Salomon Giant's Rib Raid - an excellent event, thanks to the hard work of a whole bunch of volunteers, including the usual creative race course design. And three big cheers for Phatty, who has worked tirelessly to turn the Dontgetlost.ca runs into the Salomon Adventure Running Series, which has attracted the attention of other sponsors and created a tonne of excitement - not to mention the best prize table I've ever seen.
Hingo injured himself a few days before the race, and Slowrunner graciously agreed to join us on short notice, in spite of her well-known aversion to bushwhacking. Good thing she didn't know the race would take place in rainy 8C weather in a forest flooded with icy water!
Actually, we all agreed that the weather was a non-issue. We were dressed properly, and the ice water wading actually felt good on our calves - and our knees - and occasionally even our thighs.
Unfortunately, we got off to a bad start with some nav problems today.
Things went smoothly until we crossed 6th Line, but somehow we wandered off the Bruce Side Trail that we were supposed to be following, and the map was blank other than the trail, so there were no clues as to which direction we'd wandered off it. Normally, we'd have gone back to find the last tree marking, but unfortunately, we were in an area that the Bruce Trail *used* to pass through, so we were able to locate a few other markings, including turns and so on. Soon we realized that we were nowhere near the real Bruce Trail - something that was reinforced when we had to follow a quarry fence for a long distance in a direction that we didn't want to go. By that time, I'd figured out which side of the BT we were on, and we followed a compass bearing that led us to the trail. Sigh. A lesson that I should have learned by now is that things have a higher risk of going wrong at times when I am sure that the navigation is easy, so I get complacent.
Case in point: the next section, the Lass-O. The CPs were so close together that we started off on a very rough bearing, figuring that we'd see the first CP so soon that we didn't need to be overly careful. We hadn't accounted for the wide, deep, frigid, branch-tangled marsh that we had to cross, which pushed us too far to the left. Oblivious to the problem, we looked for flags in a couple of wrong places before finally bailing out to a trail and returning to a known junction to start again. Between this error and our Bruce Trail follies, it appears from the splits that we lost about 30 minutes in silly errors early in the race.
Other than that, things went pretty smoothly - other than maybe some loss of the sense of urgency that you feel when you are running closer to the leaders. That's OK though - we had a good time and enjoyed the different challenges that had been posed for us. My personal favourite was the section where the map was blank, and we had only verbal instructions and photographs of features to go on. The photos had been taken when there was still lots of snow, so part of the challenge was trying to imagine what the feature would look like without snow!
Our team worked well together. Slowrunner pushed the pace nicely on the trails - I can see why she would have no trouble with the Canadian Death Race. Even though conditions were especially tough for adventure running today, she never lost her smile. There were numerous slippery, mossy rocks with crevices in the woods, but luckily we all managed to avoid serious injury, even though I slipped and banged my bad knee twice. (The lawsuit is in the mail, Griz.) The only potential issue for me is a wrenched lower back from a towing incident on trail. I've got my fingers crossed that it's just a short-term thing, but I'll have a better idea tomorrow.
Here is 'Bent on one of the trails. As we got here, I called back, "Hey guys - the good news is that we've made it to the big trail. The bad news is, there's a *heck* of a current running along it!"
And here we are at the finish line, still smiling and ready for the BBQ. Thanks to my Tree Hugger teammates for a fun day of splashing around the forest - even if it wasn't the most perfect race we've ever had!
Big congrats to our friends on Team Salomon XT Wings - Bender, Slice and AndyCam - the coed team who won the whole thing! Best result by Caledon Navigators was Team Salomon-Suunto - Phatty & Leanimal + STORM (2nd Coed and 5th overall), then Crash - 3rd Coed and 6th overall. Team Over The Hill - Goose, Rocky & Scooby - made an impressive debut, placing 5th Coed and 9th overall. They really should enter Storm The Trent, since they have the right skills for the MXR Canada competition. Yay, CN!!