Wan Dae Adventure Race #3

On sat 16th sept I fought off a hangover to get out of bed at the ungodly time of 6am and drove to Drumlanrig castle for the 3rd of the Wan Dae adventure races where Rob McQuater and I (the Westies Wanderers) joined about 20 other teams of between 2 & 4 in the 8 hour 'Cask Strength' race. The weather was fantastic initially, which lifted morale a lot, but soon clouded over. At least it stayed dry, unlike the last one, where the kayaking was one of the driest parts of the day! They started us off with a short orienteering course, and despite being only 20mins long, we still went wrong on it. Then it was the race proper. Unusually, we came up with a plan, as we needed to be organised to fit in both the kayaking and the running as they were about 15km apart as the crow flies (and a hell of a lot longer on a bike!). We set off for the kayaking straight away and were first there, as most of the other teams set off in the opposite direction to us and headed for the mountain biking checkpoints (not a good sign). The kayaking was great and we did 2 laps of the reservoir for maximum points. Then it was back on the bikes and over to the hills in the west for the running, with a detour en route to visit some of the biking checkpoints. The biking was great, alternating nicely between roads, forest track and singletrack so it never got too mundane. It was also the scene of our only major f**k-up, which saw us waste about 20 mins and get totally disorientated in the forest (we were heading 180 degrees in the opposite direction to where we should have been). Then it was a (very) long ride on the roads to the running. Initially we had a (very slow) uphill thrash through chest high bracken to get up onto the tops and to the first checkpoint. Afterwards, the ground became more runnable (although, being 6hrs into the race, our speed was hardly record breaking). We got lucky by spotting a couple of checks very quickly that some teams spent ages trying to find and, powered by flapjack and those energy gels that look like wallpaper paste, found the time to bag a couple more high value checkpoints on the hills t'other side of the valley. With just over an hour left it was back on the bikes for the ride back to the castle, and 2 of the 'activity' checkpoints in front of the castle. One was a bike course with a load of wooden jumps set up on it, which was great fun, and the other involved rolling a metal hoop on a stick (you had to be there cos I can't explain it) around 2 tyres in a figure of 8. Despite our best efforts we were both woefully inept at this and they eventually gave us the points when Rob managed to get it to the end tyre and back (they probably just wanted to get rid of us). After that we were finished, with only 6 mins of our 8hrs to spare. In this time we'd managed to amass 790 points, enough to see us comfortably in 3rd place, not far off 2nd and a fair distance behind 1st. Overall it was a great day, my body felt a lot less trashed than after the previous Wan Dae event, despite celebrating far too much that night and we're looking forward to a stronger showing in the series next year....

Posted by Simon Triger on Tue 19 Sep 2006 | 4 comments

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