Edinburgh Rat Race, Day 2: nine to five. Despite the Channel 4 interview when we were (again) busy faffing with route marking we didn't approach this with the expectations of a good result. None of us have done more that a few rides over the past months, two of us had never done an adventure race, kayaked or abseiled... Great team then! Surprisingly none of this seemed to make much of a difference. Clean start meant we were near enough the front not to get held up cycling (carrying) the bikes down the steps in the old town and an on the ball Jonny made sure that we were through the aerial photo orienteering and anagram in no time by working out 'ratify' as the answer after getting the i and y! Then had our only mishap of the day with a puncture in the city centre, took 5 minutes to change. Got stuck into a good rhythm after than and were pretty much on our own until the kayak, where despite massive amounts of cramp and swan attacks we cruised along the canal and passed one of the two mixed teams ahead of us in the process. A long cycle, a short O course around Heriot-Watt and a long bike down and up a very steep track (which zizi took a dislike to) to the Pentlands where poor Jonny had to swim a very uninviting length of a reservoir while zizi and I looked on, had some food and recovered! A good descent (with Jonny and me trying to keep up with zizi) was followed by my favourite memory of the weekend; zizi falling off her bike in a hay meadow and becoming very "cross" with herself because she couldn't move with cramp (Jonny and I watched from a safe distance!). Poor Jonny, only just having warmed up from the swim was then subjected to cramping himself while crawling through a wet storm drain under the bypass - this bit is going to make great TV! Easy spin back into the centre from there with a short but fun abseil in the library (?) of Napier Univ. Max points (1000) but about 13 minutes behind team Helly/Hansen so we knew it was going to be close (we beat them by 13 points the previous day). Too close, we lost by .7 of a point (or maybe 15 seconds) over 8.5 hours. Still it was awesome fun and we did far better than we ever expected.
Results: (Average Joe in a Buff):
http://www.ratraceadventure.com/page378.asp