Raiding the Rib

Event: Raid the Rib

Location: Milton, Ontario

Date: April 12, 2008

Sport: Adventure Running

Length: techically 25km, but it depends on how lost you get!

After two moderately successful attempts at navigating for an all female team in the half distance (12.5km) of this biannual event, I thought that I was finally ready to handle the navigation for the full course. Turns out I was mostly right, with the exception of one pesky CP that eluded me (more about this later).

My teammates and I arrived as soon as the registration opened Saturday morning so that we had as much time as possible to work with our maps. After several talk throughs about route options and reiterating our mistakes from past races, we started plotting our routes and taking turns running to the bathroom.

Our goal for the race was simply to finish in the time allowed, and knowing that we would likely be out there for nearly the full eight hours, we started off with a conservative pace. For the first few hours of the race, things were going smashingly. My teammate Stephania and I, with many years of racing together under our belts, work very well together in races such as this where we both have maps. I usually take the lead navigational role and she reminds me when I’m leaning left off my bearing, as is often the case. She is also very used to having to calm me down during my ritual panic attacks when things don’t appear where I think that they should. Together with our third teammate Ursula, who does not navigate but makes up for that with uncanny footspeed, we were whizzing through the course. The “Lasso,” the advanced navigation section and the “In, Over and Out” sections of the course were no match for us. Fuelled by the always appreciated Don’t Get Lost aid stations (think Ringolos, Smarties and Twizzlers, mmmm!), we left CP16 thinking we were unstoppable.

Things continued to go our way until CP17, the beginning of the ominous (for us, at least) “Walk the Line” section of the course. In this part of the event, teams must follow a dotted line on the map on which are located several unmarked CPs. The trick is to “walk the line” as accurately as possible so as not to miss any of the checkpoints. Our team found the first 2 of 3 CPs without difficulty, reading the land features to the best of our ability. Turns out that our ability ran out just shy of CP20, which, despite two valiant attempts, we could not locate. In hindsight, we were likely just a bit too left to see that pesky orange and white flag.

Realizing that we better boogie if we were going to finish in the time allowed, we carried on to CP21. Our (well, MY) confidence was shaken a bit at this point and the next couple of CPs took longer than necessary to find as several temper tantrums (on my part, my teammates just stood there amused) ensued. Added to this was the unnecessarily dangerous water crossing that we made across a river that with the spring thaw resembled Class 3 rapids. The only good part about this is that we were able to review the Swiftwater Rescue Training that we’d received in Mexico last year.

The final CPs were eventually located and we shuffled back to the finish line, just as they were taking it down 🙂 Our final time was 7:35, but because of the missed CP, we were officially unranked. This however, only fueled our fire and you can count on the Funderstorm making a dazzling comeback at Raid the Hammer in November.