Ride and Tie is an old horse race, where two riders take turns riding the horse. One person rides for a while, ties the horse up and starts running. The second person comes along, finds the horse, and rides it back past their teammate.
Neil Jones, course setter for Kawerau obviously enjoys carnage that ensues with a couple of hundred excited adventure racers racing around on bikes and on foot, trying to find bikes, communicating poorly, and generally stuffing it up.
Rochelle, my teammate today, can run faster than she can ride a bike, and in fact faster than I can ride a bike. So I'm all about a bit of Ride and Tie, as I get to do more riding! We made it through this leg unscathed, although I saw a number of headless chickens unable to find team bikes. and two nasty collisions!
The trek leg was a very special climb up Maungawhakamana, a local mountain held sacred by iwi, so I was rapt to be exploring somewhere new. We bought some tactics into play here, at the mystery activity at the base of the mountain. Basically, you chose what size bag of sand you wanted to carry half way up the mountain, and got bonus points depending on the weight carried. This has led to quite some discussion in our pre-race planning the night before. The thing with AR is, if you let someone else get points ahead early in the race, even if you finish in front of them, you have no way to make those points back up, so you'll be beaten. Rochelle and I like to race fairly competitively - we back ourselves as a women's team, and I don't like missing points early. In the end though, common sense won out. We do adventure racing for the fun, and carrying a bag of sand up a hill just didn't seem like much fun!!!
So, we backed ourselves to move fast instead, and had a few chuckles at those labouring under the sandbags. Karma got me for that one though, racing straight past the first CP and having to scramble back down the hill to get it. The way back down the mountain I had the opposite trouble, slowing down and looking too hard for CPs which you couldn't miss once in the right place!!
Off the end of the trek were a couple of tricky off track CPs without clear features - I was pretty rapt to nail these and reduce climbing by going around some small rises, still managing to stay on route.
The bike leg nav was fairly straightforward, although apparently one of the school teams ended up enroute to Murupara........ an inset foot rogaine was loads of fun on the compass, again tight nav and good distance measuring got us through this fast, dodging other teams and dropping fast over ridgelines to stay out of sight of others not so sure of their compass.
CP 16. Ah CP 16. Stuffed it up properly!!!! Classic case of relying on single man made nav features. The map was maybe a little off, with the track heading mag north after 15 a bit later than shown on the map. So, when I followed a gravel road around to the right, with a small track heading off straight ahead, I thought I was on the road coming around to spot height 147..... but actually I was still well west of CP 18. If I had paid any attention to the topography I would have been able to pick the hills, but obviously I was being a bit lazy!
The only good thing that came out of this, was finding a school team also lost on the wrong trail, with a broken chain they were having problems with. Super proud to say that with the help of a very capable young man who had stronger hands than I did, we managed to fix the chain and get them back on bikes. I've been practising chan links, so I was rapt to nail one in a race! ('Nail one' being relative, it did take nearly 10 minutes, but anyway!)
Our final bit of strategy came into play, opting to come in late and complete the advanced loop to finish the course. We reckoned that we would earn more points than we lost in time penalties.
The last 5 or so kms home, heading up near 6 and a half hours, we were getting pretty fatigued, and Chelle was feeling the effects of being a runner rather than a cyclist. I've always wanted to tow someone, so we popped her on the tow and I can safely say I don't want to do that again. We moved really quickly, knowing that every minute was further penalities, but crikey my quads were just screaming and I had tears in my eyes. It turns out the couple of times earlier in the race when I'd thrown her the tow, she'd actually sped up so I wasn't actually towing her!
Cool prizes too! 1st women's pair, with a really good score that would have placed us in top 5 in any category, men's or mixed. And we didn't carry the sandbag!!!
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| Prizes! |
Learning:
Use all the features - don't get lazy if the map looks clear and give yourself a single attack point or feature to work from. How many times will I have to learn this?
Trust yourself - if the CP is shown on the track, estimate a distance and move fast until you are nearby, don't stop and check the back of every tree that might be hiding a CP.
Tow ropes are great motivators. During phase 1, they encourage teammates to pick up the pace a little. During phase 2, when said teammate can't pick up the pace a little and you actually TOW them, it hurts.
