The final race
in the CCAR race series took place along the Lagan River, Belfast. The race HQ was at the Belvoir activity centre.
In true custard
chucker style Conor and myself felt that several pints of the amber nectar and a bedtime of 4 in the morning would be a great
way to prepare for the event (the Tango & Crash lads swear by it).
With slightly fussy heads we joined the
other teams at the briefing. Ivan briefed us on the race scoring format and gave us directions to the starting point 5minutes
cycle away at Shaw’s Bridge. After a bit of a wait the hooter blasted and all the teams headed off on their chosen routes
either by foot or by bike. We decided to do the orienteering first and led a group of crazed lycra clad claps into Belvoir
forest. A bit of confusion ensued as the group broke out onto a cricket pitch searching in vein for CP17 (Ivan had moved the
CP to a different spot and forgot to let us know). We carried on up the hill towards Belvoir Activity Centre being passed
by Passing Wind (PW) and feeling the burn from the previous night. The first special task involved negotiating a bmx track
which was great craic as Con and I played whacky races. Some tricky navigation allowed us to pick up a few places over the
next lot of controls and our route choice tactic of straight lining it across the Lagan at every opportunity proved to be
very advantageous as we approached the special task at the end of the running section in 1st place. Keith greeted
us with two tractor inner tubes and instructed us to descend the perilous Shaw’s Bridge rapids. Twas great craic and
very refreshing.
We then opted to put off the kayaking for as
long as possible and made our way to Lady Dixion
Park on the bikes. The egg Greg had given us survived the journey without
any problems due to Conor’s excellent maternal tendencies. We set about
the controls at Lady Dixion parks and survived the go-karting, frizbe and pipe filling special tasks fine but we just about
survived the buckfast drinking football kicking spides who provided great entertainment with some colourful language being
used to heckle us as we puffed and panted our way round. One group of spides (pictured right) are now missing their football
(how sad) as Con showed off his football skills launching the offending ball into orbit! We escaped to the towpath and back
to Shaw’s bridge via Eel weir to change a tyre. T&C arrived on their
single speeded tanks at the same time meaning that race was really on as they had already completed the dreaded kayak stage.
We launched
our kayak and headed back towards eel weir upstream, twas a tough grind up but the return stretch was pretty rapid as we tried
to get back before the three and a half hour time limit had elapsed. Alas T&C had got us as we seen them flying back up
the hill to the finish at the Belvoir Activity Centre and we were over time by about a minute. We had also missed CP23 as
we mustn’t have listened properly to Greg while he described the kayak stage.
The race was
the best yet and many thanks go to Ivan and his team for another cracker day.
Highlights include: Swimming the Lagan 5 times (its not
as dirty as everyone says), Rubber rigging and Conman splitting his power stretch pants exposing the most colourful pair of
boxers I’ve ever seen (glad you weren’t going commando mate!).
