 |
There’s a chance that you’re not familiar with the Polaris Challenge. Here it is in a nutshell: The organisers scatter checkpoints across a sizable area of countryside, and allocate them points. You have two days to score as many points as you can by visiting checkpoints. You know where the checkpoints are before the start, but you don’t know how much they’re worth until the clock is ticking. And you have to carry everything you’ll need for the two days and camp in a campsite that you don’t know the location of until after you’ve started. Clear?
It is, as you might expect, pretty hard work. Although only as hard as you make it. If you want to win, it’s very hard indeed. For a start, you’ll probably end up covering 150 miles and spend an extremely uncomfortable night due to saving weight by carrying half a tent, a sleeping bag the size of a Coke can, a square foot of bubble wrap in lieu of a sleeping mat and no spare clothes. And you’ll have subsisted entirely on energy bars for the whole event and won’t be able to crap for a week.
Lap of luxury
This approach is, quite frankly, not for us. Hence Team Bikemagic (otherwise known as Mr and Mrs Davis, competing in the Mixed category) rolling down a Liverpool quayside towing a BOB Yak bike trailer groaning with spare kit. Not that we were planning to take all that around with us. In an unusual departure, the Spring Polaris took place on the Isle of Man. Ferry timetables being what they are, we headed over two days early so we had a second tent to leave at “base camp” over the weekend. And a big holdall of warm, dry clothes to fall into at the finish.
Arriving in Douglas, our first task was to find the campsite. This involved a pleasant trundle along the illuminated promenade followed by a steep road climb. We were passed near the top by a vanload of other competitors asking if this was the way to the campsite, a good start for a navigation event…
Shortly we rolled into the football field that formed base camp. Literally rolled in my case, as the freehub body that I’d been meaning to replace for, ooh, months chose that moment to explode. Timing is, after all, everything. At least it didn’t go at the bottom of the hill. Pitch tent, unroll sleeping bags, sleep.
 |
Morning saw a minor crisis – the new gas bottle we’d bought for the stove refused to yield any gas. So much of Good Friday morning was spent trying to find a new gas bottle. After replacing the freehub body, anyway – thanks to the van guys for having brought the 10mm Allen key that I forgot… We quickly discovered that very little of Douglas is open on Good Friday, but eventually tracked down a gas bottle, grabbed some lunch and returned to base for the map-marking ceremony.
As well as the locations of all the checkpoints, there are usually tons of map corrections to mark up. Trails that exist but can’t be ridden, trails that don’t exist, trails that appear not to exist but in fact do and various other permutations, plus sundry out-of-bounds areas and advice. There are as many different systems for marking maps as there are competitors, but they all involve lots of coloured pens and a good couple of hours. Being a tragic kit weenie, I spent a further epoch programming all the checkpoint locations into a GPS. Hey, it proved useful at least twice…
Day one
Saturday morning dawned bright but nippy. We’d drawn an early start (and, inexplicably, team number 1) so it was down to the prom for 9am having fitted a couple of Blackburn beam racks and bungeed a tent and food to them. Riding a bike with an extra 20% weight hung out over the back wheel and a sizable pack on your back takes a little getting used to, but we made it to the start without incident. A brief briefing on the line (advising everyone to watch out for the motorbikes doing 150mph on the TT course…) and we were off for seven hours of mapreading, pedalling and semi-competent compass work.
500m down the prom we picked up the list of checkpoint scores and stopped to scribble them on the map. And then looked at the result and attempted to formulate a plan. The overnight camp site was up in the north of the island, probably a good 20 miles away if you went straight there. But that wouldn’t score many points. Directly west there was a crop of high-scoring checkpoints, so we headed that way.
 |
Navigation in the hills is pretty straightforward. At least, it is compared to navigating in town. A couple of dead ends and one-way streets later we were climbing away from Douglas headed for our first checkpoint. This early on, all the other riders we saw were going roughly the same direction, but within an hour there were people passing us in both directions and crossing our path in most of the others.
Partially this is because the way to get lots of points is to not worry too much about forming loops that pass through checkpoints. The loops go near them and you ride out-and-back legs to get to them. Not being too concerned with winning we went for a couple of through routes, including a fantastic rock slab descent down by the coast that we paid for with an extensive road climb… By this time it had warmed up considerably, with shorts being the order of the day under clear blue skies.
Northward Ho!
After notching up a fairly healthy (we thought) total in that corner of the island, we decided we’d better head north. The campsite appeared to be at the top of a not-insubstantial hill, so we decided that we’d better allow plenty of time. Actually, Sandra decided that and who am I to argue? Exactly. Besides, she had the map. It was an excellent plan, though. We blasted (sort of) up the coast road and had enough time in hand to pick off another few checks, including one up a heinously steep Tarmac climb that had a number of people off and pushing. We spotted Singletrack mag editor Chipps piloting a tandem/trailer combo up it on our way down. Rather him than us.
Then with the clock approaching the appointed time it was off to the campsite. As expected, the climb up there was steep and long, but we still arrived 20 minutes early and were first there. Almost first – someone apparently arrived over an hour early but was sent away again by the organisers. Early is good – points are deducted for lateness – although the top teams are rarely more than a couple of minutes early and often tactically late. You don’t lose many points for the first ten minutes, so if that lets you pick up a 30-pointer you’re quids in.
 |
Being first gave us the pick of the campsite, allowing us to find a not-too-windy and almost flat spot to pitch the tent and then apply ourselves to the tasks of feeding purifying tablets into water bottles and rustling up some food – vegetable soup, pasta and pesto followed by jam roly-poly and custard. Splendid. Then it was an evening of shooting the breeze in the campsite (largely with Jo and Woody, university buddies who we hadn’t seen for eight years – small world…), drinking a couple of beers that found their way up there and comparing performances. We’d got 230 points, placing us 7th in Mixed but a long way behind leading pair Ben Bardsley and Helen Jackson with a huge 473. They’d been to twice as many checkpoints as us, and we’d covered 70km. In fact, they were in the overall lead overnight, a point ahead of solo competitor Petr Strejcek. John Houlihan had managed 500 points but came in half an hour late and lost 90 of them. Apparently more by luck than judgement we’d managed to avoid a couple of fairly nasty and slow tracks, which was nice. We made a mental note to avoid them the next day too…
Day two
After a breezy night (mainly from the weather, but there seemed to be a few people suffering from the after-effects of too many fig rolls and cereal bars), Sunday dawned, well, breezy. And grey, and not terribly warm. We breakfasted on porridge (top tip – mix with powdered milk, sugar and raisins at home, then just pour on water and boil) and rolled to the start, trying not to sit down too heavily.
The checkpoints are all differently-scored for the second day, and you only get five hours. The new scores presented an obvious high-scoring path across the island with a couple of easy-looking diversions for extra points so we went that way. The first stretch was uphill on rutted moorland tracks that I was making very heavy weather off. Sandra had clearly got her technical trail head on that morning so I followed her lines and we started picking off checkpoints. We knew there was no danger of troubling the leaders, but there were a couple of teams pretty close behind – we were dead pleased with our performance so far and didn’t really want to drop any.
 |
Our planned route took us back up the evil Tarmac climb from the previous day, and beyond. We thought the bottom part was the worst, but the climb went on, and on, and on. And the higher it went, the looser it got – there was a lot of pushing in evidence. Most of the trails on the island are motor-vehicle accessible byways, so they’re generally quite wide and often loose. Not all, though – soon we were sweeping down lovely, grassy singletrack boggling at the fast teams who’d come past one way, clip the checkpoint up the trail and then barrel back down to go somewhere else, negotiating gates apparently without slowing down.
And then we were about five miles from the finish back on the prom but with over an hour in hand. Only one thing for it – off for more checkpointage. And then a proper blast down the main road in a team-time-trial-with-unsuitable-bikes style and a painfully slow couple of miles into the teeth of a gale along the seafront. Still ten minutes early, though.
Result!
The final part of the Polaris guys’ seamless organisation fell into place with a splendid nosh-up courtesy of a local veggie restaurant and some beer, once we’d rehydrated sufficiently. Within an hour or so the results were through and the prizegiving kicked off. We’d managed 500 points for sixth place in mixed, which we were chuffed to bits with – Bardsley and Jackson won the category with 768… Overall winner was Czech soloist Petr Strejcek with a mighty 872. Several of the regular teams hadn’t come out, and indeed the field was considerably smaller than usual, with 120 teams instead of nearly 500, but the event was still great. We were lucky with the weather, the island’s a top place to ride, the organisation was top and we still had all of Sunday evening to compare experiences.
And then before dawn on Monday it was back to the ferry, where the arrival of fifty mountain bikes caused some consternation amongst the staff. We all squeezed on in the end, though…
Full results and details of future events on the Polaris website.
Share