Questars Race 1 – 28 March 2009 – New Forest, Hampshire
I entered Race 1 of the 2009 Questars Adventure Race with Steve. We entered the 6 hour Questars Trio format as mens pair team, so it was mountain biking, running and kayaking.
Mine and Steve's bikes - ready to race!
The morning started off very cold. I looked around and I was the only person in shorts and t-shirt, so I nipped over to the car and put on my waterproof Gore-Tex jacket that I had recently bought (which proved to function very well throught the day – I was very impressed with it).
Then the day warmed up quite a bit, to the point where Steve stopped to take his jacket off – only to put it back on again 5 minutes later when it started to rain! The weather kept changing between hot, cold, wind, rain and hail! The hail really hurt as we cycled though it and it hit us like a million ball bearings on our arms, legs, face and head (through the bike helmet).
It was also my first true test of my new bike – and it performed really well. Steve was envious of my rear suspension at one particularly bumpy section of track 
The only downside to the whole day is that I got 2 punctures – one in each wheel… Firstly I got a puncture in the front tyre (a small thorn), so I replaced the inner-tube and started to pump it up, only to find that the top of the valve had somehow broken off! So I borrowed an inner-tube from Steve and got under-way again. Then 40 minutes later I got a puncture in my rear tyre! As we didn’t have any more inner-tubes left, I repaired it with a puncture repair kit.
Because of the 2 punctures, my poor navigation (missed a road to a checkpoint so we went back for it) and also because Steve injured himself playing football the Tuesday before we ended up 17th out of 23 (quite respectable given the circumstances). If we didn’t have the punctures I think we could easily have been 8th.
Despite the small issues, we had a great day – lots of fun. The location was really nice too as it was in the New Forest and there were a lot of wild ponies all over the place – and they weren’t phased by us nutters on bikes whizzing past them in the wind and hail!
Then the next day, I headed off to Spain for a weeks rock climbing holiday!
August 30th, 2009 at 15:07
[...] dry and it was a nice day so the weather conditions were not a factor this time (unlike in the New Forest race where we had virtually every type of weather Blighty could throw at us!). The only issue we had was [...]