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| Quest 2 day BARC Qualifier (3rd &4th May 2003) | The first round of the British Adventure Racing Championship (BARC) series got underway this weekend (3rd & 4th May), in the suitable challenging location of the Dartmoor national park. This was to be the first competitive outing for team planetFear and in fact would be the first time that all the team had raced together. For this reason we were expecting the weekend to prove very interesting and had set ourselves the objective of achieving a top ten finish in order to secure some good points towards the BARC series. The team category for this race was going to be very competitive with a number of good teams looking for early season BARC points.
The race logistics for this event were going to be slightly different from the norm with no central base and the 3 distinct stages each having a different registration / control location that necessitated a drive from where ever your accommodation was.
Saturday morning dawned with relatively clear skies but a strong wind, with the promise of sporadic showers throughout the day. After a short drive we arrived at the registration / transition location for stage 1 of day way. Okehampton camp on the north edge of the Dartmoor national park. Stage 1 was to be 6 hours in length and split between run and bike, with the transition at the camp. Upon receipt of check point grid references and map marking it was clear that the courses (MTB & Trail run) were not really clearable and that route planning to optimise available points would be very import. We made the decision to run first and planned on a 2 hour run 4 hour bike split. The field seemed to be split equally on the best approach to take regarding running or biking first and in retrospect, we believe we made the right choice with the run stage first.
The first run started well and proceeded in the same manor and we were pleased with the progress that we were making in the initial stages. We managed to included both special challenges (absail and cable traverse) in our route planning. We had to modify our route plans on the fly as the wind  Page 1 of 3
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