Last month I rode the second edition of The Unknown Race.
It’s an unusual race in that you don’t know where you’re going until right before you have to go there. The coordinates of CP1 are announced an hour before the 7am start, and when you get to CP1 you’ll find the coordinates of CP2, and so on. All I knew about the race beforehand was that it started in Vienna, finished in Vienna, was about 1000 km, and had 3-5 control points.
On the one hand it was quite daunting to have to plot a route on the spot on a phone, but on the other this meant there was very little to be done in advance. Just turn up and improvise. I had no idea whether we’d be going north into Czechia, southwest into the Alps, southeast into Hungary…
