Cycling for the treasure

Last weekend, brightly dressed cyclists raced through the city to crack the Hercules City Challenge organised by the Chain Reaxion group.

In serach of the treasure.

It was a date which would go down in history; obviously because it read ‘10.10.10'. There were tons of events happening in the city so adding to that, we, Team CRX , too wanted to do something special on that day. But how could we make it interesting was the question. We had decided to go ahead with the Hercules City Challenge. We did not want to have just another regular ride, so after about five hours of brainstorming we finally came up with the idea of a treasure hunt!

Logistics in place

Not only in Chennai, but in Hyderabad and Bengaluru too. Now planning a treasure hunt, figuring out clues, and getting all the material ready was a major task for us as we had to work on this for each city. The entire team was spread over these three cities and last weekend, we had everything in place and were ready to set the ball rolling.

The response to the event was great. Never did we think that we would have these many people coming in for a treasure hunt, on a cycle. We had groups of 10 people each who were supposed to collect five clues spanning 25 km across the city. The winner would get to attend the MTB HIMACHAL Challenge 2010, by the end of October. The first group left at 6:15 a.m. sharp, after which the other groups left one after the other at five-minute intervals.

We started at the BSA GO, Adyar, where the first clue was given, which took the participants to a Cafe at Besant Nagar, after which came the BSA GO store at Mylapore then proceeding to the subway at Nungambakkam, another cafe on R.K.Salai and finally back to the starting point.

All's well

Safety was one of the most important points we had in mind as many cyclists were going to be racing through the city. Therefore we provided them with bright safety jackets, helmets along with water and chocolates at each stop. Not to forget the ambulances provided by Global Hospitals which were present at the pitstops.

It was pretty interesting to see their competitive spirit and the enthusiasm with which they were riding through the city to the finish. Solving all the clues, our winner finished the hunt in 53 minutes. Over all, our city challenge went on fine with very happy and charged up riders looking forward to more adventure-packed events.

The writer is a popular playback singer.