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At the YMCA

Rob Howard / 28.08.2010

Overnight teams have been paddling on Coniston Water and trekking towards Lake Windermere to start a second, longer paddle for the YMCA National Outdoor Centre. First however they all had to finish stage two, and for two teams that was too much to ask. For ‘Accelerate A’ and ‘Get No Sleep’ the race had already proved too long and with team members exhausted they had to be taken off the course and returned to transition. (The Camracers team also withdrew on the following trekking stage.)

The race was already taking much longer for the leading teams than expected (hence the removal of the MTBO challenge from the course) and it was no surprise that the slowest teams were late into the transition to stage 3. The closure time for this was put back to 02.00, but even then the last team did not leave until after 03.30 in the morning.

From there the trek across to Windermere crossed the Furness Fells and one particular checkpoint on this stage caused some navigational difficulty and there were a lot of headlights bobbing around the area in the darkness as teams searched. It look leaders adidas Terrex 40 minutes to find, and they have and international orienteer on the team, but of the ‘full course’ teams they were still the first to arrive at the next transition at the YMCA centre.

As far as we can tell from the leading teams passing through the YMCA there are only 3 who have completed the full course to date and they are adidas Terrex, planetfear.com and Accelerate B, who have were all within an hour of each other arriving at the transition. Team Inov8 arrived having missed one paddling checkpoint on Coniston water, while Calder Valley missed on mountain biking checkpoint last night. “We didn’t read the route book correctly and spent 20 minutes looking for the way into the Church Beck canyon,� said Phil Scarf, “so we didn’t have time to go to checkpoint 15.� FGS Chocmalt had also missed a mountain biking CP towards the end of stage 2, but it was a strategic choice. “We decided to ride round by road rather than go over the Walna Scar trail and push our bikes all the way up there,� said Alastair Morris. “We thought it would be an hour quicker and it was an hours penalty but less demanding.� (The final rank is based purely on time with all the penalties for missed CP’s applied, so the fact they’d missed one CP is not necessarily significant to their result.)

With the leading teams pushing the cut offs and everyone moving slower than expected a decision has been taken to make further cuts to the course. Bruce Duncan told me he had taken out CP’s 34-37 on the long mountain trek, and 46 to 48 on the following mountain biking stage. He admitted to being a bit “overzealous with my course planning�!
With increasingly heavy rain showers falling in the early morning the facilities at the YMCA centre were a blessing. There was ample space to lay out the kit bags and kayaks by a row of permanent tents which the teams could use to sleep in. They had concrete floors and were chilly, but at least they were dry. In the main building there was tea and toast as promised and a warm place to sit, check the maps and eat ... and a few teams managed to sneak in to sleep as well. It was a welcoming transition and a chance to regroup and through the morning transition was constantly busy. Officially the transition closes at 11.00 but there is a further 1 hour 20 minutes window for teams to leave and set off on the Windermere paddle.

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