One of my favourite races every year is Storm the Trent. You know Sean Roper is going to give you a great location, with some tricky navigation, and a lot off people to race against. This year, between the 3 races held that day (Hike, Trek and Trek Elite) there were 450 racers. I decided to do the Trek race as a solo, in part because no one I knew was looking for a teammate to race, plus the race was starting a bit later in the morning than the Trek Elite and I needed my sleep! In hindsight I was happy to have chosen the shorter race as I woke up that morning feeling ill…so I medicated myself as much as I could and took off for Warsaw with fingers crossed.

The race started with a sealed envelope and 3 CP’s scattered around the area. Each team had to send one person running off to find them…so I chose myself of course. Ha ha…some solo racer humour. It was a sign of the day to come, as AR legend Dave Zietsma (he was racing with his wife Nuala) and I ended up running around to the CP’s side by side for the most part. After the run, we dragged our boats to the water and begun the paddle into the Warsaw Caves Conservation Area. I finished the run quickly but took a bit long to drag my boat to the shore and and get in safely with all the canoes around me. I quickly made up the time on other teams ahead of me and was one of the first boats to dock and start the trek for the mandatory and optional points that followed.

After a missed turn, I ran into Dave and Nuala on the trails and spent the next couple of hours with them bagging all the mandatory CP’s and the bonus ones. The race was a points race, with your points total and then final race time determining your rank. I’m better on my feet than bike, so I decided to do all the optional trek CP’s and skip the biking ones if I had to. The CP’s were tricky to find at times, but I managed to get all of them, although I mangled my foot on a pretty spectacular fall at the CP among the caves. I was way back by the time I paddled back to the race start to pick up my bike, but it is impossible to tell your placing because you never know if teams around you did the optional CP’s or not.

Nonetheless I had a good paddle back and quickly transitioned to my bike. By this time, I had only 2-hours or so to go before the 6-hour cutoff, so I quickly modified my plan of attack in terms of the hitting all the optional CP’s and hit the road. It got pretty crowded on the trails and roads, as I weaved my way around some of the slower Trek racers around me who had skipped some of the optional trekking CP’s and thus were ahead of me. To add to that, we were now on the same trails as the Hike racers many of whom were coming in the opposite direction. I met up with Dave and Nuala again throughout much of the bike section. We hit the last mandatory CP and took off the final trail home with what seemed to be time to spare. Unfortunately the trail was unrideable at times so it slowed me right down. Despite hammering with all I had, I came in 20-minutes late and thus lost 200 points (10 points per minute late) of the 410 I had accumulated. To my surprise, I still managed to have one of the highest point totals overall but I lost out on winning the solo category by 10 points…1 lousy minute. Makes you always think about all those little ‘breaks’ you take during a race.

Nonetheless it was a blast…another fabulous Storm race in a terrific location. Well done Sean…can’t wait for next year!