Might Contain Nuts – 12hr Brecon Beacons Adventure Race

Ian Grace – Team Endurancelife / 09.07.2012

After a late night drive from London to South wales, I pulled into the car park under the cloud covered slopes of Pen-y-Fan around midnight. As I climbed into my sleeping bag in the back of the car, the rain began to fall and the noise on the roof had me wishing for some ear plugs. I was up around 6am for a short drive to the start of the Might Contain Nuts 12 hour adventure race headquarters at the Brecon Beacons National Park Visitor Centre or the "The Mountain Centre".

Maps in hand and clutching a quick bacon and egg breakfast roll I started to work out possible routes for the navigational category. The race format was a new one with a mix of navigational competitors and those less confident with the navigation, following a fixed route.

Stage 1 – 3 mile trail run

Stage one started off with a very steady jog from the The Mountain Centre to the trig point at Twyn–y-Gaer. This section of the course was marked for all competitors, but there were still options to cut a few corners and save a bit of time on the 3 mile off road run. The transition to the bikes was in the open and the rules stated that you had to carry all your food and equipment (water would be provided at various checkpoints and transitions throughout the race) for the day with you. This meant changing to bike shoes and putting running shoes in to my backpack before heading off on the first MTB leg of the race.

Stage 2 – 13 mile MTB

Another change of shoes and it was off for the first bike leg. I decided to collect a couple of the early check points away from the marked route. As I rode towards A12, a 70 pointer, a speedy Ben Shannon came flying past and turned right towards the first bridleway section. Being slightly behind, we played gate closing and opening for about one kilometre as he would get through and close a gate about 100 yards before I reached it. It took me a while to catch him and then we shared the gate opening and closing until we were back on the tarmac heading for A11.

We pushed up the hill and onto the open land. The 60 points from A11 were in the bag and it was time to head back to the main route and pick up CP2 before heading south towards CP 3 and the transition to run. I picked up a couple of extra CP on the way, both around 30 points each, but on reflection, were not a good use of time as there were easier points further into the stage. Time seemed to be going very quickly and it felt already that I had spent too much time picking up low value points on the bike.