My First Adventure Race…

Wow! What an experience! First off big thanks to Steve who invited me along to this race, thanks for having some faith in me Steve.

Yesterday I competed in my first adventure race. It was the Salomon Adventure Challenge – Canadian Championship race. Despite its name, it is open to anyone which is why I was able to compete.

It was scheduled to be a 14 hour race, or at least that was supposed to be the cut off time, but the first place team completed the race in just over seven and a half hours. My team came in somewhere just over 12 hours I think. I didn’t actually get our official time yet. Steve tells me it’ll be up on the website eventually.

Granted my team didn’t do so hot, but since I was only out to complete the race, I was very happy with how we did. We didn’t even come last so that was a bonus. :) We started strong, but made a couple of costly errors on our way to the first two checkpoints which completely took us out of contention. In my opinion we finished strong despite our large set backs at the beginning.

The race itself consisted of one hiking leg, two biking legs and two paddling legs. We started off hiking, transitioned to biking, then transitioned to paddling (canoe), then transitioned to paddling (rafts) and finally finished with biking again.

I managed to stay hydrated and fuelled up for pretty much the entire race, but I was starting to fade for the last few kilometers of biking. I found the hardest part of the race to stay hydrated was the paddling legs, you just don’t want to stop paddling for anything, including drinking.

Highlights (and lowlights) from the race: realizing we had overshot both checkpoints 1 and 2 by several kilometers; getting to the second transition area to find out there were no canoes available; being thrown into the Ottawa river after less than successfully navigating ‘butterfly’ rapids; riding through the finish gate with my arms in the air.

I’m sore today, but I figured I would be. Stairs are not my friend today, but I’m sure I’ll recover quite quickly. This race was good motivation for me to get back into running again. We’ll see how that goes.

So thanks again to Steve for bringing me along. I’m definitely up for any races in the future…