Frontier Adventure Challenge
May 5th 2007
5-8 hour Adventure Race
Deerhurst Resort, Muskoka On
Adventure Race
website: www.raidthenorth.com
The opening race on FAR’s Adventure Challenge schedule was held at the awesome Deerhurst Resort in Muskoka and coincided with the Sault College High School Adventure Race held the next day at the same location. As the coach of the AHS AR team I thought it would be fun to recruit a couple of friends to travel up to Muskoka with the kids, race on the Saturday and then enjoy watching my athletes compete on the Sunday. The weekend was outstanding……..except for Saturday.
Ok, I will admit that this was my first FAR race. I recieved seveal emails about the race and I believed that our team was fully prepared for the race. I mean really, I’d completed 10 races before this one and my team was made up of 3 guys who are in pretty solid shape. 2 are high school phys-ed teachers and the other is the father of a 7 month old baby girl (yep, he’s the toughest of the 3). And besides, this race was marketed as an intro to racing…..how hard could it be.
As it turns out…..very. The race started on the grounds of Deerhurst Resort (nice). We started on the bikes and the first leg took us up and around Hidden Valley Ski Resort and through an established snowmobile trail to our first transition point….the Trek. I’ll put it bluntly….it was awful. Kilometer after kilometer of really dense brush, a couple of sketchy river crossings, a couple of lung busting climbs and some stinky swamp. We hooked up with a couple of other teams who shared our frustration but after a couple of hours and several choice swear words we made it through the trek and onto the established trail and headed off toward the boats, feeling pretty good about surviving the trek. Another hour ticked by before we made it to the boats (15 minutes before the cut off time) and noticed that there were still 11 boats waiting for teams. We found this rather daunting, however, we were happy to be in the boats and heading back towards our bike and the end of the race.
But now the real adventure began. We knew that there would be some challenging whitewater sections on the paddle, however, with the water level being so low and with 3 in the boat, the paddle was awful. We spent more time out of the boat trying to get our boat moving after being hung up. In one particularly tricky section, we tipped and spent more than an hour trying to get ourselves back on track (with help from a rescue crew that had been very busy this day). By this time, our spirits and egos had been badly bruised and as we finally moved into the final transition point, we were done. As the sun began to set (yep, we had been out for 9 hours by this point and we had not been passed by any other teams on the water) we huddled around a small fire, wrapped up in our emergency blankets with another team who paddled in 10 minutes after us and waited to be evacuated.
When we returned to Deerhurst, we were greeted by our relieved loved ones and members of our student teams who now started to wonder what they had gotten themselves in to. As it turns out, 17 of the 34 teams did not finish with 11 teams not even making it to the boats for the paddle.
I have to say that I was really disappointed with this race. I believe that it was designed more for the elite and experienced teams that had signed up for this race (using it as training for the Raid) and not as an intro to racing. It would be my suggestion to race organizers to seriously consider re-thinking their course design for the Adventure Challenges. Having a race where half the teams do not post an offical finishing time is not cool in my opinion.
Luckily, the race organizers did recognize the need to reconsider the race design for the high school race the next day. I’ll tell you more about that race in my next report!!
Cheers
Marcus
