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Double Delight in Purbeck

Rob Howard / 30.04.2010

When Race Director David Hunt introduced the prize giving of ‘Q2 – The Quest Challenge’ he described the weekend as “all 4 seasons in one event�. Friday night there was a definite winter chill in the air as the temperature dropped to -5C and the shivering campers awoke to ice encrusted tents on the field at Burnbake campsite, not far from Corfe Castle on the ‘Isle of Purbeck’. On Saturday the sun shone as forecast and it was like a summers day, but on Sunday the forecast for more of the same was badly out and the temperatures and misty conditions were more like spring and autumn.

Whatever the weather he was speaking to a bunch of happy campers and racers after a very successful inaugural Q2 race. The terrain was varied and new to many of the competitors as the Purbeck peninsula south of Poole harbour is not on the way to anywhere, but it proved to be well worth a special visit. It is varied too, a mix of chalk downs, forest and sandy heath, with the mud flats and extensive coastline of the harbour providing an ideal sheltered venue for a sea paddle. Equally varied were the twists and challenges Hunt put into each stage to keep the strategy varied, and to keep the competitors thinking over all 4 stages.

The event field at Burnbake was an ideal location and Hunt commented, “I love this area and really wanted to have an event here, but with a fixed campsite that was away from it all, and which we could use as a start/finish.� The event base was a large marquee and some 250 racers arrived to compete, from first timers to experts, in teams of 2,3 or 4 or to go solo.

The race was split into 4 stages, 3 on Saturday and a longer one on Sunday, with a total of 75 checkpoints in all and began with a trail run. This stage was called ‘The Gold Rush’, though as Hunt pointed out the only gold in the area is black gold, as the race map included all 5 oil wells in Purbeck. “I wanted you to run first to get a feel for the terrain,� he said, so he had set out 14 CP’s all around the event base, plus 3 activity points. There were penalties for not visiting these (all 3 for masters or 2 of them for novices), and points to be won for completing the activities. Two were on the chalk ridge which runs from Corfe to the coast and the rest were scattered in the forest and heath.

The activities all turned out to be mental tests, which wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but they were to be a feature of the weekend. Activity point A was a big Sudoku challenge which revealed a grid reference for a farm and when teams wrote the correct farm name down for the marshal they earned their extra points. Some teams coped well, others narrowed the area down then guessed, and some spent ages trying to work it out and then failed, winning no points at all.

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