The race is getting close now, we’ve finished our last training paddle (blogs to come), but we need to put all that experimenting into perspective and look at the race and how we’ll get to the end.

Though Sarah takes the pragmatic view – dealing with things as they come, I take more of a long view.

Building the big picture

A few weeks ago, we sat down with the Yukon River Quest presentation, I put the GPS co-ords they provide on to google maps and we wrote down all the points. Each place where there will a checkpoint or a monitoring point. We added in the most interesting points on the river: rapids and big rivers joining, and highlighted the the three points where we get time-checked and the place we’ll meet our support crew for new supplies.

From the mileages on the GPS points, Sarah worked out rough timings when we thought we’d be at each one and we laid all this out in the front room.

From this we could work out how much food we’d need and when. We also worked out what points we’ll want to change into day and night gear. The race people say most people drop out of the race out due to hyperthermia, fuel and the right clothing will help us to avoid this.

This has allowed us to look at the food we’ve tried out over the training races and build up a list of what supplies we’ll need – we’ll be blogging about this next. More importantly we now have a shared view of the race and what should happen when.