Raid The North - Sun Peaks
Team Britannia Construction Recaps Their Race
Gary Robbins / 12.08.2006
I've learning over the past few years that getting a consistent and cohesive team together is just about the hardest thing you can undertake. As they say, just getting to the starting line is the hardest part of any good adventure race.
So it was Monday night 10pm and I still had not managed to construct a team for Friday's Raid the North in Kamloops.
My MOMAR teammates were: in Denmark, still broken, and just flat broke. I didn't feel too bad and hadn't opened my visa statement in two months so I figured I'd give it a go.
After scouring all my local resources I was forced to start hitting up adventure racers I'd never met before...or maybe I just needed some people who didn't know me! Either way at 10pm on Monday night I was calling hostels in Banff, AB to try and track down a girl by the name of Jen Silverthorn, who in an e-mail had said she would consider racing in Kamloops. Her husband notified me of her approximate whereabouts and I went to work hoping a message would reach her.
At 11pm I heard back and she confirmed that she was indeed ready and willing to go all the way to Kamloops to race with strangers. Only problem was that when we first spoke I thought I only needed one additional teammate. I had her confirm she would race before I told her that so far it was just her and I...with no support crew!
She knew she could find another racer in Calgary and I knew I could find one in Whistler. We agreed to exhaust our resources for a support crew, but I failed to mention that I had already done so and came up empty. I was truly embarrassed to bring so little to the table, but I really wanted to race Raid the North again this year. It was too close not to do so (4hr drive).
I found a friend of a friend in Whistler by the name of Megan Rose and Jen had located a guy in Calgary by the name of Andrew Green. Andrew had a brother visiting from Australia who he convinced, after hours of begging and feeding him beer, to be our support crew...we had a team, and we would race as 'BRITANNIA CONSTRUCTION'.
Megan and I arrived in Kamloops at midnight on Thursday. Our teammates had to drive through the night and didn't arrive until just 2 hours before registration. They were going to head into a 36hr race having already been up for 36 hours!
The race started at midnight on Friday and immediately we were in the toughest bush whack I have ever seen. Not 30 minutes into the race, when we swam across a river, I started cursing Geoff Langford's name(race director.) He had put together a truly challenging and spectacular course, with the first section of trekking to the bikes being the most difficult, at least in my opinion.
Numerous teams got lost and we were no exception. By the time we had reached CP 2, seven and a half hours had passed and we were sitting in second to last place overall. If memory serves me correctly the distance we had covered in 7.5hr's was less than 15km!
Once we found our bikes we went about trying to climb back into contention. Four complete strangers came together in a way that only adventure racing demands (well Jen and Andrew knew each other, but you get the idea!) We all did whatever it took to ensure that the team moved faster and slowly but surely we did start catching teams; in fact by the time we hit the paddling section we were in 18th overall.
The paddle was great with beautiful weather and views; we even took a five minute mid way break to go for a quick swim, some with clothes on, and some without!
We had moved up one more spot on the 37km paddle and hit the final bike leg into the night. Biking was definitely our team’s strongest discipline and we tracked down an additional three teams before hitting the transition to either the long course or the final trek.
We felt fortunate to make the long course cutoff and after a quick transition we were out on the bikes again. A wrong turn here, a wrong turn there, some hallucinating (I started to struggle to stay awake and when I looked up Megan was absolutely ripping down the logging roads on a skateboard! I thought I too should have brought a skateboard before me starting yelling at myself to wake the hell up!) and we were onto the final trekking stage up and over Sun Peaks Resort.
We crossed the finish line in good spirits and all happy with our 9th place overall finish. Not too bad for some Cow Town racers pairing up with some West Coast mountain town racers and hoping for the best.
Special thanks to my teammates for putting up with me and eating all of my food.
We should also give very special thanks to our sponsors for this event.
Primarily Britannia Construction, who specialize in custom home construction and design. Contact Mike Young at 604-213-6566
Also special thanks to,
www.rudyprojectusa.com
www.princetontec.com
www.experiencecycling.ca
www.carbboom.com
www.kinesys.com
www.valburke.com
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