ACE Races – Ashdown Forest
Date: 7th May 2005
Race Type: Adventure Race
Time Limit: 4 hours
Location: Ashdown Forest
www.aceraces.com
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After our first Taste of Adventure racing in Novembers Sweatshop AR, we looked for our next Adventure for the New Year and found it in the form of ACE Races.



ACE Races organise events of all lengths, from one day to multi day Epics. We decided to start our ACE career gently with their first one day race of the year in Ashdown Forest. These one day events have a time limit of five hours. The course is to be navigated via check points in a certain order, some of which would be special challenges! For every checkpoint missed or failed, a 20 minute penalty would be incurred.

The start of the race was en mass and on foot - we were soon hurtling down the first hill and heading towards the first checkpoint via a mystery route to confuse us. After about twenty minutes we reached the map give out, although navigating at this point was a bit pointless as every one was going in the same direction - map reading skills would really come into play as the course criss-crossed itself and it becomes impossible to tell if other teams are heading for the same checkpoint as ourselves.

Checkpoint 1, at the summit of one of the many hills, proved to be the first of the challenges - this was basically a small area of water with a rope strung across - the rule being to get one team mate across with dry feet. Gary, being the smallest, decided he should carry Keith, the biggest across - while I just waded across by myself.

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Next up was the run back to transition, then on to the bikes. First up was downhill then folloeing a stream to cp3 then further along the stream to the challenge at cp4. This involved parking the bikes up carefully (a collapsed pile of bikes = fail) following a marked tape (while touching it at all times - or fail) down into the stream, then back up a slippery bank and back to the beginning.

Following this came checkpoints 5 - 14, all on the bike. We missed two checkpoints during these - down to bad navigation. This, in turn was because we hadn't really decided who was navigating - we each had the map at various times, resulting in us all being confused at various times. Although the second of these, cp 14, we missed because we were enjoying the section of singletrack it was on!

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CP 15 proved to be the best challenge of the day. Basically it was a mini assault course (this being on army ground) containing a 15 metre long, one metre wide tunnel, then a ten foot wall at the end that required some pushing and pulling to get all three of us up it. Then it was back on the bike and up another hill to cp 16, before dismounting once more and running up to the challenge at cp 17. It was then that cramp struck both myself and Gary - probably caused by a recent dip in cold water. Luckily, this soon passed, although Lady L wasn't with us on the challenge - to locate thirteen Sigg bottles hanging up in the imediate area, then work our the word. Unfortunately, our brain-cells weren't firing at this stage and we had no pen to write the letters down. The answer was Sleepmonsters - doh!

Two more biking checkpoints remained before we downed a few energy bars back at transition. One more Challenge remained - a simple wade through a river under a bridge, then two more hilly CPs and we were back to the finish at 4 hours 30 minutes. We had three penalties so our time increased to 5 hours 30 instead. Unfortunately, being an all male team, we didn't receive a ranking, but we would of been 50th of 83 teams.

Overall, it was a great day. We learnt that we need a single navigator and I think we did very well to get to every checkpoint - even if we didn't manage to stamp two of them.

Steve Butler