E2C May 6&7, 2006

To start off our race season this year Shawn and I competed in the Eco-Endurance Challenge in Hubbards, NS. This was a 24hr orienteering-style race, all on foot, during which the goal was to find as many controls in the woods (places on the map) as possible, with only your map and compass, no GPS! Each control was worth between 100-250 points. Once you arrived at a control, you punched your card with a patterned stapler thingy, and ran on to find the next.

Well, what a race we had. After the first hour-or-so of me whining, and Shawn tolerating and pushing me, we got into a nice running pace that we kept up for the first 12 or so hours. Shawn was so good at the navigating that we hit all of our targets with relative ease (only one 1km detour in the woods, and one 1km detour on a dirt road).

However, as night fell (and the fog rolled in), we quickly realized that we had run out of food (oops). It had rained all day, and with no thanks to Ziplock, Shawn's food bags in his pack were punctured by nasty branched in the woods. Hey, maybe that's why we could smell cheesies for about an hour before we discovered the soggy remains of our food supply. We also didn't plan our route very well; it would have taken us about 6hrs and 16kms to get back to the car to re-fuel. So, needless to say, as Shawn unsuccessfully attempted to acquire sustenance from soggy cheetos, we were feeling pretty low. I was falling asleep while walking (or should we say crawling!), and Shawny wasn't much better off. It was getting especially difficult to bushwhack through the thick woods to find some of the tough controls, with only one functioning headlamp (Shawn's was spastic!).

Then, through the fog and way past the reach of our headlamps we saw two lights floating in the distance....one appeared to be 7ft off the ground, the other maybe 4? It was Jan T. and Mark Campbell, our saviors of the race! Luckily they took pity on us, gave us a price club sized bag of fruit gummies and a boost drink. The frantic gummy eating kept us awake until the sun came up about an hour later, and suddenly we felt full of energy! ...well, relatively I guess :)

We finished of the race strong, ended up with 4500 pts and 4th place overall in the competitive division (27 teams), 1st place Coed!
Here is a link to the race website: http://www.hrsar.ca/e2c/2006results.htm
We didn't have our camera at the time, so I’m just waiting on some pics of this race from a friend.