This weekend I did my first adventure race. It was fun but I hadn't done any running so my legs got completely trashed after the first stage, which was a nuisance.
Stage 1 was a run over a couple of massive mountains. We had to scale up the side of them, not on a path and the biggest was all rocky at the top so it was more of a scramble. The way up was actually OK, it was the way down that hurt. My knees and calves felt like they were ripping apart. It damaged me for the whole weekend too! We were doing OK but then messed up as we ran out of time and couldn't get the two big point controls we were planning to get. Even then we couldn't make it back in time so ended up losing the majority of our points. We didn't really take into account the huge mountains in the way when we planned how long it would take to get back. We were out for 2.5 hours, half an hour late!
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| The start |
Then it was a 4.5 hour bike stage. This was good, legs were fine on the bike and we went on some brilliant rocky ascents and descents. I love biking in the Lake District! Even on the bikes it soon became apparent that we couldn't get back on time so we dropped down off the hills and cycled back along the road the whole length of Coniston. We ended up being 10 mins late so lost some points but not as disastrous as this morning.
Now I was struggling to walk and getting up was almost impossible! I was very worried about my legs.
We next had a 90 min running night stage. We learned from this morning and plotted ourselves a much smaller loop. It wasn't half as vertical as this morning, but all the controls were still up big hills.. We set of quite slowly as I was struggling to do anything more than a power walk. As the stage went on we did pick it up a bit and we properly ran the last mile back, because it was flat and we wanted keep all our points for once! The route we did was really nice, it went over nice grassy hills and up steep rocky paths. The 2nd control we got was at the bottom of a waterfall and you had to reach out over the water to get it. The weather was brill and it was a really nice warm night stage. We were only 2 mins late back too so a vast improvement on this morning.
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| Me shuffling along in the night stage |
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| Gill skipping along in the night stage |
No dinner! And no sleep for a 2nd night running! Legs were really bad this morning so I decided to do the kayak stage and miss the final fell run. I actually couldn't even of walked it because it goes up and down the Coniston Old Man. The kayak stage was great fun. I've only been in a kayak on holiday once so didn't know how it would go. Gill does kayak so she put me in the front. It didn't seem to be the ideal place when we got out into the lake. It's was very windy with lots of waves all coming into the boat and into my face! It was great fun though. We were pretty slow but that was a good thing because the other people gave the control positions away. We turned down wind and were going well, then had to cross the lake, that was interesting as the waves were all coming from the side then. We did a conservative loop as we didn't know how long it would take. We were back 20 mins early I think! That makes a change for us.
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| My pink wellies kept my feet toasty warm :-) |
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| We are in sync and everything! |
All in all it was fun but I think it has wrecked my knees for a while. I enjoyed the social side and trying the different things but don't think I'll be doing another one any time soon!
