The Sting in Stirling
Taking the High Road or the Low Road
Rob Howard / 20.08.2012
In the afternoon of day one teams completed the mountain biking stage to the first major transition at Killin, choosing to take the high road (full course) or the low road (short course).
Leaving the Lake of Menteith after the rowing they rode up onto the Menteith hills and in the forest above Loch Venachar they had to make their first choice. The short route descended to Kilmahog then followed fast and relatively flat tracks alongside the course of the A85, staying on the Rob Roy Way to the CP6 at Balqhidder and missing out CP5. The longer route tracked along the shore of Loch Venachar then turned north, following a track with more climbing and which petered out to an area marked in red on the map, and with the warning “Where this is soft ground get off the bike!”
As it turned out all of the marked area was ‘soft ground’, or bog as most people call it! On this part of the descent into Balquhidder the long course teams put in more effort and were slower, paying the price for collecting CP5. (The short course teams were penalised 90 minutes for missing it ... but will have won some of this back by moving more quickly along the course.
On the ‘soft ground’ I met Russ Ladkin of the Camracers team who offered me his bike with the words, “do you want this, it’s no good to me!” Ian Furlong of XC Racers had no regrets on taking the long route. “At this stage it’s the long route all the way for us ... though we may have to reconsider that in the future.” The Rookies just said; “They told us it would be wet ... they were not wrong!” They added they are Rookie by name and Rookies at adventure racing, but they were moving well and still in high spirits after the hike-a-bike section. So too were one of the French teams, who gave me a thumbs up as they passed and one of them called out; “The ride was very beautiful!” I gave them a thumbs up back – which is the limit of my French.
One team not moving quite as quickly as they hoped for were Mountain Hardware who were suffering from mechanical problems. Sally Ozanne handed me a broken rear mudguard asking me to put it in the bin, and added they’d had a broken chain, a puncture and that Anthony Emmet had lost a wheel spoke. Not the best of starts for one of the race favourites.
SleepMonsters
