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FURTHER PAGES Cambridge Adventure Race Group 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001
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2-day ACE Race Hafren Forest, Wales 12-13 August 2006 This was the second ACE 2-day of the year and for the first time, Paul and I were wearing the yellow jerseys as the series leaders having won the first event. No pressure then! The journey over was a bit slow behind a hay cart for the last part but we were still there in daylight with plenty of time to sort gear, get organised, look at the map and chat with friends before a good nights sleep. The format was explained to be similar to the first event with the run and bike combined into an 8:30 hour stage with the run transition only open for a limited period in the middle. There were more points on the MTB stage so we aimed to split time accordingly, roughly 2:00 MTB, 3:30 Run, 3:00 MTB. Amazingly that's pretty much what we stuck to although there was an element of luck in that just linking controls that we needed to do together. We also had the quickest transitions overall which gave us a little more time. In the first MTB we did a couple of hike-a-bike short legs which proved quicker than cycling around. We even carried our bikes through and back to one in the spirit of competition when it would have been much quicker to abandon the bikes and go in and out by foot. Hafren forest was great with a lot of forest fire trails and single track linking them. The whole course was like an extended short race, constantly going back and forth past the same junctions and retracing steps. Right at the end I took a couple of wrong turnings and it was only Paul's sense of direction that pulled us back from heading away from transition! After transition the run took us back up through the forest on tracks we had already used. A little trouble descending to one stream junction control as we were on another stream. Paul descended too far and had to climb back up once I found the control - guess he's learnt that one! Nearly all the route was cross country with some serious climb in the heat. Our final descent was with Accelerate/High 5 having completed the course 10 minutes faster than us. Back on the bikes it was a climb back up through the forest. I missed a turning which put us on a track going nowhere near any controls. Having realised the mistake we made the tough but correct decision to go back down to the control and then climb out again. We lost several minutes on this. One more trial hike-a-bike section wasn't so successful and we had to turn around, come out and ride around. Finally just as we didn't want to do, we were up at the furthest part of the forest making decisions about how long it would take us to get back. Luckily most of it was downhill and we made it with just 4 seconds to spare!! This gave us just a small lead going into the night navigation. The night navigation was extended to 2 hours to allow us time to get up the hill to the control give out point. The night nav didn't go as well as it might. I put leggings on at the last minute as I was cold but of course was then too hot for the whole stage. We then got distracted off to a high scoring control over a very rough track which took us most of 30 mins and then stayed out on the moor which I thought would be quite runnable like the part we were on during the day but it wasn't and we struggled, it being obvious at the furthest point that we would be late back. Again I started slowly as Paul tried to push the pace but I was faster by the end in the long run back down the hill. We managed to be only 6 minutes late - it could easily have been far worse. We scored 316 compared to Jeff's 350 despite him being 13 minutes late. This left us trailing Kev Honeysett and Keith Read by just 9 points going into day 2. There were only two stages on the Sunday: the kayaking and a choice of a road bike time trial or a trail run. Lots of scope for tactical choices. We almost had to do the run as Pauls' bike was having problems, but looking back at the previous event we had faired better on the cycle endurance. We still managed to beat Andy and Chris but only by 1 minute while Kev and Keith chose the run. Unfortunately an unknown Eliot Challifour blasted the serious hills beating the rest of the field by 6 minutes taking 40+ points from what we expected. The paddle was the final stage with the usual restriction on having to start it within a period from finishing the previous stage. It was really windy on the reservoir and because the fisherman were using part of it, we were confined to one end meaning the 14km course consisted of a lot of criss crossing. We started well but then I took us to the wrong control, luckily realising soon after to go to the correct one but that cost us several minutes. Overall we were 15 minutes down on Chris/Ian but hung on to 2nd place overall by 80 points but were trailing Kev and Keith by a massive 165pts. Luckily they arn't doing the full series which meant we extended our series lead to 119 points going into the final event. We scored a total of 1864 points bringing my career points to 10232. |
