately only on paper). We've taken over the top floor of the bar of Camping Rambouillet so that coffee, water and croissants are on tap and Ski can maintain his pre-race beer habit.
The course itself looks remarkable. A start on horseback from the Palace de Versailles and then many hundreds of kilometres by kayak, horse, blade, orienteering and bike before the start of trekking, caving, canyoneering, via ferrata, white water and sea paddling as the route reaches the south and tightens up.
It looks like Gerard has aimed to keep the teams close by enforcing frequent cut offs, which leave very little room for error. We are content because the roller-blading looks like its at night (so no one can watch us) and the biking generally looks rideable.
Today all 37 teams rolled through a millionaire’s mansion for the mass race briefing. I had been practicing my French for this and mastered hello, goodbye, up, down, beer, left, right and vin rouge ... None of which were any good at all. As the only UK team we gained a little understanding of how the non-English speakers feel at the Oz, NZ, US and UK races. I now have a fear of making mistakes through misunderstanding over the next 10 days.
This briefing was held at the ranch where the king of Saudi Arabia keeps his race horses. Ski did try to chat up Gerard to see if we could borrow a couple for stage 1. Howard wasn't quite so sure about their calibre and I was busy persuading the team accountant that ice cream is good for carbo-loading and trying to mark corrections on a map after a bombardment of ‘information francais’.
We thought we may have been psyching out the continental teams with Ski's custom made size 14 shoes and our K2’s. However on a closer look at the first kayak: (a 92 km epic) it seems we may instead be psyching ourselves out with our own boats quite soon. I expect choosing the more robust Amaruks for the rocky river sections like the Gardon and Ardeche and the big open sea paddles will be wise. We learned the hard way last year at the World Champs whilst going 50km the wrong way up waterfalls on Rannoch Moor. Sometimes strong, steady and heavy is best!
Time for bed in a French campsite. Tomorrow holds kit check and the usual weighing, measuring and trying to fit twice as much kit in a van as there is space. A quick bit of sleep banking now on my thermarest and buoyancy aid, then up with a cafe au lait in the morning: about seven hours sleep coming ... a personal record for the past three weeks!See All Event Posts
