The Polaris MountainBike / Orienteering Events

I had great fun in the new discipline (for South Africa at least) of MTB orienteering - Gunter Spilhaus has organised a number of events in 2002, as part of/following the very successful model of the Polaris series in the UK and Australia.

The Southern Cross Mini-Polaris Challenge: Feb 2002

Extracts from Paul Mitchell's report off the Main Polaris Website

This mini Polaris challenge was designed to allow the organisers an opportunity to test everything before the real thing later this year. If this was anything to go by, you definitely don't want to miss the real thing.  Just under 30 competitors arrived on Saturday morning at Silvermine North, not knowing quite what to expect. It hit us in a rush when organiser Gunter Spilhaus handed a list containing co-ordinate points for 25 controls, a map and instructions to plot these quickly before the briefing, then only half an hour away. Thank heavens my AR box was in the back of the van so it was out with highlighters, set squares, calculator, etc and frantic plotting commenced. The spirit of teamwork meant that somehow everybody was basically ready to start when it was time to go.

Most of the riding was on fire tracks and forestry roads with short sections of single track. It was not too technical which suited the hackers like me, but certainly made use of the contours in the area so you had plenty of opportunity to push up the average heart rate. The orienteering may sound daunting, but you really didn't need to take out your compass at any stage. If you could handle basic map reading, you could find the controls. What you did need to do was to think about your route choice to make sure you hit the hills the right way around and to keep an eye on the time so you could make adjustments if need be. This event can be enjoyed by hardcore racers and social adventurers alike. You don't need to a downhill whizzkid or a top notch orienteer to take part in this because you can choose where you want to go and how quickly you're comfortable in going.

The Adventure Racing community was well represented as expected with Ugene Nel and Jaco Rheeder taking overall honours having located all controls with one minute to spare ! Jean Paul van Belle and Trevor Ball were joint second while Jacques Marais and Karen Velleman won the mixed category. I [i.e. Paul Mitchell] was second in the solo category.

Blade Polaris Paddle Event - Oct 2002

This paddling/orienteering event took place on the Theewaterskloof Dam. No pictures or story here, but "Team Energy" i.e. Caroline Brawner and myself won the sea-kayak category against all expectations by taking a "safe" but well-planned route.

HP Polaris MTB Orienteering Challenge - Nov 2002

Report by Jean-Paul Van Belle

Friday evening: we are personally welcomed and made to feel at home by the reception team of Oak Lane in what ranks as one of South Africas most beautiful areas: the Elgin fruit valley. Registration gets interrupted to watch the Old Mutual World of Endurance broadcast of the Eden AR Challenge, not only to inspire everyone with the fine performance of the most formidable AR team in the country (the most humble Team Energy), but also to comment on the film crews style of covering an event: because said film crew is to be covering the current event. Laura ensured that registration went ultra-smoothly, with Paul putting on a most appreciated sideshow in the form of an orienteering crash course (giving away a couple of course secrets, I believe), followed by another free crash course in advanced engineering (using action research as the pedagogical model: build your own MTB map holder).

For those unfortunates amongst you who have not taken part in a Polaris Challenge yet, this is the general format. At race briefing, you get a customized 1:50000 map created especially for the event by the Maps and Surveys department, along with the coordinates of the checkpoints. You have ample time to plot them onto the map. After the start guns goes off, you sprint (on MTB or kayak, depending on the event) to a nearby point where you are given a sheet with weightings or scores ranging from 0 up to 100 or more for each checkpoint. With the clock ticking, you have to figure a route which will maximize your total points score while still allowing you to return within the time limit. For this two-day event, the cut-off times were 7 hours on Saturday and 5 hours on Sunday, with different weightings being given for both races. Back to the Friday evening: even the best amongst us took a full three hours plotting and double-checking the 40 checkpoints and adding the invaluable course corrections. The really clever ones just hovered around providing moral, digestable and alcohol-based support in exchange for a copy of the final plottings Putting myself in Gunters complex and most convoluted mind, I anticipated that the point weightings for the Saturday 7-hour would see the emphasis on area north of the N2, with the Sundays weighting favouring the southern part. This proved to be indeed the case.

An early Saturday sunrise greeted a camping site crawling with self-proclaimed MTB technicians making the final adjustments to gears, lubing chains, polishing map holders and the like. Support crew some of us were clever enough to have conned unsuspecting acquaintances or girlfriends into a so-called nice week-end away were kept running with requests for coffee, breakfast, coffee, kit check, coffee, etc. Some so-called orienteering people arrived on the scene and out of pity we let them copy our map. Other well-meaning people busied themselves putting rocks into Carolines bags so that she would go downhill faster in ARs she always complains about her lack of downhill momentum. The weather was predicted to be a perfect one for Belgian Mountain Men (inside joke dont even try to get it) with lots of cool winds (reaching gale force at some points) and the chance of slight rain. The staggered start worked well, with a nice opening sprint (good enough to have someone break their bike :) leading to the hand-out sheets. Ugene and myself sat down together to study the point score sheet. Although we had a vague initial plan to race together, Ugene favoured the southern area whilst I stuck to my guns to go north, so we reluctantly parted ways. It must be noted that, at that point in time, I was not really racing for position so I also figured that my strategy would also give me the chance to explore the northern area which would be too far for the shorter Sunday.

A quick ride (past checkpoint #7) took me to Glen Elgin (CP #29), where I puttered around a bit before figuring out that a Private Keep Out sign meant that this was indeed the right road to take. Thus emboldened, about 4 kays further, I squeezed over and through the Eikenhof remote control high security gate to bump straight into the farmer in his bakkie my fears of being shot at close range abated quickly when he gave me an encouraging hand wave. Obviously Gunter had spent a lot of time socializing with the local farmers. Chasing my own tail for about 10 minutes or so, and failing to locate the walkway checkpoint #35 (worth a measly 10 points), I decided to stop wasting time and move on to the more valuable Eikenhof Mountain Dam just across the road but a stiff climb up from the current 300m. I didnt take the shortest route there, zigzagging somewhat aimlessly through the orchards. But the more attractive (according to the map, at least) alternative route turned out not to be any faster because at the Dam I met up Johan. He was going to be my major challenger for the rest of the race. Hed taken the more scenic route which probably cost him an extra 15 or 20 minutes.

Checkpoint #30 was described as the last pine in the row, but it took us some figuring to find which of the at least two dozen crisscrossing rows of trees was the row. We then stuck together for a while, engaging in some idle chat before the gradient took our breath away, and jointly pushing our bike up a non-marked road whose existence was disclosed with the race corrections. We discovered pretty quickly why the road was unmarked, and indeed even on the corrections was given as a partly dotted line. Reaching the 800m high point # 40 gave me a bit of a break for a sandwich with Johan, clearly the stronger amongst us, pushing off for an out-and-back to the Holy Grail: the microwave tower, with the obscene score of 150 points but at 1114 metres altitude. Luckily the road was relatively (now I know where Gunter got the name of his company) easy going, both in terms of surface and gradient. Despite the cool clouds and strong back winds, sweat was trickling off my forehead not in droplets but in rivlets!

Only when I was going back and well into the 10 km downhill ride, did I see the next few competitors, which made me realize that there was a possibility of a decent race position, though I knew I couldnt touch Johan for strength or technique. At the bottom (which is the top of the road pass) I hit the 1km flat stretch to CP#32 but was faced with such headwinds that I actually had to get off my bike at one point. There was a nice banner indicating the checkpoint but, in what seemed to become a pattern for the rest of the race, I spent at least 5 minutes looking for the darned clipper who turned out to be hanging in plain view right in the middle of the bridge. I reckon that, in this race, Ive lost more than a full hour looking for clippers which were hanging in plain sight at exactly the correct coordinate but where I was too thick to think too silly to see (slogan J.P. Van Belle all rights reserved).

About half a kay down the track I got what must have been a mutual shock: I bumped into my 13-going-on-to-18 year old daughter with her friend. They were lost looking for the start of the Boland trail, which a colleague of mine had invited them to this same weekend. What a coincidence out of a million. I pointed out a mountain peak and told them to keep to the right of it and they wandered off to have an equally great though slightly less strenuous/alcohol-laden weekend. A quick and easy ride past CP#33 to CP#31 saw me meeting up with the TV crew the only time in this race. Johan, who was way ahead of me at this time, apparently took the downhill road whilst I, unbeknownst of Johans route choice, went for the shortest but somewhat uphill route so that we met to each others surprise at the impressive dam wall by CP#37. Time was getting short so this was decision time for us: which route home will yield the most points. Johan did his usual magic, disappearing in a flash with me looking around stupidly and asking what happened. Eventually, I pushed/carried up my bike in a straight line VERY slowly the 89 degree slope to the between two peaks CP36. Euclid, FYI, the shortest route between two points is NOT a straight line. Life wasnt made easier by the fact that I couldnt see Johan neither ahead nor behind me so I didnt know whether I was chasing him or he me. The race debriefing (should be called post-mortem in my case) revealed that at that point hed headed off straight south.

Time was by now running out on me: about 90 minutes to go, more than 20 kays from home. I looked at the map, decided to go for broke and try to hit CP#25, 7 kays the wrong way from the finish but with the promise of tar and easy gradient home. I took a fast downhill ride where I bumped into Trevor and Richard. The latter seemed to have recovered pretty well from his early-morning half marathon run (honest!) but they failed to give me usable information on the CPs ahead, just the usual Trevor babble which he must have learnt from baby Ryan. At least his wife Allie managed to beat him again in this event, funny how these small pleasures in life keep one smiling. I took a wrong turn but managed to stumble onto the far end of the single track where CP#26 was to be found. It made for a frantic but very scenic ride. As the other Polaris riders will attest to, forestry roads in that area dont make much sense when checked against a map, so I just navigated off the sun, the wind and what Ive always called Stompkop but is really Kanonkop. CP#25 was described as track junction, exasperatingly I had to check out abut a dozen different junctions, luckily all within 100 metres, before I found the clip. It was getting scary now, about 16 kays to go, 1 hour left. The wind picked up and somehow fire got into my legs. I decided to forego CP#27 worth 25 points even though it seemed one tiny kay off my route, but time pressure prevailed and I hurried, make that flew, through Grabouw to Glen Elgin and from there back to the finish. Somehow all the hills I remembered from the way up had disappeared or melted away: I made it with almost 20 minutes to spare.

The biggest surprise of them all came when the days results were produced (extremely quickly thanks to the great team LaurAnlie!) and I had the highest score of the bunch: 670. Initially I thought Id had a couple of Hunters too many, an entirely plausible suggestion to anyone observing my favourite post-race rehydration method. This left me with the plight of the material leader in a difficult and technical chess tournament endgame that is suspended for the night: whilst the rest of the players are relaxing and enjoying dinner and drinks, (s)hes got to swat up the finest intricacies of that particular endgame. After watching the Boks put on their finest against the Scots (at least the adverts provided some relief), it was back to the map and trying to gather intelligence. Most of this was stuff along the lines of how the clipper at CP#19 was stolen by a local kid (despite stainless steel cable & lock) and how Gunters dad Sherlock managed to find the culprit and put the control back, who got the most chain breaks, why Ugene was covered with blood, how Caroline managed to beat most of the field and the like. The next day broke with some heavy high mist which unfortunately burnt off all too quickly. It was clear that, today, I had to defend the little remaining honour of Team Energy (it having been disgraced completely by Trevor and Uges performance, or rather lack thereof). I reckoned I was halfway there by deciding to lubricate my chain since my bikes fate is to stand somewhat forlorn but definitely completely ignored in storage between adventure races. Gunter came by to inform me that there was to be no more of this getting lifts in local farmers bakkies, so they would track my movements by attaching a GPS tracker on my backpack. I later managed to disable the unit to destroy any incriminating evidence anyway. Actually, the real purpose was to be able to generate one of those most amazing 3-D fly-through special effects which we were all able to share, compliments of Johans custom-designed software.

Another great start with plenty of opportunity to adding to Kathys uphill by giving her some extra lip. Hope she enjoyed it, the others did! As I suspected (I cant really reveal in public my prior intelligence arrangements with Paul whereby he sends me all race info one week prior to the race in exchange for unspecified amounts of cash:), Gunter wanted us to go South. I was very keen to explore the Kogelberg MTB trail so I included that in my initial route choice. A quick visit to the checkpoint 3, 12 and 8 brought me eventually to the infamous bridge CP#9 located right below in the Palmietriver valley. Caroline said she never saw a switchback so I first hunted in the direction of the Sandpit before coming to my senses and bringing the reliability of the source into the equation. So I backtracked and found the bridge no problem. All through the last half hour I had been weighing up the extra time required to get to the dam where the big fish was swimming CP 10 & 13 with a combined score of 140. Very reluctantly I decided to forego 10 & 13 and give this great MTB trail a miss: no matter how I calculated I was not going to make it within the 5 hours.

Thinking I was going to regret my decision (I never did!), I headed further South towards Draak-se-Kop (CP#14) via a relatively easy-to-find CP#16. A bit of a climb and a little detour along the Krabbefontein farm boundary but I got to the track crossing (CP#14) without problem. Ugene hadnt found this clipper and I had overheard Gunter saying it was hanging right of one of the high-voltage power pylons. So I went for the nearest one, no joy. Must be the lower one. No joy either. Further down the track. Nothing. Back to the other one for a closer inspection. Still nothing. Maybe the next pylon up (lots of sand, sweat and swearing). Zilch. Back to the other pylon. Still the same. Back down the track. Zero. OK: last change then I go. Back to basics and forget everything I ever heard or thought about this point. Map plots here at the track crossing, description says track crossing, go back (10th time) to the path crossing. Look up. There it hangs - laughing at me off the nearest bush, clear as a bell, obviously not clear as a van belle. Very funny, Gunter. To myself: 20 minutes lost, you idiot! (thats what my parents and now my kids call me). I cleared the memory of the GPS imagine having proof of this balls-up on TV theres already enough Balls on TV.

Anyway, no time to feel sorry, on to the Palmietriver. What appeared on the map as a good, fast downhill turned out to be a get off the bike, get on, get off, get on, fall off, get on, fall off, crawl on, etc. affair. The road from or rather to hell. Explains how Ugene mangled his shoes and body. I got to the Palmietriver in more or less one piece where the track crossing was indicated which meant a wade/half-swim across to the other side (no, Jacques, I didnt strip because you werent around to photograph me). Only problem was that the clip for CP#15 was 400 metres bundubash away just where the next team and TV crew was visible. So I had to drag my cycle all the way through the bush and back for a stupid clip. My borrowed watch had been speeding up progressively I must tell Caroline that these built-in altimeters speed up the time as you descend. A long slow drag up to #18 where I bumped into another team coming down and a long push to #21. I am still not convinced that the fire break was faster than the road, especially not where you have to negotiate these vertical cliff faces. Small wonder these two elderly lady hikers were shaking their head in disbelief when they saw me negotiating this extreme downhill stretch on wheels. But the sea views were awesome if not unexpected and the headwind brought cool relief and even some high cloud cover.

Dilemma: 75 minutes left and the big scoring tower is in sight but still a damn long way away. You only live once with Johan weighing heavily on my mind I decide to go for it. The straight-line shortcut looks like bundu-bashing so I take the long way around another team apparently went straight across and lived to tell the tale. The envisaged short-cut by the dam is indeed there and it is a less steep final climb than anticipated to the tower. Here my curse strikes again: I keep looking for the damn tower which has been occupying my mind during the last hour. I race to and fro from the old ruins down this path, then trying to follow the powerlines but nothing nowhere. Ok another 10 minutes and lots of energy wasted. Take a deep breath and look again at the map. 20: Top Water Tower. WATER tower. Idiot! I turn around: there are the water reservoirs right next to the ruin and a bright pink ribbon flapping about merrily in the wind. Idiot. Adrenaline reserves kick in along with the anger and I teletransport myself to Somerhoogte Village (CP#19) to spend at least two minutes (again) looking behind the wall, with the reformed clipper-thief-boy pointing me in the right direction to finally find the clip hanging right above my silly head on a tree branch.

I now have less than 45 minutes to go. Add in a 20 minutes buffer low-penalty time (penalties really kick in hard after 20 minutes). I am due south of home base. There is no straight road home. A very agonizing decision. An easy 40 point score is tempting me down a what appears straight and quick eastern loop route, with promises of flat tar further down and the possibility of picking up even more controls. The western loop takes me to the deeper end of the valley, no points but guaranteed tar and no decision making on the way home. I measure thumbs on the map: eastern route: 16 thumbs = kays; western route = 11 thumbs. I head east then dj-vue kicks in from a previous Polaris MTB Challenge where I lost about 200 points in penalties. Sorry, however tempting the lure of the 40 point Siren, the flirting with the over 30 minute 10 points-a-minute zone is too ghastly to contemplate. Mind over heart, I turn back, eastward, and kick butt, arriving across the finish line only 4 minutes late (Gunter says 5 and hes actually right but lets try and fault the organiser on at least something, the entire race having been too perfect to be humanly possible).

Although I get to the finish much earlier than expected, I finish with a heavy heart. Deep down, I know I should have scored much better and I probably lost out heavily against Johan and the other teams close on my heels. But I am actually too buggered to care my legs are lead-dead and will remain so for longer than any other extreme event I have done before. A suitable number of alcohol-based re-hydration non-sports drinks (sorry Fast Fuel!) numb my muscles enough to enable me crawl to the nearest shady spot and I start adding up my score: 500! Not too bad after all. To cut a long story and prize-giving short, I scored a total of 1165 points over the two days, about 130 points ahead of Johan, and 200 ahead of the first pair, who came third overall. The event was organised faultlessly, the weather close to perfect, the Oakdale crew too hospitable for words and the locals and scenery nothing short of amazing. What an event. The fifty or so racing teams had a great time and most achieved their personal goals for the event, be it to explore the area, score 150 points or just have fun. We cant wait for the next one!