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Galloping Round Galway

Shane Ohly / 12.09.2008

After days of wet weather, Saturday morning dawned bright and clear and the 1st Galway Rat Race enjoyed great weather all day. The base was the recently reconstructed central icon – Eyre Square. Later, many competitors lounged in the Square fountain to cool off and clean up at the end of their day.

At 11am the prologue kicked off proceedings. For anyone involved with the Newcastle and Gateshead Rat Race the format would have been familiar; a ‘Norwegian style’ orienteering challenge where the description of the control you need to visit is at the location of the current control and you need to write it down or memorise the details.

However, in Galway we took this concept a stage further by splitting the field into two and having them flow round the course in opposite directions with omni-directional control descriptions! We also got rid of the written control descriptions and replaced them with pictures of the next control. So, midway round the course competitors found themselves on the top of a multi story car park, looking at a picture of pier, staring over the edge and trying to determine, which of the Galway piers their next check point was. The correct one was over 1km away and just visible across the city skyline! This was Photo ‘O’ for the first time in the Rat Race.

Teams collected code letters from each checkpoint to form a code sequence. Without the correct sequence you couldn’t get into the bike compound until 12 noon.

There were then 4 different adventure loops to complete. The first taking the Rats north to Mionlach and for a short kayaking adventure on the wide River Corrib, before heading back to Eyre Square. At the end of each loop the competitors returned to Eyre Square and had 2 activities to complete. These included searching for a checkpoint in a ball pool, a horizontal bungee, filling a leaky drain pipe, speaking Gaelic Irish, searching for a SPORTident checkpoint in a pot of yogurt and space hopping up steps. Evil and fun, all at the same time!

Adventure Loop 2 saw the competitors heading over to Bearna Woods via Galway City Museum, Massimo Pub and the Salthill diving boards. The tide was racing out so only the leading teams got to jump off the higher diving boards into the sea, and lower boards were used for slower teams ... phew! (Fortunately the weather was gorgeous). Arriving at Bearna Woods the teams had to complete a ‘Nightline’, a blindfolded ropes-following activity and orienteering course.

In between all this frantic activity the teams had to keep their eyes open for the rare red leprechaun who was running round the city with a checkpoint in his hand. If you had caught him by the end of the day there was a fifteen-minute penalty ... and boy could this leprechaun run!

Adventure Loop 3 took the competitors east to Merlin Park Woods and the ruined Merlin Castle. Here they found Merlin the Wizard with a tough riddle for them to solve. They could then dive into Merlin Park Woods proper to search for another CP before heading back to Eyre Square.

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