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First Time For Everything

Craig Zielinski / 30.04.2006

I\'ve been obsessing about AR for a couple of years now. Ever since Gary Tompsett came into an outdoor shop I used to work in and wrote down two web addresses on a post-it note. (Rat Race and Wilderness ARC.) Since then I\'ve completely annihilated a copy of Ian Adamson\'s Guide to Adventure Racing through reading and re-reading, and acquired a vast amount of gear for the sport.

The sticking point has been actually training and actually taking part. I\'m one of these people that love the idea but have a great deal of difficulty getting round to actually doing. It was worse after I marshalled at the Wilderness ARC. After experiencing first hand the family atmosphere of the UK adventure racing community it really irked me that I hadn\'t been at “the sharp end� of a race. My friends and I signed up for the Edinburgh Rat Race in July … no more having “all the gear and no idea�.

Now starting to focus on the idea of racing, I began looking at other potentials for the team to cut our teeth on before the Rat Race. Think of my mixture of utter joy and abject horror when the all-too-accessible Wan Dae races materialised! I\'d have no reasonable excuse not to enter.

The Rat Race team couldn’t go, so I found myself answering a post on the Sleepmonsters “find a team mate forum� and before I knew it I had entered the Simply Blended 5 hour race with two people I hadn\'t met who were both older, fitter and more experienced in the realms of running and cycling than I. With about 8 weeks of learning to run for more than 30 minutes and cycling on the first bike I\'ve ever owned as an adult, I found myself standing at the Scottish Adventure Racing Wan Dae race in the Pentlands, amid a sea of lycra and lightweight, breathable fabric-wearing bodies, being hastily instructed by new teammate and friend Alan on how to paddle a kayak.

Due to the number of dead inflatable kayaks, it was deemed that our trio would all be in the one boat, rather than a two in one, one in the other scenario. This was a good thing, as I was pretty sure that the craft with one person in it would be going nowhere. The wind was disturbingly strong and for some reason it failed to compute that our kayak was already inflated because a team who’d just finished their kayaking leg, almost three hours after they had started, had just brought it back. Comments from them like “that was horrendous� and “I never want to do that again� seemed to bounce off my wind-beaten ears rather than going in them.

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