Spider Pigs (Caroline Donaghy & Lisa Cassley), the all-female defending champions, proudly present their Castlewellan, 23^rd February, race report.

The race started with a scramble through the Maze with one team member retrieving the map and race instructions. Once we had all our markers in place from the coordinates using an oversized chunky biro (not coming to the next race), we set off cycling. A horde of yellow and orange bid wearing lunatics hit Castlewellan.

We spotted the first checkpoint straight away being veteran CCAR racers and smiled smugly as the virgin racers circled aimlessly ditching their bikes and running back to the correct position. A few bumpy lanes and lots of mud getting to the next few checkpoints saw us Mountain Boarding down a hill track, with Shane Kelly the Photographer at the bottom ensuring he snapped us falling off.

We soon reached the first transition point, here we ditched our bikes and started running, but our hopes of defending the all female title were dashed when we got lost around and on the Slieve Meelmore mountain. Too many walls with too many holes saw us flustered. It was such a relief to get to the top and find our bearings. The view was awesome and we set off in good spirits having punched another checkpoint. The next checkpoint was our favourite, the abseil over a cliff section of the mountain, the easy way to get to the bottom.

Once again back on the bikes we set off for the kayaking stage with a stop point in a souterrain, walking around on wooden slats gave us a chance to catch up with our friendly marshals and tell our mountain tales. 5pm was looming and the daylight dwindling, we made the decision to forgo the kayaking and continue biking to the next checkpoint, we only got one more checkpoint but it was our first race of the year, so we were quite pleased with what we achieved.