Swamp Fox Race Report
23 03 2008From Bruce Dale (Team 5-0), Bruce raced with Dale Long of Conway SC. Dale is the current Columbia Chapter President, check out their entire race report and results here!
I raced with Dale Long of the Columbia Chapter and we were hoping to move up from our 5th overall finish from 2007. This was one of those races were you’re reminded of the essence of this sport and that is to stay in the fight and keep pressing. Both Dale and I are solid riders and so with 46 miles of mountain biking we knew we should technically have a good race day.
We ran pretty consistently near the top 5 for the first portion of the morning, often crossing paths with NCARS (Matt Tabor’s Group), a couple other male Duo teams and one or two co-ed female teams. With each CP we would move up spots and found ourselves leaving CP7 in second overall….as with most races we struggled with CP8…we had precalculated the distance from an old road bed crossing and paced it off. We then began searching the area and continued not being able to find the marker….in the meantime teams began piling into the area. Frustrating of course knowing that we were potentially losing spots by the minute, we decided to take another attack point which took alot more time but ended up being a good call. When we arrived at CP9 it seemed we were in around 6th or 7th place. With some pretty straight forward riding to 10 and 11 we put the hammer down and and moved back into fourth by CP12. CP12 was the transition to the Orienteering course so we dropped the bikes, grabbed the O maps and took off in pursuit of NCARS and another Duo team.
We decided to do two risky bushwhack sections instead of running the roads and trails around to get the points. Our choice was factored by the woods being pretty clear for visibility and the distances by trails were 3-4X as long our first bushwhack went fairly well and we scooted out on the road to pick-up the next one which was an easy point. We then took a big gamble that Don Childrey also chose to take and that was a 1K bushwhack between points 15 and 14….we stepped into the woods and Dale Long remarked this one will make or break our race…..the movement was tough with some very swampy low lying scrub brush that just tore our lower legs to pieces but we fought through it stumbled onto our handrail road and then went in for the marker CP14 we picked it up, ran out for CP13 and headed for home. When we arrived back at the bikes, there was one duo male team already gone and one gearing up to ride and our gamble had paid off big time. We transitioned quickly in hopes of tracking down second place and closing on the 5-6 minute gap.
Despite riding hard to CP17, 18 and 19 we just couldn’t close on 2nd place and ended up with a third overall just 18 minutes out of first place and 13 minutes out of 2nd place…
Stay in the fight………
Here are some PICS from the race via our AR Club Site:
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