Event: Frontier Adventure Challenge Deerhurst
Location: Huntsville, Ontario
Date: May 1st, 2010
Website: www.fastadventures.com
This 5-8 hour sprint race based out of Deerhurst resort has been my “season opener” for the past four years. It’s become one of my favorite adventure races of the season and a staple on my AR calendar. I love the contrast between going out and getting muddy all day in the woods, then being able to come back to a sweet room at at Deerhurst at night and volunteering for the highschool race on Sunday. As much as I love this race though, it also also one that makes me nervous, as I have a history of making stupid early season mistakes and was currently only 1/3 going into this race!
This year’s event drew 84 all female, male, coed teams and solo racers. I was racing with one of my regular Funderstorm teammates and fellow RF’er Elyse Nieuwold. The race startred from Deerhurst with a run down to the paddle section. My team knows nothing about picking out the right boat, so we grabbed the one that was most convenient and started on the 10km paddle, where we found ourselves, as expected, near the back of the pack. It started raining almost as soon as we started paddling, the intensity of which ranged from a light drizzle to a good old fashioned pouring, with a few flashes of lightning thrown in for good measure. We tried our best to pick off a few teams on the paddle, and at the very least, to keep up with the other all female teams around us.
We paddled in our bike shoes so that we could have a faster transition to the next bike section of the race. We quickly got rid of our paddle equipment at CP2 and hopped on our bikes for the first of two biking sections. After a bit of road riding, we started through a maze of snowmobile trails, looking for an elusive trail that would head us towards CP4. This is one of my most feared adventure racing directions: “find an ATV trail heading generally in X direction towards the CP.” It is here that I usually question every potential trail or decision to be made. But somehow, thanks in part to the plethora of bike tire tracks and a sprinkle of optimism, we ended up on the right trail and enjoyed the muddy ride to CP4. I must take the time here to thank my awesome Kenda Nevegal bike tires, without whom I likely would have been pitched off my bike into the forest.
Here we transitioned to trekking for three CPs that could be obtained in any order. We decided to start with what we viewed as the “safest” one first – CP5 – as we could approach it from a known point on the map. We started bushwhacking then found a trail heading exactly on our bearing. Once we neared the water features we were looking for, we turned back to the left, knowing that the trail had been going slightly right. Somehow, we managed to pop out right near the CP, punched it, then ran back up the trail.
CPs 6 and 7 were a little further and more complicated for us. The area we were trekking through was full of water features, and it was often difficult (for me, as least!) to determine which one of them we were on. We found CP6 with only minor difficulty. En route to CP7, I had my characteristic navigational breakdown where I start heading the wrong way and throw a mini-tantrum. Fortunately, one of my teammates excels in the role of damage control and with a quick look at the map, she helped re-orient us. Once we were heading in the direction of the CP, we saw a trail of teams also heading towards CP7. I was shocked at how bunched up all the teams still were. After punching CP7, we took a straight bearing south to bushwhack back to the trail that led us back to our bikes. I was a little frustrated at seeing all the other teams at CP7 and my teammates detected this in my bushwhacking pace, which one referred to as “a blitzkreig on nature.” I think our aggressive bushwhack paid off though, as I know we got back to CP8 (where we had left our bikes) ahead of a few teams we’d seen around CP7. I had identified this section of the race as the potential “danger area” for me where our race would be decided; I was so relieved when we had found all three CPs and it was over!
At CP8, we hopped back on our bikes to bike back to Deerhurst. After a bit more mud, it was almost all downhill and I clocked nearly 70km/hr on my bike going down one of the paved hills – sweet! We had already decided to do the last section of the race – a short trail running / trekking section – in our bike gear, so when we got to Deerhurst, we dropped our bikes and headed off. Both of the two advanced CPs were located in the trail system across the road from the resort. The first CP we hit was at an intersection of two trails and posed no problem. The second CP was a little trickier, as apparently it had been marked differently on some of the maps. We were lucky in that I believe ours was marked correctly and we found the CP after a few minutes of looking. We bushwhacked down to the road and ran back to the finish.
We had no idea at this point where we had finished or how many female teams were ahead of us. I didn’t see any at the finish line, but I figured that was because they were already long gone. We washed our bikes first, then ourselves, and headed to dinner, where I was thrilled that whole wheat pasta was an option on the buffet! Through some stroke of universal goodwill, we ended up 1st out of 14 female teams in our category. I was shocked! When the results were posted, I was happy to see that we had finished 20th overall out of 84 teams. Perhaps this means the end of my Deerhurst curse!
