Adventure racing in Canada (from Thorlene)

Wednesday, 25 July 2007

With the conference in Vermont over and still not  managed to find the 100s of kms of MTB trails in the state, I was lucky to link up with Remy from Montreal (originally France) for the 2 day Raid Pulse adventure race in Quebec, Canada. Remy had everything organised and sourced me all the bits of kit I was missing including a map board. We set off from Montreal Greyhound bus station at 4pm Friday and registered for the race in Montpellier that evening. The race consisted of Stage 1 Saturday 10.00am (max 8 hrs) Trek-Kayak-MTB-Trek, Stage 2 Saturday 9.30pm (max 3 hrs) Trek-MTB, and Stage 3 Sunday 9.00am (max 8 hrs) MTB-Trek (+ absiel)-Kayak-Trek.

 We didn't do so well thanks to my navigation stuff ups on the trek legs...fortunately no problems with the bike nav. I'm putting it down to the instructions on how to use the unmarked trails to find the checkpoints losing something in the translation ;-). But it was a good weekend with the overnight campsite being superb and Remy and I turning out to be quite well matched team mates. Cheers Remy.

Remy was also the hero of the day on Sunday for helping me get my gear packed up and back to Montreal airport in time for my 9.00pm flight to Zurich that night.

Thorlene