Peel Adventure MTBO
A Mountain Bike Orienteering Adventure
Anthony Emmet / 25.04.2003
It was fast, furious and great fun!! Racing between controls, weaving in and out of trees, flying along single tracks and launching off earth mounds were all part of the experience. This was a treasure hunt with a difference, whether you were seeking top honours or just out on your rusty steed, you could not help but enjoy yourself. Mountain Bike Orienteering may not be too well known, but if Friday’s event was anything to go by, its popularity will soon rise.
Map
MTBO has been in existence for sometime and is only just beginning to take off with EBOR (Yorkshire Orienteering club) being the main pro-activists in the UK.
Generally though these events and others like the Fat Tyre have made use of maps designed for people on foot. This Peel Adventure MTBO has come about thanks to Dave Peel who has spotted a gap in the market for mountain bikers and decent maps. Dave has been to the top level of orienteering, representing Great Britain between 1998 and 2001 and has since turned his attention to producing maps for all sorts of occasions including the KIMM.
The map we were presented with on Friday was detailed, accurate, up to date and MTBO specific, absolute heaven!! It was 1:15000 scale, so similar to an Orienteering map, but devoid of all the useless information necessary to a foot ‘O’ event. All we wanted to know was how fast we could ride, and Dave produced this on the map with black lines marking fast tracks and various dotted lines marking good riding to difficult to ride, and even better they were correct. This was overlaid on the basic contour, vegetation, water and manmade features that were easily identifiable from a bike. I was impressed!! This enabled accurate navigation while hurtling along at speed, but also showed you where the technical single-track route options were. So if like me you wanted to gamble and add to the challenge, using the single-track options definitely had the desired effect - but they were not necessarily faster. There is an example on the Peel Adventure website to give you a better idea of what I am rambling on about.
Emit
Due to the speeds of this event it is not ideal to be jumping on and off your bike all the time to punch/dib controls, enter the ingenious EMIT system. This clever little system can be compared to “Championchip� as used for the London Marathon, but specifically for bikes.
Originally introduced for Road Races and time trials in Norway, it is simple but extremely effective. It can register your EMIT card which is attached to your bike within about 5 meters, and tells you the code that identifies the control. The EMIT card will flash up the control number and its code so you can cross-reference this with your control descriptions. This will stay on the card while you are still in range of the control, and stay there for 5 secs once you have gone out of range.
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