Race: Frontier Adventure Challenge
Location: Huntsville, Ontario
Date: May 3, 2008.
Length: 8 hours
“My advice to you,” began Geoff Langford at the pre-race meeting for Frontier Adventure Sports & Training’s first race of the season, “is to jump in the first puddle that you see, but there is no way that anyone is going to stay dry today.” Geoff was right, and between the muddy, muddy trails and the fact that it rained for most of the day on Saturday, there wasn’t much chance of anyone staying dry beyond the first five minutes of the race.
With my regular teammate in France, I had the pleasure of racing on another all female team for this race, The Sherpas. Having only raced in this division for the past year or so, I was looking forward to racing with some different people and sharing the navigation responsibility.
Based on participant feedback, Frontier changed the format of their race course from previous years. These changes involved more orienteering with less distance between CPs, allowing CPs to be collected in any order within each discipline, and lengthening the advanced course from 1-2 additional CPs to 3-4. From a racer perspective, I enjoyed the new changes to the race format. I always have difficulty when there are several kilometres between CPs, and I liked the additional element of strategy that being able to obtain CPs in any order brings to a race. Kudos to Frontier for keeping things fresh!
The race began with a bike orienteering section in which racers had to obtain 8 biking CPs in any order. These CPs were all found off of a series of main snowmobile and ATV trails near Deerhurst. At the word “Go,” teams scattered in all different directions towards the trails, which were very muddy, but mostly rideable and lots of fun. All of the CPs involved racers either getting off their bikes to trek in for the controls or finding additional trails not shown on the map to locate them. With the exception of the elusive CP6, which kept many teams looking for a road sign at an intersection of two unmarked snowmobile trails, our team moved through this section of the course fairly efficiently, although we did stop briefly to take some pictures of my bike stuck in the mud for the photo contest.
After collecting all the bike CPs, racers headed back to the central TA at Deerhurst to transition to paddling. By the time we got back to the resort, it had started raining, and the rain did not let up until late in the evening. We tried not to let this affect us since we realized we’d be wet in the boat anyways! High winds + open water resulted in fairly slow paddle section that took us about 2 hours to locate the 2 paddle CPs. We were very happy to get out of the boat and run back to the TA to change into whatever dry gear we had before the trekking section.
The trek section of this race took place on the Deerhurst trail system. 6 regular course CPs were all located on or near intersections on the trails. Our team began this section with 2 hours left in the race, and after hearing that some experienced teams had had trouble with the advanced course, we made the decision to stick with the regular course. In retrospect, we had little trouble finding the regular course CPs and came in with an extra hour to spare, so we likely could have done the advanced course, which involved finding another 4 trekking CPs located off trail. Hindsight, is of course, 20/20, and although we did not complete the advanced section, we felt that we had worked well as a team, made minimal mistakes in the race, and had a great time splashing around in the mud for 7 hours!
