Venue for a 12 hour race

[ollietrex]

I was thinking of somewhere where you could hold a 12 hour race in Ireland? The requirements would be:-


- Large space for camping

- Space to build or use 12+ km of single track, fire road and tarmac


Kilruddery came to mind, any other ideas?

[ollietrex]

Oh or maybe somewhere like Tymon park... But that is probably full of people you don't want there.

[Oisin]

Cycling around in circles in Tymon park for 12 hours... I can think of nothing worse.

[ollietrex]

Yep that would be agreed... Shame Balinstowe does not have any open ground where you could camp and it would be perfect.

[Richie]

You'd get a nice 12km loop using bits of Crone, Djouce and Powerscourt while avoiding most of the narrow walking routes - I'm pretty sure i saw a camp site when we were up on maulin last weekend, further up past Crone carpark heading for Glencree... then again that might have been a hallucination caused by oxygen starvation kicking in...

[mel]

Djouce - if you could camp on the opposite side of the road.

[ollietrex]

Yeah Djouce might not be to bad because there is fields that run all the way along the side there. Plenty of single track and a fair amount of fire road....


Any other ideas? I thought of Glens of the Down because there is plenty of fields on the side of that as well but the problem is its all protected forest so the powers to be would probably just say no.

[mel]

Are you thinking of organizing a race? Ryan and I actually talked to the organizer of the Bontrager Race, Martyn Salt from InEvent, and they were thinking of organizing an endurance event in Ireland. So far I know they had been looking at 5 different locations in Ireland - so dunno, maybe there is potential in cooperating, since we know the trails here and they know how to organize a big event like that...

[mel]

Think they were talking about next year though - quality organization takes a lot of planning....

[ollietrex]

It was just an idea in the back of my head and was looking at if it was possible anywhere in Dublin. Will chat to you tomorrow night if you are out for a few glasses of Torq recovery :->

[Phil]

Perhaps down near Ballyhoura,They are doing the Beast down there this weekend which is an endurence event (although not entirely comprised of mtb) though it is spread out over a large area.

I think Jackie is heading down to it, she might know after the weekend if there is camping space.

[ryan]

The problem with Ballyhoura is it's miles from anywhere... (I was down there 3 weeks ago). If you plan on running a big event, some people would head over to the UK if it was close (ish) to a port/airport.

[Phil]

True, its an hour and 15 from Cork Airport and similar from Shannon (mind you on a bad day in Dublin its an hour from Dublin Airport to anywhere in Wicklow!)