Adventure Racing race 6:30:00 [4]
Noe sure the exact time on this. I've always wanted to do the Raid Pulse 2 day race and with Kristen and I heading out to Quebec in a few weeks for the Coast RAID I figured this was a great training weekend for her. We knew we wouldn't be competitive, but we still wanted to go hard and have a lot of fun. The race started with a nice bike ride. I love riding in Quebec because they always seem to have much better terrain to race on. We hardly road pavement for this race, but also we hardly had to hike a bike through swampy ATV trails. Kristen and I worked well together with her using the tow a fair bit on the up hills and the flats. Some nice ATV trails, and then some dirt roads to finish on. We switched to a trek and headed up the road, until we jumped into the woods. This was a really fun section. The thunder was crazy loud as we followed a creek/river system to hit 2 checkpoints, then trekked to the final point on a lake. The 1st stage ended with a canoe. This was probably the least fun for Kristen as we had a pretty good head wind the whole time. 13 k of paddling and for the final 4/5 k we were on open water going into a string head wind. We arrived on the beach for the camping location and she was in good spirits for the day.
I found this format to be really interesting. Basically Saturday consisted of a 5-8 hour stage followed by a mandatory camp at a remote location. Then around 9:30 there was a short 2-3 hour stage race. Sunday was another 5-8 hour race back to the start/finish.
Adventure Racing race 3:15:00 [4]
The night stage started with a trek. We hit the first point dead on, but then I decided to try and hit a trail on the top of a hill. In the French directions the race director had pointed out that Benoit L from SRS had found the trail when he test ran the course, but he had found it really hard to stick with it. The race director forgot this part during the English directions as this probably would have changed our route a far bit. We never found the trail and were one of the last teams to come out of the trek. Actually I think all the teams behind us just turned around and went back to bed. The bike ride was a lot of fun and again we used the tow to our advantage, finishing near the back of the pack, but still feeling good.