Adventure Racing World Championship 2016
The lowdown on Lock Down
Rob Howard / 09.11.2016
What’s the image of Adventure Racing, usually it’s the action shot of course; white water, abseils, bike drop offs, beach running, high mountains ... but in the mix there are usually a few shots of teams intently studying their maps or following a compass.
Navigation is one of the elements that distinguishes Adventure Racing – it’s not all about muscle power and endurance, that won’t help if you are going in the wrong direction or can’t find the checkpoint!
So, when teams received all 40 race maps this morning and went into ‘lock down’ for two hours of map marking and route studying it was an important part of the race, even though the race won’t officially start for a few hours. It was a long job, requiring a lot of concentration and cross checking to make sure everything is marked correctly. (The consequences of a mistake could be very costly in time and energy.)
The hall in the Civic Centre was just the right size with teams spread out on large circular tables covered in maps, and like school kids at the start of term they all had their marker pens and stationary all ready. The lock down was an couple of hours of intense work, and towards the end teams were able to pop in and out of the hall to make amendments to their equipment boxes based on what they now knew.
The teams already knew there would be a lot of paddling in the race, and some had guessed parts of the route, but perhaps the most common comment was there appeared relatively little navigational choice.
Nathan Fa’avae of Seagate said, “I guess we are a little disappointed there doesn’t appear to be much navigation on the course. We like it when you are constantly making decisions.” As they have Chris Forne on the team the harder the navigation the more advantage they’ll have, but he did add. “Having said that you never know until you get out there and see what it’s really like on the ground. All the races of Craig’s we’ve done in the past have had plenty of navigational challenge.”
Tom Gibbs, the navigator on Godzone Adventure said pretty much the same thing. “I think there are parts of the course where it could be really tricky, some of the CP’s on that first trek at night included.”
As the period of Lock Down came to an end teams moved outside to load up their kit and get on the coaches, ready to travel to the start on what is sure to be a nervous ride.
SleepMonsters
