British Indoor Adventure Race
The Final Effort
Rob / 04.04.2004
The 4 teams who raced in the final heat on Saturday afternoon, the highest scoring heat by far, had had little time to recover. They included the two highest scoring qualifiers, Hebrideanchallenge.com and The British Orienteering Team, who were racing the outside stages first with Saab Salomon/Orange and The North Face.
There was no repeat of the problems the defending champions had with their bikes yesterday and Saab Salomon/Orange lead all the way around the woodland circuit on the ‘Land’ stage. They made no mistakes when they jumped off for the navigation exercise and set the highest score of the day (1792 points). The British Orienteering Team were closest to them (1624 points), but it was a big lead to establish on their first stage. Hebrideanchallenge.com had a poor start on a stage they expected to do well on, finishing at the back of the their group of 4.
Indoors at the same time, ‘Decathlon SAS Jungle Bunnies’ were putting in an even better start on the Technical stage. They had no problem staying on the climbing holds of the ‘sky frame’, getting up the Jacob’s Ladder or the rope ascent, and set a huge score of 1940. They even filled their Sportident card by making 64 ‘dibs’ and no other team came close to their score. The nearest was Wonder Y who scored 1555. Both these teams had the advantage of a full day’s rest and doing the hard climbing stage first.
When they moved onto the ‘Simulator’ stage they were evenly matched. Wonder Y are a team of paddlers but both Shirine Voller and Rob Pinfield proved to be exceptional climbers on the rotating climbing wall. Voller outclimbed Gill Watson despite wearing trainers, when Watson, and just about every other competitor had climbing shoes on.
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