After the FAR race the Saturday
before I had decided it was time now to get back to full training since the
knee held up fine…So I did and went for a 100+km road ride on my own on Monday.
By the end of it I got hit by a car who decided to start his car and make a
turn without bloody looking in front of him before. Fortunately my scream made
him stopped fast enough so he didn’t kill me. I only got a wrecked back wheel
and a bruise on the tibia. Tuesday I didn’t do much but did a combo run and
paddle on Wednesday for 2h. I then took the rest of the week fairly easy
because I knew my Team mate Jo would want to push it hard on the week end at
the St Donat’s race held by Endurance Aventure. On Friday afternoon Jo came to
pick me up at the shop. We packed up boats and bikes and there we went….At
least we thought so. 5m after we left we heard a real bad noise coming from the
boats on the roof. One of the straps was dangling and got caught under the
wheel pulling, tightening it to the point where the kayak cracked…Oh no what a
start!!!! After inspection of the damages, Jo reassured me saying he could fix
it with duck tape and that we would be fine. So after another inspection of all
the straps we were finally on the road. We got to St Donat, collected our bibs
(a little small for the guys, that was funny) and went to bed. Not so early
start but freezing start. A friend of mine said to me a couple of days before
“attache ta tuque” meaning “it’s gonna be freezing cold, hold on your hat”….but
I didn’t have a hat (Andrew I hope you
will feel guilty of keeping my pink tuque now that I am freezing my little bum
over here and you are under the tropical weather of Perth). Anyway after
complaining a thousand time in the first hour we were out I put on two long
sleeved layers (wool and polypro) and a wind stopper. I also had a buff
gracefully given to me by Alex (thank you). After dropping the boats we went
back to get our maps and did our mapping. It looked really straightforward butt
some of the tracks were drawn in blue which we were not sure if they were
rivers or tracks (they were tracks to finish with) and there was something
about the maps that sounded too easy to be true. The race started on the bike
and as usually it started a little too fast for me. Why do everybody has to
push that hard at the start to die off (for most people) less than an hour
after??? Well I did die off or at least started to overheat pretty quick as we
were going up some hills. I was breathless, hyperventilating but not wanting to
stop cause I didn’t want to be too far behind Jo but after a while I didn’t
have the choice so whilst walking up a hill I stripped the wind breaker off
while Jo was pushing my bike. After this first bike leg we got on a small
running/orienteering leg. We were up a ski field and we started running up and
down the slopes trying to find the checkpoints around. After a couple of
navigational mistakes we were back on our bikes. That’s I think the first time
we realised the map wasn’t that accurate and some tracks didn’t exist anymore
but others were there that were not on the map. After a couple of navigational
mistakes due to not paying enough attention to bearings I might have been
nagging Jo a little (a lot) and after a few remarks like “check your bearings”
or “can I see the map we aren’t going the right way” he asked me fairly
politely if I wanted the bloody map…After remembering my trek of the previous
week and how I got lost I decided it would be wiser to just shut up at this
stage. I must admit the map wasn’t helping him much but he managed our way to
the next transition which was another trek/run up and down a little mountain.
Jo is strong and I was really struggling to keep up especially when he was
running uphill. I hooked up behind him and he pulled me up to the first
checkpoint on that leg. We bush bashed our way through the next checkpoint down
in a swamp and bush bashed and ran to the transition again. We knew we were
pretty tight on time to make the cut off for the “advanced section” at the next
trek so we pushed it hard, made a really quick transition and bike leg to that
next orienteering section. Jo pulled me like a machine on the bike and we even
passed some guys team at that stage. We got to the transition to start the trek
10 min before the cut off so we were doing the advanced section. We ran to our
first checkpoint which was down in between two swamps that we didn’t found
right away. At that stage Jo actually gave me the map and dunno how I found the
bloody thing. Another mixed team was there too but as we went for the
checkpoint we discovered they had done the rappelling already that was located
just above us. We should have thought of that before that we could just rappel
down and then get the checkpoint there. Instead of that we had to climb up to
rappel down and re-climb again to go for the next CP. I guess it is by doing
this kind of mistake that you learn for later, right? We went up a little more
and decided to follow a little cross country ski track that was showing a
little sign with the same mountain name than the one we were supposed to go to.
So even if it wasn’t on the map we took a chance and ran on it. Due to the map
a little messy it was hard to know how far we were exactly or how high we were
supposed to go. After a while zigzagging, going up and down on the track Jo
asked we shouldn’t try to take a kind of bearing and head towards the top of
the mountain. He turned to me and asked me what my call was. My guts told me we
should keep going on the track so we did and maybe 50m further on the track was
the CP waiting for us. We were so damn happy that it boosted us to continue
running. We found the next three CP pretty quickly and got to the transition
again. We knew we were 3rd mixed but that the second weren’t very far so we
hopped on the bike and rode hard to the paddle section. The paddling went
smoothly but I was a little disappointed it was such a short section of the
race (paddling being my strength you would understand). Jo’s boat didn’t sink
and we were moving fastish on the water. After dropping the boat I couldn’t
feel my fingers and started shivering even if we were running (weird I know). I
hooked myself again behind Jo and we ran the last 3 to 4 km to the finish. On
the line we saw the second mixed team. They went through only 2min in front of
us….dammit!!! After 7h11 of racing we finished 3rd mixed team, 5th overall. We
were pretty happy with the result even if we know we did a lot of mistakes
during the race but most of all it was nice to race with Jo and we had fun
which was a great result by itself. It was also a good feeling for me to have
pushed hard the whole time. That’s the best training you can get isn’t it??
Now time to concentrate on XPD,
to keep training hard without getting injured…
N.L.
