What: 8 hour sprint adventure race
Where: Deerhurst Resort, Huntsville, Ontario
When: May 2nd, 2009.
For the past few years, Frontier Adventure Sports & Training has put on their first race of the season out of Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville. This event has become a favorite early season race of mine, for several reasons: 1) As much as I like spending a day out in the mud, there is nothing I like more than to come back to a nice, swanky hotel for a hot shower and a good feed when I’m done – what better place to do that than Deerhurst! 2) Strategically placed at the beginning of May, this race is always a good early season reminder about how unfit I am. 3) I really enjoy seeing and volunteering at the highschool race that is run the day after the FAC race.
This year, my teammates for the race were fellow RF’er Marcus Olson and Breathe Magazine editor Joel Perella. The three of us are going to be competing together in Untamed New England later this summer and thought it would be good to get a sprint race under our belts. An unfortunate tragedy struck our team when Marcus’ bike was stolen off of my car during a gas station pitstop en route to the race. As stoic as he could be under the circumstances, Marcus raced on a rented Deerhurst bike (and still kicked my butt on it).
The race started from Deerhurst with a 10 km mountain bike ride to the canoe put-in. As teams raced up the hills leading out of Deerhurst, I was reminded that I’d spent a lot of time on my feet already this season, but not quite enough on my bike! At TA1, we transitioned to canoes for a 9-10 km paddle back to Deerhurst. The paddle section took us through a combination of river and lake, and was fairly uneventful for us. As usual, we called out lines from the movie Anchorman and waited for opportunites to say, “that’s what she said” to one another. Once we arrived back at Deerhurst, we transitioned to our trekking gear for a series of two CPs before we met back up with our bikes. We found our first control, CP3, with little difficulty. CP4, the next control, proved to be the undoing for many teams in the race. From CP3, we headed to the Deerhurst airstrip where we were trying to locate a trail heading north up to a road. Unfortunately, there were many trails in this area and lots of teams, including ours, ended up on the wrong trail. Fortunately, we were able to detect this mistake fairly easily and got ourselves reoriented by heading north up to the road. At CP5, we got back on our bikes for a short ride to CP6 before going back to trekking for two more CPs – 7 & 8. Concerned about our time, our team opted not to go for a swim to an island in a river for CP8A, an advanced control. After CP8, we got back on our bikes to return to CP5/9, then start heading back to Deerhurst, collecting CPs 10 and advanced biking CPs 11-13 on the way.
Team Breathemag.ca finished the race in 7:02, which was good enough for 9th place in the coed division (out of 26 teams) and 24th overall out of 67 teams. Considering that we’d had some difficulty with CPs 4 & 8, we were really pleased with this result. Following the race, we all enjoyed a buffet pasta dinner and a really cool presentation by the Mallory family about their experience summitting Mount Everest last year!
