The reason that Denver and I were absent from Saturdays photo shoot and “Weekend at Loey’s” was that we competed in the Polaris Challenge. For those that don’t know Polaris, it’s a two day, self sufficient orienteering event on a MTB. By self sufficient I mean that you have to carry your own food, camping, cooking and other overnight gear…. Denver and I did not know Polaris.
This year’s event was held at Black Springs, about 30kms south of Oberon and west of Jenolan Caves. We arrived at the camp site on Friday night to join up with a group of mates including DC and Woz from KOM.
Friday night was spent; plotting the 37 checkpoints on our topographical map, a few beers, bike preparation (including the fitting of a gear rack to carry all our overnight gear), a few more beers and a she’ll be right we’ll do the rest in the morning.
The reason that there was the fitting of only one rack to one of our bikes was that Denver had selflessly offered me the opportunity to maximise my TDC ride fitness training by carrying all our overnight gear with the exception of his tooth brush (I later discovered that he elected to leave that behind in the interest of shaving a few grams from his load).
Race day dawned with a beautiful blue sky and the realisation that we had a lot to do, including the waterproofing of our map, before our looming start time. Denver headed down to the event centre to Contact our map whilst I attended to a last minute tyre change and then raced down to join him. I arrived to find Denver using every appendage in a heroic struggle with 5 rolls of very sticky plastic and our 2m X 1m map….we missed our start time.
We started in the next wave. Now confident that absolutely nothing else could go wrong after our disastrous start to the day I chose to ignore the strange creaking noises coming from the seat post clamp of my borrowed gear rack. Keen to make up some time I pointed my bike down the first downhill fire trail, about 200m from the start, and let it rip. As the pace picked up the creaking noise became more tortured until the clamp failed catastrophically resulting in me having a spectacular high speed off. Conscious of the fact that I was in TDC gear not a single expletive was uttered.
Despite some soiling of my TDC kit (externally) I was unscathed, my bike fine but the gear rack was no more. With no other choice the 35litre dry bag with all our over night gear was occy strapped to my Camelback and Denver took the tent pole. Denver now fondly renamed me Sherpa Marty.
This year’s event was held at Black Springs, about 30kms south of Oberon and west of Jenolan Caves. We arrived at the camp site on Friday night to join up with a group of mates including DC and Woz from KOM.
Friday night was spent; plotting the 37 checkpoints on our topographical map, a few beers, bike preparation (including the fitting of a gear rack to carry all our overnight gear), a few more beers and a she’ll be right we’ll do the rest in the morning.
The reason that there was the fitting of only one rack to one of our bikes was that Denver had selflessly offered me the opportunity to maximise my TDC ride fitness training by carrying all our overnight gear with the exception of his tooth brush (I later discovered that he elected to leave that behind in the interest of shaving a few grams from his load).
Race day dawned with a beautiful blue sky and the realisation that we had a lot to do, including the waterproofing of our map, before our looming start time. Denver headed down to the event centre to Contact our map whilst I attended to a last minute tyre change and then raced down to join him. I arrived to find Denver using every appendage in a heroic struggle with 5 rolls of very sticky plastic and our 2m X 1m map….we missed our start time.
We started in the next wave. Now confident that absolutely nothing else could go wrong after our disastrous start to the day I chose to ignore the strange creaking noises coming from the seat post clamp of my borrowed gear rack. Keen to make up some time I pointed my bike down the first downhill fire trail, about 200m from the start, and let it rip. As the pace picked up the creaking noise became more tortured until the clamp failed catastrophically resulting in me having a spectacular high speed off. Conscious of the fact that I was in TDC gear not a single expletive was uttered.
Despite some soiling of my TDC kit (externally) I was unscathed, my bike fine but the gear rack was no more. With no other choice the 35litre dry bag with all our over night gear was occy strapped to my Camelback and Denver took the tent pole. Denver now fondly renamed me Sherpa Marty.
We settled into a good rhythm and hit every checkpoint that we went for on the Saturday for around 85kms and only missed one on the Sunday for 65kms. Each afternoon found us around 20kms and several nasty hills from the finish with about an hour or so to cut off and a crippling point penalty. We made it back in time with around 10 min to spare each day due to our TDC fitness.
We ranked 13th out of 49 in the vets category, 63/209 overall.
Denver rode like a legend putting in a huge effort on his brand new MTB.
Overall, a great weekend away at well organised but very different cycling event. Definitely recommend it.
2 comments:
Awesome - Sounds like a challenge for next year - Hope you've got some pics coming!
You two are champions - I never knew something like this existed. We will have to have a bigger presence next year like Josh said!
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