Storm The Trent 2008

Storm the Trent “Trek Elite” 8 Hour Advanced Course

Saturday May 11th

Warsaw, Ontario

www.stormevents.ca

I was really looking forward to this years Storm the Trent as I had entered my team into the Trek Elite 8-Hour event. After the disaster of the Rib Raid my team was looking for a little redemption in this the 2nd qualifier event for the Mountain X Race (www.mountainxrace.com).   The race course was set up as an 80-100km multi-sport adventure with Race Director Sean Roper once again designing a killer race.  Our team decided that our race would start with the actual trip to Warsaw so we packed up the truck at 4:30am and headed out. We arrived in time to get our gear and meet in Lions Park for the pre-race meeting. We found out that the race would start with a 3-checkpoint sprint by 1 member of each team so at 7:30 am I grabbed the envelope and started the race.

With the first 3 CP’s hit, I met my team (AHS Team/Team RF Member Tim Beckner and Breathe Magazine Editor in Chief Joel Perella) and we headed out in the canoes for our 1st paddle leg of the race. The paddle ended at the Warsaw Caves Conservation Area with the first of 4 mandatory CP’s. In addition,  8 other CP’s were hidden around the area each worth a specific point value. The winners of this race would be the team that finished with the most number of points and with the fastest time.  Our team was able to successfully bag all of the CP’s so we hit the boats and headed back to the start/finish where our bikes were waiting. With a quick transition out of our wet gear we hit the bikes ready to bag some more CP’s. We were successful in hitting all of the CP’s including the 2nd mandatory CP before we ran into trouble at a CP located near an abandoned snowmobile club. We were instructed to follow the trail that led the most North-Westerly but as we did we hit a part of trail washed out by recent flooding. We were told that flooding would be a part of the race so we pressed on but then we hit an actual lake. Confusion set in as we tried to see what lay beyond the lake (ok, so I may have waded into the lake just a bit) and then it hit us that Sean wouldn’t actually make us cross a lake so we doubled back and hit the other trail that ran somewhat North-West and it turned out to be the right one. Unfortunately, our miscue ate up a lot of time and as we emerged out of the trail (after enduring a 500m bush/bike wack….ouch) we were running short on time. However, we refused to give up and we wanted to make our race offical so we hit the 3rd mandatory CP, picked up some ice cream (seriously!!) and we made our way to CP4. We were re-routed away from the marked-course route through singletrack as it was deemed unpassable so we headed down road and across a couple of dirt roads before we made our way to Lions Park and the start-finish. We finished well beyond the cut off time but we felt pretty good about ourselves when we found out that all of the teams in our race did the same! I even found out that one of the super elite teams made the same mistake we did as the snowmobile CP.  Cool!  Anyways, I felt that our team performed well and that this was a great race. We were able to overcome some adversity and successfully complete the event.  Oh and to top it off…..at the awards ceremony our team ended up winning one of the door prizes and I walked away with a new pair of Waterproof XT-Wings. Oooohhhh Baby.

I also want to send out a shout to the members of the AHS team who were competiting in the 4-hour hike event. We had 10 athletes competiting and special congrats to the team of Mike Tufnell, Elyse Neiuwold, Colin Thompson and Stephen Dixon who ended up in 3rd place in their division. Cool again.

Big thanks to Sean Roper and the entire Storm team for putting on yet another great event and to Pete Cameron and the crew from Salomon for all of the cool prizing. Can’t wait for Storm the Ten. Hey Kalon, are you ready??

 Marcus