Stars W.A.R. (Winter Adventure Race)
Mansfield Outdoor Centre
Beautiful winter conditions, an interesting race course and great to see so many friends!
This year Stars W.A.R. was a 2.5 hour rogaine on snowshoes, which was fun although I hope the Stars will return to a ski/snowshoe format since that was (I think) unique in Canada with very cool strategy.
'Bent and I teamed up and put together a decent plan that I changed at the last minute as we were heading out. In most cases, that would be a mistake but this time I think it was the right choice.
We headed to the west side of Airport Road first since there was a high concentration of points in a relatively small but hilly area. I've only been in there a couple times before and the terrain is really interesting. (Who owns it, anyway?)
About 25 minutes in, 'Bent simultaneously stomped on the back of my snowshoe, pushed me uphill and asked "Is that helpful?", while ripping the right side of the binding off my snowshoe. :( Luckily, he had some repair gear to strap the snowshoe together although it wasn't super solid. It took us another half hour to realize that switching snowshoes to give him the broken one was the key to a happy marriage.
We lost about 8 minutes in various stops to deal with The Snowshoe Incident. Before that, we had been in the mix with some good teams and it felt exciting but now we were alone and didn't see anyone for a long time. It didn't feel like we were racing anymore and it took awhile before I started concentrating properly on the map again.
Luckily, that was our only real problem and it was a really fun day for snowshoeing. We had to skip 1 or 2 controls that would have been possible if we hadn't lost time before, and we finished 8 minutes early without any other controls within reach.
It was fun to see Hammer on the course several times and he gave us a couple of photos. The big news of the day was the impressive victory by Adventuregirl! and Hermes - the first female team to win Stars W.A.R. overall! Congratulations! Timato and Audrey were the Coed champions and 2nd overall. Lots of other great performances too. Thank you to Nick and the Stars for a terrific event!