Summer is nearly over and the new season of Mountainbike navigation events are coming around again.
The ever popular Dromara CC trailquests are taking place in the build-up to the new year, with events spread around County Down.
Our very own Trailblazers events will be taking place soon with the promise of another short, sharp 3 event series set in very interesting areas (more details to follow)
In the meantime there is the chance to experience what some might call real MTBO events this September with the Dublin based orienteering club SETANTA holding 2 MTBO events.
Both events will be held with the Wicklow mountains providing the backdrop – the first event on Sunday 19th September at Castletimon, Wicklow. The second is the following Sunday 26th September in the famous Djouce woods. These 2 events are very popular with the local riders and are excellently organised by the host club. It will be well worth the trip down!
The adidas TERREX adventure race concluded on Monday afternoon when teams rushed into the heart of Keswick town for the 12:00 deadline. Team adidas TERREX had already confirmed their win when they crossed the finish line earlier in the day at 06:50am. Only the top three team visited all of the controls on the 400km course. Of the three Irish teams involved in the race, Team IrishAR used all of their experience and finished a superb 5th place.
IrishAR have an excellent record in UK expedition races finishing 4th and 5th during the five day Wilderness ARC races in 2005 and 2006. The local team from Northern Ireland, Team Cooleyraid.com, finished a very creditable 19th, especially considering that this was Taryn’s and Andrea’s first multiday non-stop race. The third Irish team, Get No Sleep, finished the race as a pair when Sean and Karen unfortunately had to pull out from exhaustion.
In the end 26 of the 32 starters had finished the course with teams intact, and all of the teams had at least one member finish – a remarkable achievement in such a long race and probably unprecedented in AR World Series events. No doubt over the next few days and weeks (once everyone recovers) stories of epic adventures and heartbreak will start to come out. It will be well worth to keep an eye out of them.
The good news is the adidas TERREX adventure race will be back in 2012 for a big, longer race in Scotland.
Starting at Stirling, the event will be a 4 to 5 day nonstop adventure race for mixed sex teams of 4. Including running / trekking, mountain biking, kayaking, canyoneering and some rope work. The event will run from the 25th August to 1st September 2012.
So if you missed your chance to race and think adventure racing is the sport for you, then you better start training…2 years in not a long time.
The biggest adventure race to hit the UK since 2007 kicked off this morning in south Cumbria. Thirty seven teams started their 400km journey at 7am with a 24km run across Morecambe Bay. There will be a total of 12 stages that will see racers run, trek, orienteer, mtb, kayak, swimming, climb, abseil all their way up and across the mountains and lakes of the Lake District until the finish line at Keswick’s Moot Hall in the centre of town. The leaders are expected to finish early on Monday morning.
There are 3 Irish teams competing; IrishAR (Team No13), Team Get No Sleep (Team No10) and Team CooleyRaid.com (Team No20 ). They can be followed during the race using the LIVE Tracking that has been set up on the adidas TERREX website. Messages can also be sent to the teams, which will be posted on top of the kit boxes at various stages of the race. These messages can be a great morale booster and I would encourage everyone to send a message to their teams.
The LIVE tracking is the best I have seen from any race and well worth look HERE.
Trail messages can also be added and sent from HERE.
Daily reports and photos will also be posted on the adidas TERREX website and via the main Sleepmonster website HERE.
Back in July, Bobby Smyth represented Ireland for the 2010 MTBO World Championship, held in Portugal. Bobby has put together an excellent detailed report and if you dash over to the Trailblazers MTBO website, you can read it there.
Causeway Coast Adventure Racing are now taking entries for the Cooley Raid adventure race. 2010 will be the second year of this exciting 36hr race, which guarantees to give competitors a ‘full-on’ adventure racing experience – navigation, kayaking, ropes, trekking, swimming and a few special activities thrown in for good measure. Being held over the [read more...]
Due to a few other commitments I hadn’t raced for a number of weeks and I was looking forward to the Wednesday evening’s orienteering event. It was the penultimate WEE of 2010 and was a scary remainder how quickly this year has flown by and also how bad the summer has been so far weather-wise.
This [read more...]
It’s amazing how quickly a race gets bantered about as a classic, even though it has only been staged for a couple of years….but the Da Cooley Thriller is definantly one of those races on the MTB XC scene that deserves the title and attracts its fair share of elite, weekend warriors, adventure racers and [read more...]
I first read about the Energia Belfast 24 Hour Race on the Average Joes website and you can see my reaction to it on the original post. But the thought of this sort of challenge ate away at me in the background, wondering just what I would do in this type of event. I was reading [read more...]
In a little under two weeks the longest adventure race to take place in the UK since the World Championships up in Scotland in 2007 will be under way. The Adidas TERREX will be a non-stop 4 day expedition race across Cumbria and will make a spectacular 400km journey through the Lake District, taking in [read more...]
It’s amazing how time catches up with you. I had agreed to plan August’s first WEE back at the beginning of May; thinking I would have plenty of time. Suddenly last night at 9pm it was all over. WEE 9 was completed, competitors safety off home and all the kit signed-off back into the trailer. [read more...]
@johnlaughlin No i have not tried them, but i have see them and they look good + the kids were enjoying being at that position on the bike.September 3, 2010 10:45
I had arranged to race the Galway Rat Race with Ivan Park and Jackie O’Hagan, but at the last minute Jackie was unable to make it , so Ivan and I decided just to run as a male pair team. The last time I had raced with Ivan was back in 2007 at the Beast [read more...]
Filed under: Summer is nearly over and the new season of Mountainbike navigation events are coming around again.
August 31st, 2010 | 
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