Questars Trio Race - Wiltshire Downs
Mud and Rain on the Wiltshire Downs
Tom Davies - Team Tri-Adventure / 22.07.2011
Luckily the kind chaps at Questars had negotiated the use of a very nice school hall as the race base, so after the usual pre-race faffing of mixing energy drinks, panicking that I'd only brought one shoe and trying to find my compass, I settled down in the warm dry hall with a coffee (and a couple of hundred other excited looking racers) and had a look at the map. The main feature was a steep ridgeline running east-west across the map about 3km north of the race base, and although not on the scale of the hills that were present at the last Questars in Brecon, it looked to be a fairly substantial (and steep!) climb.
Although the control values at Questars races aren't given out until after you start, it was clear that the majority of the high scoring controls would be either up on the ridge or the other side of it, ensuring that to score well you'd have to tackle the climb several times. The kayak timeslot allocated to me didn't start until 3 hours into the 6 hour race, so I decided that it was best to bike first and to try to clear all of the bike controls before starting the kayaking.
Whatever time was left over after kayaking I would use for running. Normally I'd have preferred to run before biking, to try to avoid the horrid feeling of running on tired jelly legs. In this case however, having only been cleared to run by my physio the day before (a suspected stress fracture fortunately turned out not to be fractured after all), I wanted to keep the running to a minimum to avoid any further damage.
All too soon the start time rolled around, and with my map marked up in waterproof marker it was time to venture out into the rain, through the start arch and pick up the control descriptions and scores. After crossing off the six dummy controls from the map (which for the first time ever made my planned route easier!), I was on the bike and setting a good pace to the first few controls.
These were predominantly accessible by road, which was a good warm-up for the legs, before I turned North, left the tarmac, and tackled the ridgeline for the first time. Sadly bypassing the amusingly named hamlet of Cuckoo's Knob, a steep and slippery climb led to a control located on the aptly named "Mud Lane", before turning back south and a fast descent all the way back down the face of the ridge to the next control.
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