Mountain Hardwear Open5 Adventure Race Series
An Unexpected Open 5
Adam Marcinowicz, Team Accelerate Adventure Racing / 06.11.2008
We were blessed with sun in the car park making the decision for Skins shorts that much easier on a frosty November morning. I was pairing up for the first time with Caz (Caroline Bullard). This was in preparation for our time racing together when as a 4 in Portugal.
I was looking forward to this one as it was an opportunity to put my hours of biking around Ambleside into good use. We chose to Bike first, this being another first for me as I have always run first in previous Open 5 events. We got off to a quick start and followed our original planned route. We were evenly matched and both had a hand in the navigation and communicated well, our mission had started and was going well. We felt as though we were moving fast and spirits were high ... or was that from the night before?
It was just an hour into the race that our fortunes changed. My rear derailer got scooped up into my spokes – ‘Oops!’ The Hanger bent and pulleys exploded while on our way to CP14.
To rub things in, our Team mates and opposition, in the forms of Eddie Winslow and Julia Baron came waltzing by only seconds later.
Now Team Accelerate has great Team Spirit and we strongly believe in helping whenever another Team member is having problems. Eddie was no exception and as he and Julia sailed past, smiling like Cheshire Cats, ensured we could still get back by handing me and Caz his spare bus tickets home before leaving us in the capable hands of the local farmer.
This race was by no means over in our view. I spent a bit of time trying to bend and put the bits of bike back together only for them to pop out again. Then I remembered about single speed and tried to break my chain with my Decathlon chain tool, only for chain tool to snap on me twice under the pressure. What can I say, cheap bike tools, hard lesson learnt.
We were getting cold with me faffing so I zip-tied my chain to the rear chain stay and ran with the bike up the hill to get warm. Caz was great during all this, was supportive and honest saying, ‘I don’t know what to do so I will just laugh’. Caz did make friends with the farmer who offered her, maybe us, a lift back to the start. As far as we were concerned our race was not over. I stopped running further up the hill to have another look, coincidently next to some hay bails where Caz also stopped to powder her nose. This got me thinking as surely all that wrapping could come in quite useful for something.
Caz came up with the fantastic answer that I was looking for, ‘We could use the plastic wrapping as a tow!’ So I peeled a length off and also borrowed a bit for spare and started to tie it to my seat post only for Caz to state the obvious. ‘It needs to be attached to my bike’, D’Oh – less haste more speed and all that!
So for the rest of our bike Caz would tow me on the flat and I would run with the bike up the hilly sections. We tried different setups and took it in turns, with the most dangerous being when I scooted along behind Caz on a short tow with my right foot on the left pedal, at 16kph, and then loosing balance only to find my cleat had clipped in to the spud (peddle) and now the bike was attached to me!!.
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