Orienteering 3:14:44 [3] 32.0 km (6:05 / km)
shoes: Salomon XT Wings SLAB - 2
Fun race as Explorethebruce.com with f-n-j and one of his 17 year old prodigies, Eli, from Oliphant, ON. I'm not sure if Eli had ever ran this far before, but Jack mentioned something about him being close to, or being on the junior national xc ski team, so I figured he had a big engine. We probably started a bit too fast & by CP 5 I was afraid Eli was going to bonk-out early. We tried to stay high through the forest towards 6 & lost time as it was quite slow. I made a really weird/dumb nav error leaving 6 & basically ran due east for a few hundred metres until I was saved by the compass. Then wasted more time re-locating. I think we lost over 3 minutes here. Somewhere between 7 & 8 Eli let us know he was finally warmed up & ready to push again???? That was pretty funny, but our pace improved. The rest of the nav went smooth on through to 14 & the scramble. We had Eli rest while JVD & I picked off the matrix CP's, then everyone was running strong again back towards Albion. At this point we were told we were in 2nd with differing reports of how far the Foriegners were ahead (5min vs 10min) nevertheless we pushed hard hoping they may be bonking, or may make an error in the final section, which appeared to have the most options for choosing different routes. Between 17 & 18 we thought we caught sight of the Foriegners around the lake. Then, surprisingly into CP 20 we arrived at the same time from opposite directions (us west, them east). We managed to gap them up the hill to our home-stretch trail, but I made an error going right on a small offshoot forcing us to bushwack back to the proper trail where we again were only seconds ahead with a few hundred metres to go. Luckily we had a bit more gas in the tank and were able to hold them off to the finish. Probably the closest finish to a Raid event I think. Good times for sure & it was awesome to see Eli thoroughly stoked to take home a new pair of Salomon's, which he certainly earned with some solid suffering.