Call to Crawl #4

August 14, 2016

This, the 4th event in the Call to Crawl series this year, was a 90-minute drive from my house, but was well worth it. The day/evening before the event, it there was some pretty heavy downpour, but there was still a turnout of about 30 people, and the rain held off all day during the event. Unlike many of the previous events in this series, there were two courses; one with 50ish gates, and the other with about 100, as well as a total of 15 bonus gates spread between the two.

Both courses had a number of interesting man-made obstacles, from log bridges to switchbacks to cement ramps and everything in between, as well as natural obstacles ranging from fallen logs used as bridges, to multiple dirt hillclimbs etc. Neither course was super difficult - it is a G6 style event after all – but there were enough challenges to make it fun.

I got ahead of the bottleneck of people on the first course, and was able to finish it with enough time to do all of the bonus gates (including the bonus gates of the second course) and walk back to see how everyone else was doing. This was pretty lucky, as later, about a third of the way through the 2nd course, a bearing in my front axle died, causing the ring and pinion to slip under load and generally tear themselves apart. I was able to finish the course with some a hearty amount of extra throttle, but the bonus gates would have been a problem if I hadn’t done them earlier.

This was sadly the last event that one club member was attending, as he is in the process of moving to the east coast of Canada; some others secretly bought him a cake, and we all signed a poster for him to take with him. Sucks to see him go, but the cake and poster were nice surprises for everyone.