With a very wet competition weekend, Cycle Education entered an all girls team (Pam Price, Alysha McNee-Darrach & Raynie McNee) into AROC’s Paddy Pallin Adventure Race held in the suburbs of Tuggnerong. With the amount of rain forecast and the ‘one in ten year flash flooding warning’ the event organisers opted to cancel part of the course, the crossing of the Murrumbidgee River. This left Cycle Ed Chickadee’s doing their two stronger disciplines (really we only have one, that’s cycling) and we had to run, cycle, run… oh and to finish the race we had to problem solve a maths equation, algebra to boot!
With team Cycle Ed Chickadees having a second go in the discipline of AROC Adventure racing the weather forecast was ominous and no sooner had we departed for the start leg, down came the rain. The first part of the novice course consisted of a foot orienteering leg on the Farrer Ridge Nature Reserve. Not being runners, or more accurately funky-looking-shufflers we did amazingly well at this first part.
Onto the bike leg and with me at the helm of the map board to navigate I managed to nail the first check point, where we had to write down a secret code. Alas the code didn’t stand out and several minutes were wasted by both Cycle Ed’s Chickadees and the other 15 teams frantically searching. At this point someone mentioned there might have been a comment at the race briefing about chalk written on the walls and ta da…. there it was ‘DC’ written in bold pink chalk in amongst the designer artwork of urban graffiti.
Off we go again, pedalling in search of our next check point. It was at this moment I had a mental failure and made an error in the navigating, thus resulting in our team detouring to somewhere on the map… After several + minutes later we’re back on track zooming to our next check point near Point Hut Crossing. Back on the bikes again and now with a very fatigued Alysha, who at 13 just doesn’t have the energy (fat) reserves of her well padded team mates we were again zooooming back to the Event Hub for our final challenge.
The final challenge was another foot orienteering with a twist. Six numbers were to be found at various locations. Each number equated to a letter in the algebra maths equation that had to be correctly answered. Thank goodness Pam still had a brain after two hours of racing and after a second attempt came up trumps with the answer of 103. Off to the finish line we went. All of us lagging in cold, wet enthusiasm and grateful to be finally finish only to be told by the marshal ‘Well done, I think you’re 1st in your category…’ I guess when I felt bad about making a few navigating errors, clearly many of the other teams had made a errors too.
Well done CYCLE ED CHICKADEE’S!
