The Battle of Antrim
At the Battle of Antrim
Paul McArthur (Average Joes) / 16.12.2011
Cootehill was the last CCAR race I did and with a gap of 12 months I was looking forward to getting back into race mode. It was going to be a bit of a wake up call for the body as I hadn’t really had a chance to catch up on all the training I had missed over the last few weeks. However, a 5 to 6 hour race was exactly what the doctor had ordered. On top of that I was teaming up with Richard Nunan for the first time…..and was looking forward to this as well.
Saturday dawned damp, dull and very windy. I arrived at the Antrim Forum Sports Pavilion just after 8:30 to a packed car park and over a hundred competitors rushing around sorting gear and throwing on orange race bibs. I haven’t seen so many ‘weekend warriors’ since the good old days of the ACE races. It was good to see and a great compliment to the planners and organising team who had worked so hard to get adventure racing as an establish sport in the North of Ireland.
I meet Richard and we quickly sorted out registration. Both of us are relative ‘old boys’ to adventure racing and of course instinctively knew how to prepare and what to expect. Our only decisions were to use Power Straps, I would navigate and Richard took the dibber.
The race started at Antrim Yacht Club. The water on Lough Neagh resembled a maelstrom of boiling swirling water and I was glad the river heading up into Antrim looked relatively still in comparison. The wind was strong, but at least it wasn’t raining ... yet.
At the start, Richard and I stood along the front row with the rest of the usual suspects. With nearly 190 people behind us it was going to be a pretty fast start to get away from the crowds. The Antrim Lord Mayor started the race and we were off running along the riverside path for a few hundred metres until we were given our first (of 5) maps. The first couple of controls lead back to the Forum running track. After a quick three legged race around the track, we continued back long the riverside path into Antrim town centre.
At the Court House we were given another map of the town centre and we had to mark down numbers to various ‘picture’ clues dotted around the town centre. We took a clockwise route around the controls, but got caught out while trying to take a shortcut through the Tesco car park and found it was a dead end. Back on track we quickly finished back at the Court House and had to total all the numbers to be able to continue.
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