Better late than never? I feel like I should have written this months ago, but just forgot.
This is going to be a super crappy (and crabby) report more for myself to look back to.
I love Adventure Racing and this one was ... good. But a few things ground my gears.
1) The Results were wrong. Are still wrong. They didn't enforce their own rules, a team that finished just behind us should have been DNF'd for a PFD violation but wasn't. At least they finished behind us! Another team that medalled was put in the wrong category and didn't get their due at the ceremony, it was bad.
2) The Awards Took Forever. Hours after the race before we finally got to the medal ceremony, long after the cut-off. We just wanted to go home, but zero urgency on the part of organizers
3) The Food Took Forever. This is the second straight year they tried to feed hundreds of people with food truck(s) that are so incredibly slow... it's not working, hopefully they do something else??
4) The Course Kind of Sucked... lots of difficulty came from really long climbs on the bike, not from any complexity in navigation or strategy.
OK enough complaining, maybe. It's one of the last races of this kind and I really do love them.
On to our race...
First Run
I don't know how we got lost on these super basic trails but we missed a turn and ended up following other people the wrong way... ugh! Fortunately it didn't cost us that much time, and we were able to recover... the next checkpoint we got really well that a lot of others missed, one of the few times navigation came into play.
Paddle
We were surprised to hit the paddle in second place! We're far from the fastest runners (me especially) but I guess the navigation did work to our advantage, somehow.
We crushed it... as we should!
Run #2
This was a long and obvious run around the lake to the bike drop-off. Nothing too interesting, but we did get passed rather predictably and fell from 2nd to 4th overall.
We weren't quite sure who was in our category but we were pretty sure the team in 1st was it. They were the ones who should have been DQ'd... but I'm not bitter.
Bike #1
The hills, holy hell.
We used gravel bikes based on what we knew ahead of time, and it was a huge advantage - this was entirely on-road, nothing technical at all.
We bombed down the hills - I hit 77km/h on gravel, downhill, it was INSANE. So much fun, so comfortable... don't tell my wife!
What goes down must go up - and the climbs were HARD. Fortunately at this point we didn't come back quite as high as we'd come down, so that's a plus?
We passed a few of the teams that had passed us and figured we were in pretty good shape.
Run #3
I enjoyed this run (hike?) the most, it was an interesting area to navigate to checkpoints and some different strategy options. We really nailed this one on navigation, I wish my pace could have done it justice.
Bike #2
Ho-lee-sheeeeeeeeet...
The climbs right out of the Run were so steep, like "pretty good people walking bikes" steep. I saw 15%+... on gravel, it was diabolical.
We finally got to the top and in typical-of-this-course style, we then went down....... fast! This was a curvy gravel descent that was so much fun, again we found ourselves passing uncomfortable bikey people with our sick gravel bikey skills.
One again what went down had to go up... and the climb this time was a lot. Several kilometers straight up with a quick diversion into some little trails, then back to climbing.
I died a lot, but so did a lot of people.
The Finish
Through a weird neighbourhood section then back to the start/finish.
We won our category! Yay!
All in all a good day, except for the 4 points mentioned above.
I didn't hate the course but far from my favourite. Canoe leg was interesting/great, the runs were decent, but the bike was pretty boring. Hard but not in an interesting way, just long. I would rather be further north in some wilderness, but everyone's different.
See you in 2025, most likely.
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