Wow, no wonder they call it an adventure race. Team MySinglespeed.com made it’s first adventure race appearance at this years Spring Adventure Challenge put on by the folks at GRAAR. My teammate Steve Bassett and I arrived at Owasippe early Saturday morning for our first foray into the wonderful world of adventure racing, neither of us not quite sure we’d gotten ourselves into. One thing was for sure, we were going to have a little fun Team MySinglespeed style no matter what.
We couldn’t have asked for better weather for a spring race than what we had. It was probably in the high 40’s maybe low 50’s that morning and the sun was shining. The other racers added to the great experience we had. Before the race even began, another team was nice enough to give us a sheet of contact paper to laminate our passport (boy have we got a lot to learn). Throughout the race we kept running into the same people on the trails and during the orienteering sections, and everyone was joking around with each other. When many of us got lost during the mountain biking section, the other teams were helping each other out to point them in the right direction instead of ignoring them and letting them continue to be lost. It was rather comical to split from another group only to see them about 15 minutes later, and realizing none of us really knew where we were going.
When it was all said and done, Team MySinglespeed took 15th out of 29th in our division and 32nd out of 58 overall, but we were the only single speeders out there. It kind of became a joke on the trail whenever we would run into other teams and they would realize that we were riding single speeds. One team remarked as we passed them on the trail, “Single speeds eh? You guys should be done by now”. To which we simply replied jokingly, “We’re on our second lap around…”.
It’s now official though, I’m hooked on adventure racing. You can be assured that you’ll see Steve and I out there racing again.
