British Adventure Racing Championship Final
A Long Forest Ride
Rob / 30.09.2002
This second day has been more about endurance than multi-sport – a tough day on mountains and mountain bikes. From the time they came down off Cadair Idris the teams have been in the saddle, for the most part on forest trails. The mountain stage was brutally tough and Jue Panter of The North Face was in a poor way when she came down. “I was running on empty,� she said later at PC9, “but in the last 3 hours I’ve gradually recovered.� That was 3 hours of hard and hilly riding, including up to an hour of pushing and carrying – some way to recover!
Most at the teams arriving there had some comment on the pushing they’d had to endure. Chris McSweeny of Last Minute just said, “what can you expect in a Brian Elliot race� and both Fiona Patterson and Jonathan Mayne said, “It wasn’t as bad as in the rush!� (The other race organised by Brian Elliot is the Adrenalin Rush.) “It was about an hours climbing,� Patterson added, “first some steep carrying, which was very precipitous and interesting, then some pushing through bracken and forest undergrowth.�
The PC was at a forest car park and when the leaders arrived positions had changed. Team Wales had slipped behind Lythgoe and Salomon X-a, who are having a strong day. The Welsh team had had 3 punctures and Salomon X-a had two while they were at the PC! All the teams seemed in good spirits and Sealskinz High Five were happier and higher up the field today. Keith Read’s bandaged knee was giving him no problems and he said, “The knee is fine – it’s just the rest of me that’s falling apart!� They came in just behind SWART – Silver St. Motors and had been with them in the forest above, but got ahead of them by taking a different track. “We took a different route,� said Read, “I think it was a track a single sheep had made, and we followed it!�
On the next section to the overnight camp Sealskinz High Five opted to miss 2 controls and take the 160 minutes of penalty, so they could arrive at camp at a reasonable time (they got in at 21.02). By now it was getting dark and finding the checkpoints in the forest would have been hard and slow, with an added risk of getting lost, so they took the safer choice, as did all the teams behind them. By the time they got to camp Graham Hobson had no brake blocks left at all – and no spares either!�
It was already dark by the time the later teams got to PC9 and the marshals there were settling in, cooking some food on a camp stove and getting out their head torches to await the last teams. At the same time over at the camp support crews were preparing to receive their teams. This camp isn’t as comfortable, it’s a piece of common land, with no water supply and covered in high tussocky grass. By 21.00 it was also starting to rain a little making life harder.
As the night drew on teams came in at a steady rate, their bike lights appearing on the track across the common to herald their arrival, which brought support crew member over to see if it was their team. Sadly, one team isn’t going to ride in – ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ became the first to withdraw. They phoned in to say they were OK, but lost and fed up, and they’d found a pub and were going to pull out.
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