Irish Adventure Racing Championships
AR Lessons at Night School
Gillian Murray / 20.04.2004
There were 9 teams at the start of the race on Saturday morning, which dawned rather misty and damp. We got a quick briefing from Greg Clarke about some of the basic rules we had to remember and then we were off on our bikes. As the only team doing the 2 day race, we had persuaded Greg to let us do it as a continuous race and this still seemed like a good idea at 10:30am on Saturday. Once we got to 10:30am on Sunday, I think we were beginning to have second thoughts!
The race began with a bike leg. All teams headed off in the same direction and we hunted as a pack for the first couple of checkpoints. When my tow rope broke going round a sharp bend (I know I shouldn’t break so hard!), our team (Team Flapjack) fell back a little behind the rest of the group, but we wanted to pace ourselves so we would last through the night and not have to stop from exhaustion!
Lesson 1 was “always carry a spare cable tie, or two!� Mickey McCallion, one of our regulars on the team couldn’t race this weekend and he normally carries them, so we were missing him already! Ricky Gault, his replacement was a strong biker and could trot up any hill we put in front of him, but neither he nor any of the rest of us thought of bringing any out with us.
Once we got over the trauma of the broken tow rope, and got used to my slow pace on the bike, we just settled in to our “follow the navigator� mode. I’d had a bit of a spill into the mud, complete with buried stones to chip at the knees when Ivan and Steve repaired the tow rope with surgical tape (how resourceful!). Not bothering to disconnect on the downhills, I braked hard approaching a corner, “WE’RE GOING TO CRASH�, I yelled. My back wheel locked and as I passed Steve, my towing partner, his bike was pulled from under him, depositing him in a heap in the ditch!
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