adidas TERREX Race News | Day 1

Day One. Going the Distance.

What a first day of competition for the adidas Terrex adventure race!  It began at 07.15 at Bolton le Sands when teams set off to run across the sands of Morecambe Bay, a 24km running stage which offered a unique opportunity to venture into this hazardous but beautiful terrain.  In perfect weather, with all the Lake District fells in view on the horizon the teams ran over the sands and waded through waist deep water channels  to reach the first transition at Holker Hall.  

From here stage two began, and this was to take up the remainder of the first day.  The cycling distance was 110km and within this distance were 3 additional special stages, foot orienteering, a gorge scramble and mountain bike orienteering.   

The full route took teams over the western fells and out to the coastal town of Ravenglass , but only the top few teams took this option.  The course is designed to allow the elite teams to clear the full route while others make strategic choices about how much they can achieve, and ranked accordingly.  And right from the outset strategic choices were being made as some slower teams opted to miss one of the Morecambe Bay CP’s set on an island towards the end.  Others cut short the cycle stage and/or opted to miss the orienteering. 

It was clear early on in the day that only a few teams could hope to keep to the full course and at the orienteering challenge in the late afternoon  adidas Terrex, Accelerate B, planetFear.com, and Irish AR were the teams which had gone the full distance.  (Maybe also FGS Chocmalt.)  However, on arrival at the orienteering the Irish team elected to miss the stage and take the penalty, deciding to they too did not have enough time to keep to on the full course.  The orienteering stage proved a tough one, with 400m of ascent over difficult terrain, and no doubt their view of the hillside above played a part in their decision.  

A ride of several hours over the fells lead the teams to the next special stage at Coniston, where they undertook a scramble in Church Beck.  This was a late course change, but the safety and marshal team put together a challenging half hour river descent of jumps and swims, with one 6m abseil into a pool and a big slide of a boulder into a pool below.  Many will have done this in the dark which will have made the experience all the more memorable! 

Team passed through the gorge at dusk and into the night time hours, then moved on to more biking checkpoints and the final challenge, the mountain biking orienteer.  However, realising the course was proving too long, even for the elite teams, the race organisers took the decision to cancel the mountain bike orienteering stage to reduce the full course distance.  As a result race leaders adidas Terrex arrived in the second transition just before midnight and quickly set off again.  Tom Gibbs commented,  “It’s too early in the race to sleep yet.”  The next stage is kayaking on Coniston water, which most teams will being in the darkness, and complete in the daylight as they move into the second day of competition.