BlueCrest /Retrobike takes the 2007 Euro Challenge by storm!

john

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This just in from Kestonian (Woody) and Pace (Ben). Super effort chaps !

BlueCrest Capital Management, sponsored by www.retrobike.co.uk, took 5th place in the 2007 Cisco Euro Challenge in Donegal Bay, Ireland. The all male team shone in the 4½ hour mountain biking stage to take 4th place, rising to 7th in the overall classification. BlueCrest continued their rise up the leaderboard in the night-canoeing stage to secure 5th place overall going in to the final day, a position they maintained through the construction stage and the final 10km orienteering stage set on the outstanding beach and precipitous sand dunes surrounding the surf-town of Bundoran, to achieve their best ever finish in the event.

BlueCrest’s ladies team, also sponsored by RetroBike and competing for the first time, remained unphased by the lack of female competitors, taking 28th place in the race which comprised 70 entrants, beating 20 all male teams and a number of mixed teams!

All the team members would like to thank RetroBike for their sponsorship and support! More details on the race can be found at www.challengerworldresults.com

Pics to follow I hope.
 
A few more details on the event ... pics below

It's a multi-stage, corporate adventure race, or, as I describe it, the best team-building you can send your employees on! Each year, 70 teams from companies of all sizes around Europe congregate to thrash it out for the title, with places in the World Team Challenge up for grabs for the top 2 finishers from each country (1 from the UK, as there is a separate 72 event for the UK).

This year, we were in Donegal Bay, Ireland in the surf town of Bundoran. Terrain was slightly less dramatic than Mayrhofen, Austria, in 2006 but we knew it wasn't going to be an easy race when the first stage started at 10pm and involved running and canoeing. Yes, canoeing, in the dark.

Each stage has a strategic story behind it as well. For example, in the first one, it was a game of darts. When the gun goes, you get a map with the locations of the checkpoints that are worth various "throws" (Double 20, bullseye etc) and you have to visit these to score 150. After each 3 throws, or when you get to 0, you have to return to the "oche" - another checkpoint.

Teams are made up of 4 people and for some checkpoints, you can split into pairs, while others must be visited as a complete team meaning that timing is everything. Any time hanging around for your team mates is time wasted.

Sound easy? That's because it was the simplest stage this year! All your planning time is included in the stage time, so the pressure is on.

Ben and I are pretty strong runners, but obviously we had high hopes for the MTB stage. The team had an injury crisis about a week before the race, so we were slightly weaker than hoped but our new sub was a marathon in-line skater, who commutes an hour daily so we crossed our fingers and hoped he could ride off-road on Ben's KHS. We also felt a bit of pressure as a lot of teams had clocked the Pace and the Moots as we unpacked them from the van and admired the bikes.

To cut a long story short, it was a 4.5 hour MTB stage and we rode like our reputations depended on it, collecting the long bonuses while sending Mike and Alex on the shorter ones before meeting up to cash them in. Mike cramped really badly on the way back to the finish, but Ben towed him up the hill using 2 inner tubes tied together while I navigated and we only picked up a small penalty for being late, leaving us 4th on the stage. Reputations safe!

From there on, we stayed in 5th with some solid performances in more night time canoeing (7th), constructing a raft to float a 10kg bag of sand (17th, but this was so tight a stage we gave back very little time) and a 10km run across 35m high sand dunes (8th)

A quick mention for the BlueCrest women's team who came 28th overall. That's in the whole event - beating 20 all male teams (the others were mixed). For 3 of them, it was their first adventure race! An awesome performance!

I'd highly recommend the race if you can get the buy in from your workplace, and will happily answer more questions!

Night canoeing
stage4.jpg

10km running on sand dunes is pretty tiring ...
stage5.jpg

This is why we have yellow suits ... much easier to find your team mates!
beach.jpg

Navigation on the bike stage
stage2.jpg


Woody
 
these events look great fun. Except I am shit at running which is not gonna help :?
Looked into the microsoft challenge, but its not cheap. Not bad, but not cheap.

Well done guys, sounds like you pretty much monstered it!
 
I've done the Microsoft Challenge a couple of times with a previous firm - great fun, but hard work. An extra 3 stages over the Cisco version and the stages are harder, too.

The headline cost is expensive (1K per person) but that's about the cost of a decent 4 day team training course these days and it's well worth it.
 
Hey well done Ed!

The little rehearsal we did must feel like a walk in the parl compared to this!
 
Cisco Euro Challenge on TV

Sunday October 14th at 8.25am

Channel 4

We were teams 57 and 64. Yellow suits (easier to spot!)
 
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