Ace Race – Round 2 of 3 (12/07/2008, Bracknell)
Steve Bentham was out of this one, having had surgery on his kidney a few weeks before he was taking things easy for a while. So John Harrison bravely stepped in to take his place on team ‘Feeling SAPped’, alongside me and Dave Peck.
Team Feeling SAPped (Paul, Dave and John)
As well as the usual running, biking and orienteering stages, were some ‘interesting’ challenges:
- Carrying a bucket of water (supported on a wooden tray, supported by ropes) around a lake
- Transcending a rope ‘bridge’ (harder than it looked!). At one point Dave was almost at 90 degrees – and THEN John told him how to do it easily
- Me leading Dave and John through a course in a wooded area, while they were blindfolded
- All 3 of us wading chest deep through a cold lake with our bikes above our heads!
- All 3 of us on a single set of wooden ‘skis’ where we had to walk synchronously around a course (harder than it sounds!)
I recorded the GPS stats on my Garmin Forerunner 305.
The results show that we came 69th out of 102 overall and were the 24th team out of 39.
We all had fun – and all got very wet and muddy! As you can see from the photographs.
The only downers were that the Ace Race organisation was very poor (like the last race) and we know that other teams cheated (e.g. they missed checkpoints, then found out that they still had time left, so went back and completed the missed checkpoints), so because of this I wont enter any more races that don’t have electronic means of scoring (e.g. electronic dibbers).