Neil, Doug and Steve\'s Egg-Cellent Adventure !

Paul Magner/Trailplus / 23.07.2002

Saturday 20th July. The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. 80 teams arrive for the second event in the UK’s biggest three-person Adventure Race Series: the Sprayway-TrailPlus…..and there is a look of concern on the competitor’s faces! Concern indeed as the teams’ registration process is completed with the receipt of a raw egg. What dastardly Adventure is being hatched here?

With the sun shining down on the massed start at 10.00am eighty raw eggs were being carried around on an initial 1.5 mile run until the area marked ‘Challenge A: Egg-Stream Adventure’! With team members standing about 10 metres apart, the three-person teams had to lob, pass or throw their egg from one to two to three and back again. A five-minute time penalty was then incurred for teams that broke their egg.

The initial ‘Run’ section also had a memory challenge, where competitors faced having to remember 20 ‘adventure-related’ items, which they later had to write down, with a 30-second time penalty for each error or omission. Teams were running along muttering to themselves: “Badge…Matches…..Peg….Whistle…. “ There wasn’t a Generation Game cuddly toy though!�

The enjoyable mountain-biking section in Bracknell Forest had some excellent single-track elements for the ‘aficionados’, and was hilly enough to be challenging, though there were reports of a few ‘short cuts’ being taken! The kayaking had some extra elements too including some ‘hand paddling’ but it wasn’t the end of the water-based activities. As competitors emerged from the lake they faced a challenge called ‘Playing the Pipes’. A plastic tube had a number of holes drilled into it and the objective was to get the ping-pong ball inside to float to the top. With fingers plugging the gap, one team member was required to race backwards and forwards to the lake to fill his/her plastic cup until the ball emerged at the top.

And finally, The Slippery Wall! The uphill finish across Sandhurst’s majestic polo fields was interrupted just yards from the finish with a fiendishly angled wooden wall covered in vegetable oil. Spectators were greeted with some unusual bodily positions as the teams somehow managed to clamber and push each other over the final challenge so they could cross the line.

It was an exciting final few metres too as ‘The Blue Notes (Neil Thubron, Douglas Fox and Steve Jeffery) crossed the line only just ahead of ‘Team Atlantic’ and ‘The Lisburn Squirrels’. However, the second and third placed teams incurred 1 minute and 6 minute time penalties respectively and ‘The Blue Notes’ had a clean sheet so their winning margin in the end was over 2 minutes. They’d paced things well after being a bit behind on the run, and completed all their challenges carefully. No eggs dropped and the scrambling being done on the ‘slippery wall’!

No doubt they’ll be back to go for the hat-trick of wins at the 3rd and final Trailplus race of the year on September 14th.

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