ITERA - Presented by Open Adventure
A Warm Welcome at the Elan Valley
Rob Howard / 13.08.2014
Into the third night of the race the teams are passing through the Elan Valley visitor centre where they break from their long mountain bike stage across mid Wales for a 10km trail run.
It is a figure of 8 run based around the visitor centre and the dam just above it, and takes teams up both sides of the valley, so there is a lot of climbing for tired legs and sore feet. It took leaders adidas TERREX 2 hours to complete it in daylight and the short course teams arriving after dark are mostly deciding not to do it. The time penalties will probably be as long as it takes them to get round, and as they are already short coursed its not worth trying for them.
It’s also hard to leave the centre as the cafe has been especially left open into the night for the teams, so they have a warm place to stop, away from the midges which are biting ferociously outside, and best of all they have hot food and warm drinks.
The centre has been very supportive of the event, going to great lengths to provide this facility, and as the staff have handed out large quantities of pasta bake tonight they’ve had some of their most appreciative customers ever! Chief Ranger Alan Samuel said, “We’re glad to support such an amazing event and have them at the Elan Valley and hopefully some of them will come back to explore at their leisure another time.”
Open Adventure make great efforts to find transitions where there is shelter and if possible warm food and drink. This allows teams to recover and encourages them to keep going, and its one reason why all of the teams are still in the race, which is now moving into its second half. Can all the teams make it to the finish?
Sitting among the teams in a full cafe are tonight were ‘Running on Empty’ and they’d enjoyed the final ride into Elan village tonight when the rains cleared up and the sun came out. They had some difficulty last night finding their way out of a control in a quarry (as did many teams) and in the end decided to bivvy where they were until it was light.
“It was such an overgrown track we had no hope finding it,” they said. “We’ve had a good day today, I think mainly as we’ve not got lost, but we’ve also we’ve got into our stride a bit more. It was a little frustrating with the stop/starts in the early part of the race. Now we think we can make it to the start of the paddle and get some sleep before moving on. We’ve only had about 3 hours sleep so far and this pasta is the first hot food we’ve had.”
They are one of many short course teams making good progress round the course, and it looks like all these teams might make the paddle cut-off.
The full course teams don’t have the luxury of not doing the checkpoints on the trail run at Elan of course, and this is the location where they are serving out their ‘equaliser penalty’ to re-establish the correct race times and positions.
This has had the effect of closing up the positions in the top 10, except for the fact adidas TERREX are still out in front by several hours.
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