---

Pump it Up

Rob / 02.04.2004

It was a quiet start to the 3rd Indoor adventure race, with just 4 teams in the first heat, and to begin with they headed outside to the woods for a run/ride/navigate section, and then to the lake for canoeing. There was not much to separate them on the water, with both ‘Penta’ and ‘Decathlons Jungle Bunnies’ scoring 1000 points. This was despite the ‘Bunnies’ (Gill Watson, Keith Read and Neil Hay) tipping over. Though on the ride their fortunes were reversed as Penta had a puncture and ran a kilometre with the bike.

On the ‘land’ stage it was the other two teams in the heat who did better thanks to their navigation, with both Dynamic Adventure Racing and Orange UK scoring 1008. So when they came back into the arena it was a close contest, but that was soon to , as they discovered this year’s course required a lot of upper body strength.

This year there is no biking or running inside, so the arena is less frantic and spectators can don’t have to watch several teams doing different things in different corners. The inside stages are the static simulators (rotating climbing wall, canoe and bike trainers) and the technical stage which takes the rest of the arena up …. and most of the airspace!

In fact almost all the time the teams are off the ground, so it could be called the ‘Air’ stage. It began with a an aerial traverse on a rectangular frame suspended from the ceiling, with scramble nets at the ends and climbing holds along the side. They were well spaced and not easy to stay on, especially for those who opted not to put on climbing shoes, and as everyone had to dib while hanging on.

The cruel part was that if one team member fell off, all of them had to start again, and this happened a lot. Some competitors did not have the strength to get round and never completed the climb, and then they had to face a Jacob’s ladder, one even higher than last year. And if they could clamber up that the next challenge was to haul themselves up a rope climb followed by a zip wire … and then round again.

Only the ‘Bunnies’ were able to stay on the climbing frame and move steadily up the ladder and rope climb. The other teams did not have the strength to get round, and Jonathan Mayne of DAR was really struggling to get up the rope ascent and had to give up on it. The result was that the ‘Bunnies’ scored 1020, while their nearest rivals, Orange UK’, only got 450, so they came out clear winners.

See All Stories On This Race