Orienteering race 2:51:29 [5] 26.26 km (6:32 / km)
ahr:175 max:190 shoes: Inov8 X-Talon 212 2012
Raid the Hammer 2012 on team Where Are We? with Chris and Jeremy, for those wondering who these guys are - Chris was on my zombie team last for last years RtH and Jeremy is another guy from The Ontario Triathlon League - both pretty accomplished City Chasers.
We were really well matched, no one ever fell drastically behind - Jeremy had a little trouble technically in the Rocky Horror sections, but for most of it we were side by side.
Plan was just to run our own race at our own pace and ignore what the other teams were doing, which is excatly what we did - the splits look like it was a head to head battle the whole way, but I was never really conscious of the other teams - it felt we'd always seem to pull away from one of them, then they'd suddenly be on our tail again - frustrating!
Only 3 mistakes of note and all under 30 seconds and a stop of 2 mins to tape up a blister that was forming.
First scramble, N4, N2, N1, N3 - first tiny mistake on route to N2, not turning off the Bruce at a bend, but tiny!. Got back to #1 in sight of the other teams, headed out to C and back with a crowd of people in my wake (you're all welcome). Got back 15s before Jeremy who'd been to A and we were off, right with VanBatKins, who disappeared into the distance instantly, an event that happened 3 or 4 more times during the day!
S1 and 2 were fine, the road run was a slog to begin with, but took the time to eat (ended up being my only food of the day) and drink and look at the next stage.
No problems at all in Brant, except the blister stop (in which about 5 teams appeared!), really, really nice forest in there (shame so much of it is private property :/).
Did the second scramble A, B, D, E, C. Took a gamble on the green going A-B and it paid off, thick but easy to move through/not thorny. Helped finding B by a big group of Half Raid teams loudly celebrating finding it :). Second sighting of VanBatKins here.
The climb up to the Aid Station was the beginning of the hurt. We took our time here and were treated to our 3rd VanBatKins run through :)
Again no problem with the Nav in the final section after this, it helped I'd done the GHO monthly training back here sometime in March/April - everything was kinda familiar.
Final road/trail run was agony - don't think I've ever sustained such a high HR for so long. This was the only time we were really racing the other teams. No chance on taking the lead from JVD and co, but both other eventual 3rd and 4th place teams had a team member that was really struggling so we put the foot down as hard as it would go and got enough of a gap to finish enough in front the other teams to take 2nd (totally unexpected, I thought we had a chance at 3rd! if we were lucky).
Really enjoyed the course, I remember when I saw it at registration some people would be disappointed with all the trail and road running, but I think the fact that each Raid has a different focus from year to year is one of the appeals - you never know what you'll get.