Adventure Race

As promised, these are some of the photos from my adventure race in Blessington a few weekends back. This is a picture of the team before getting on the water to start the race. Rachel is on the left, she is an avid runner and does all sorts of mad mountain runs and marathons and such, then me, then Aimi, who is a mad into the mountain biking and dragged us up and down the biking slopes on the day, then Emily. Clearly we have no idea what we are letting ourselves in for.

The race started on the water, with around 4k to travel to collect 5 markers. The race was set out like orienteering. They gave us a list of coordinates at the start which we had to plot on a map and then set off to find as many as possible. We had a card to punch at each marker to prove we'd really been there. All water markers had to be found in a conoe and then the land markers were split into mountain biking and trekking. The sea looks flat calm in this picture, but on the way back into land after finding the markers the wind picked up out of the blue and boats were capsizing all over the place. We did well not to fall in and get totally drenched. Myself and Emily have plenty of water experience from misspent youths at rowing, so that helped no end.


Unfortunately there are no photos from the biking stage cause we were all too busy trying not to fall off. The trekking started off running up a rough forest trail before swinging left and going up a really steep fire break (a gap left in trees every now and then in forests to stop the spread of fire). At the top we looked into the distance and saw the deadly steep Sorrell Hill (hill me arse) and had to make it to the top as fast as possible to get the next marker. The wind was unreal and nearly blew us off the top. It was quite sore to take the wind full force in the ear for the duration of the climb, but was worth it when we reached the top. This is me, Rachel and Emily trying to catch the wind to float onto the next marker, which was on the mountain visible in the distance.


And this is us at the end of the race, just barely alive. It was a proper challenge and took us 5 hours, but we set out with the aim of finding all the markers, not being last (we came 8th of 12) and to still be friends at the end of it, so we achieved all aims! Hurrah!