We thought it would be of interest to teams, and would aid transparency and understanding, if we offered some notes around a few of the decisions we made on course and time adjustments.

Adventure Racing is a complex beast, as you all know. It’s not always possible to predict in advance exactly what everyone will do, how the timings will run, what impacts the weather will have etc. There is to some degree a reactive element to the decisions we made and there is probably no getting away from this completely.

We had to dynamically manage the course a couple of times:

Stage 3 (Torridon Giants Trek)

By Saturday night the wind forecast for the high ridges was looking spicy, though there were discrepancies between the three forecasts we trust the most (Met Office, XC Weather and Mountain Weather Information Service) – in particular they did not agree on wind speed. By Sunday morning they were all aligned, and it was clear to us that the ridges would not be safe – they are exposed and technical. A badly timed gust could easily have been a problem. We therefore cut CPs 3-2 and 3-3 and dropped 3-5 to a pre-planned lower location, which still opened up route choice options

Stage 5 (Loch Ness Paddle)

Whilst conditions were obviously challenging, they were ‘do-able’. This kind of thing is precisely the reason we want teams to come to the event with some paddling skills and experience. The stage was running longer than anticipated due to the headwind though. Whilst the forecast was for the wind to drop as we approached the evening, we thought it prudent to get teams to TA5/6 by darkness if we could. The original cut-offs (launch by 1900hrs and visit CP5-3 by 2015hrs) would have achieved this, but everything was taking longer on the day. So, we decided to make launching by 1900hrs a hard cut off, and effectively delete CPs 5-2 and 5-4 for teams starting after 1630hrs, but would add a time adjustment to make this fair from the perspective of teams who had completed all the CP’s on the stage. We benchmarked this against the c. 9.5hrs that Rachel’s Irish Adventures had taken to complete the stage (and what extra effort they would have expended to achieve this). After much spreadsheet agonising, we decided on 5 hour adjustments for each of CP5-2 and 5-4, and a 2 hour adjustment for CP5-3. We also decided that any team that was Long Course at CP5-1 would remain classified as Long Course (until they either missed the 1900 launch cut-off, or the 2015hrs CP5-3 cut-off, or later dropped CPs on/beyond S6 when they would become Short Course as normal).

Stage 14 (Dava Way MTB)

The leading two teams were ahead of our schedule by a considerable distance by TA13. We think some of this is related to the S3 changes (which both cut time and meant you slowed down less than predicted), and probably also because the same wind that affected S3 will have given you a decent tailwind for all/most of S4. They were also just FAST!. This created a couple of problems: (i) logistics – we had 6 x TA’s open at one stage, and (ii) access to Kinloss Barracks – Jim and John who marshalled the gate could not get there until early afternoon. We therefore held Leaping Fish and Endurance Life at TA13 for 3 hours to help sort these issues. There was a large enough gap to 3rd place, that it was highly unlikely this ‘hold’ would change the results.

We tried to do this with the best intentions at every point. We really don’t want to get into a protracted discussion on any of this – that’s not the purpose of these comments, and please exercise restraint in any response. We simply want to give you some background.

Updated Results 

V2 results – we’ve made a couple of corrections, mostly minor stuff like team name changes, but one larger one: on the ITERA results we had not included column H (“Other Adjustments – mostly this related to Shortcuts taken from TA10 or TA11) in the total time calculation. We’ve corrected this now.