This was to be my first "Urban Polaris" and the excitement was mounting. Mark (my team mate), Alastair and Nick were also joining in the day, it all started at 5:30AM at the Canberra Youth Hostel. By 6:15AM we had registered to find out that our starting group was at 9:20AM, we were a bit miffed with 3 hour wait. Well what does one do for 3hrs. Funnily enough 3 hour's was just the right amount of time for us to work out where the control points were on the map, get our bike ready to go and sneak in some breakfast.
At 9:20AM we finally start, and with much confidence we head out through the gates and made a left hand turn too wards our first control point. About 8km's into our ride our plans seemed a bit shakey at 15km's it was time to be concerned, considering we had initally calculated the control to be only 12km's away (max). We did eventually reach a control point (the furtherest one for the entire event), but we had no idea where it was on the map. We eventually why we couldn't see it, because it wasn't actually on the map we had. It was on one of the additional handouts. Not a good start, considering all the hills we had to ride to get there. But after a good laugh about our mistake (which we had no idea how we made) we headed back. That cost us an hour of riding time, but did collect 40 points. We did eventually make the right turn and headed of to our planned route. The rest of the day went more to plan, we rode along bikepaths, motorways and fire trials. We seemed to do a lot of hill climbs, the maps we were given didn't have any contour lines marked so we had no real idea what the terrian was like. We stayed north of the city centre, I have a feeling that the south was a little flatter, I'll have to remember that for next year.
So 6hr43min, 96km, 13 controls and 210 points later, the day was done.
"The Battlefield"
Making our battle plans. Note to self, read all the documentation before you start.
The view from the top of "Black Mountain Tower"
Finally back home.
