gAydventure Racing 3:00:00 [3]
started at Stromlo, finished at the Cotter, raced in the Bike Shed team with Jason Chalker and his mrs Emma Viotta. Ridiculously well organised event, as always from the AROC team. Good fun course too, well it would have been without the paddling ;)
First up was a run part way up Mt Stromlo in the mtb shoes to our bikes, then we rode to the top and followed a few km's of singletrack, reading 6 letters on signs along the way. The whole team didn't have to ride the singletrack so Emma went straight to the end and Chalks and I smashed the singletrack. We had a big lead (already by the top of the hill) but came out 1.5mins behind ARNuts cause they'd split up and done 2 of the 6 letters each - we (and evidently every other team besides ARNuts) didn't think you were allowed to do that (ie we thought someone in the team had to ride all the singletrack). Then I overran a control beside the track (too busy looking ahead to see where the leading team was probably) by at least 500m and we had to go back and get it, which lost us a couple of minutes. The orienteering legs on the old Arachnacopia map were good fun, we smashed the first one and pretty much caught the ARNuts, then there was a short mtb ride to the south end of the map for more orienteering and we did that good too and came out in the lead.
Then we were back on the bike (last bike leg) and we hit it hard down into the Cotter but got stopped for over 2minutes by the red light. All that hard work for nothing - the ARNuts got there just as the light went green. After we ditched the bikes we had to grab tubes and run a km or so up the river, I thought Chalks got me a tube (while I was getting the second map out of my bag and having a gel etc) but he'd only got 2 so i had to run back and get one for me which lost a bit more time and now ARNuts had a little lead. The tubing section wasn't great, the water was a little low so lots of bashed knees and shins. It would have been awesome with a bit more water in the river (or a bigger tube). We held about the same gap to ARNuts but lost a bit more on the kayaking. Luckily there wasn't too much of that. We then had a bonus leg "orienteering" on a dodgy 1:25000 map around the Cotter. Emma was pretty tired by then so we didn't go too quick, but no technical troubles. Finished about 3mins behind the ARNuts, not too bad considering Chalks and Emma have never done any gAyR before, and that we got shafted by the red light and rode all the singletrack. Kinda fun but that's enough of that for a couple more years.
well done to the AROC crew, awesome stuff.