Beast of Ballyhoura

It starts off the same way every year, a few months before the event a couple of emails are sent around to see if anyone is interested in entering a team for the Beast of Ballyhoura. A team of four is sort of assembled, which includes at least one female member, and then people drop out, get injured, others come in and a completely new team emerges if you're lucky. So it was again this year, and I found myself on a team with Conor O’Meara and Andreas Kusch (both mainly hill runners) and triathlete, Hilary Jenkinson. We met just a week before the event, assembled all the mandatory equipment between us, had one brief night mountain bike ride together and then all met up at 5.00pm at the event centre on the night of the briefing for the Beast.

For those who don’t know, the Beast of Ballyhoura is a non-stop 36 hour adventure race based around the Ballyhoura mountain bike trails and surrounding mountains, rivers and countryside. It has all the requisite adventure racing sports – kayaking, hill running, orienteering, maintain biking, abseiling, and a couple of special activities which were archery and clay pigeon shooting this year. The format is a set course that you complete through to the end with bonus controls on extra loops if your going well. There are cut of times, both on the main course and the bonus loops to ensure that the teams in the race are kept relatively close together. Judging your pace and knowing your ability really counts for a lot as the race progresses. If you start too quick and attempt too many bonus loops, you could pay for it in the end by getting big penalties by missing checkpoints on the main course. I competed on different teams in the last two years and really enjoyed the event. I was glad to be back to give it another go.

As in previous years, the event centre was Blackwater Castle in Castletownroche. We pitched our tents and sorted our gear and food out before the briefing. The briefing started at 9.30pm on the Friday of the August Bank Holiday weekend. Race Director Greg Clarke went through the rules and the course. We took down the control points on our maps and laminated them. The first section was to be mainly kayaking, so we sorted our gear out for that. When we finished all this prep work, it was well after midnight, so we went to our tents for a bit of sleep. The bus to take us to the start would be leaving at 4.30am and there were a long couple of days ahead of us.

Got up at 3.45am, changed, stuffed as much food into me as possible for this hour of the morning, and we were all off to the Rock of Cashel for the start. A photograph was taken and the five, four, three, two, one and we were off. Only twelve teams this year, but the standard seemed to be very high. A five km run to the River Suir gave way to a 35-40km kayak section down to the Swiss Cottage below Cahir. There was the odd weir to keep the interest and a couple of controls also (between the cannons in Cahir Castle for instance), but by and large I found this a bit of a long section. We got our gear at the end of the kayaking – there were three places in total on the course where we could access gear and food that we had stashed in boxes the previous night. There followed mountain biking through Combaun Wood, a bike carry over part of the Galtees, more biking to find controls in holy wells and the like, and you just keep going. Andreas was having mechanical difficulties with the bike and we opted to miss the first bonus loop. It was a good decision as we wouldn’t have made the cut off. We had to take out Andreas’s back brakes as his wheel kept on locking up. I broke my chain into three bits just before a bike drop, but we managed to fix it and started our hill run/ hike up Galtybeg and Galtymore.

There was a cut off time at the abseil in Glengara Woods at 6.00pm and we made it with only about twenty minutes to spare. We reckoned we were about sixth or seventh, but the bonus loops make it difficult to know. There was some fairly easy orienteering around Glengara Wood that brought us to the second transition. Time to change gear and stack up on food and liquids again. You always have to keep eating and drinking, otherwise you just won’t make the finish.

Darkness was now falling. We followed the route though small boreens and trails to various controls. We skipped another bonus loop as there was no way Andreas could cycle it without back brakes. In fact his bike got worse and the front brakes seized as well. We were now in trouble. We spent a while fiddling about and eventually got them going again with Andreas feathering his front brake to stop it locking. There was a section of night bike orienteering around Paradise Hill where I broke my chain again. It took me a little while to find it in the dark, as I didn’t notice it fall off the bike further back up the road. We stopped at a pub in Anglesborough to fill our bottles with water – it was a hot night. Conor was feeling tired at this point. He still had energy, but his eyes were closing. We decided to skip a bonus loop that we were going to take and stop for a coffee in a bar in Ballylanders which we noticed was still open at 12.30 at night. In hindsight, this was the best decision we made, as from here on in we finished very strongly and passed teams out.

We got to the clay pigeon shooting at around 2.30am and the archery about 4.00am, but I’m not sure about these times. The bonus sections through the Ballyhoura trails lay ahead of us, but we were held up as glow sticks that we had to count had gone out. There was still a control on this section, so the organisers let us go and we finished the trails as the light dawned. Two more bonus controls fell around the west side of the Ballyhouras and we were on our way to Doneraile Forest Park and more orienteering. We picked up all the controls and climbed into our kayaks again to kayak down the Awbeg River to Castletownroche and the finish. Two years ago I paddled this same stretch of river when it was in flood and it was genuinely dangerous, as there are a lot of fallen trees blocking the river. This year the current was low and the fallen trees actually became fun objects to get around. We picked up all the controls on the river, got to the base of the castle, carried our boats up to the castle and jogged into the finish. When the bonuses and penalties were all counted, we heard we came in fourth. A brilliant result for us, we were all really pleased with that.

The Beast is a great event. There is nothing like it on the calendar, and if you have any desire to do something like this, then I strongly urge you to give it a go. You won’t regret it. There is a great atmosphere between the teams and a massive sense of satisfaction on completing this tough event. Many thanks to the organisers and all involved in staging this event. It’s a mammoth task. My special thanks though to my team mates Hilary, Conor and Andreas. I couldn’t have hoped for better company.