As night falls on Day 2, the seven teams at the Ukatak Raid International are scattered along the course, between CP5 and CP12. Team Finland moved into 1st place early on the first day, and continues to lead the pack, with Peak.com giving chase, closely followed by Samuraï Spirits and PlaneteAventure. Much further back, struggling but persevering, the three Quebec teams are moving through the course. The race has effectively been split in two. For some teams, it is a race to the finish. For others, it has become a race just to finish.
Overnight, the temperatures on the course plummeted to -35°C. Team Finland's Eero Jappinen attributes his team's lead to the cold weather.
"It is so cold, cold, cold," Jappinen says. "There is no reason to stop anywhere. The northern lights were beautiful last night, but the trail is no place to stop and take in the view. Besides, we have to be able to make our flight home later this week."
Team Peak.com cruises into the second transition area sometime around 11am on Day 2.
"I'm half-numb, half-asleep," says Maureen Monaghan.
Members of Peak.com are not expert cross-country skiers, but at least they fare better than PlaneteAventure, which essentially walked the length of the cross-country ski leg.
With a broken binding, cross-country ski boots become hiking boots, and a ski becomes a hike. Skis in hand,
Team PlaneteAventure walked instead of skied approximately 30km of hard-packed snowmobile trails through the Parc des Grands Jardins.
PlaneteAventure's Sophie Deudon's feet suffer the consequences of this unexpected hike in the wrong boots. She sits inside CP5, actually a park warden's heated chalet. Surrounded by the smelly socks, sweaty long underwear and miscellaneous gear of no fewer than three teams, she sits in front of a huge wood stove and pokes at a blister covering much of her heel. With a sharp blade, she slices the loose skin away. With medical precision, one teammate treats the blister with antiseptic as another prepares a bandage. After a mandatory four-hour rest period at this transition area, it continues on the cross-country ski trail on foot, eager for its own boots and its mountain bikes. Still, the team remains in 3rd place, and continues to gain on the American team Peak.com.
Team Le Yetï's skis are holding up and it is skiing well, which is good because the Quebec team made an unexpected an unwelcome detour in the early hours of the morning. A navigational error threw them hours off course. The team is now at least six hours behind the leaders.
Race organizers have decided to allow the three Canadian teams to forego the mandatory four-hour rest period. Instead, the teams will have a five-hour penalty added to their time at the end of the race. This way, the organizers hope to reduce the distance between the seven teams.
By midday, Team Finland is back on its bikes, riding along snow-packed roads through pristine evergreen forest. Rich green branches bow under the weight of the snow that showers down when the wind blows. Early-afternoon snow flurries have cleared off, the sun is shining, and the temperature is a balmy -5°C.
At CP8 on the shores of Lac Moreau, Team Finland gets its first taste of a traditional Canadian sport: snowshoeing.
Jappinen straps on the snowshoes and tries them on. How much practice have you had? he is asked.
"Five seconds," he says. Then he turns. "Now, 10 seconds."
Team Finland, and the teams behind them, have a long, hard snowshoe ahead. There are sections of the course where it may takes hours to go a few hundred meters, and other sections where rescue is almost impossible. At the team meeting before the race, organizer Martin Nieto told the teams they would most likely get quite frustrated on the snowshoe section.
"You'll waste a lot of time and energy if you try going too fast," he has said often. "Take your time, you'll get through it."
With snow forecast for tonight, this section promises to test the teams navigation skills and physical limits. The trails will be even tougher for Team Finland, which is literally blazing the trail for the other teams behind them.
"We thought about staying here, sleeping 12 hours, then letting the other teams make the trail, so we could start the race again at the next cross-country ski section," says Jappinen, half in jest. "That could be a good strategy."
But a lead is a lead, even if it means a tough go. So off they went, snowshoeing across the snowy frozen waters of Lac Moreau.
– Susan McKenzie, Ukatak Raid International Correspondent
