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Displaying items by tag: adventure racing

#KAYAKING - The Gaelforce adventure racing brand is looking forward to a busy 2012, as The Irish Times reports.

Best known for its signature race Gaelforce West - combining trail running, hiking, cycling and kayaking over a 67.5km course and attracting up to 3,000 competitors annually - the business is adapting to the prevailing economic climate by diversifying its activities.

This includes its Trail Blazer series, consisting of shorter running and kayaking races, as well as partnering with sports scientists at Santry's Sports Surgery Clinic to provide expert information to athletes.

“We’re trying to be innovative," said Gaelforce's Ciara Young. "Marketing had to pull back so the new events are ways to get people to interact with the brand and keep them thinking about the brand."

The Irish Times has more on the story HERE.

Published in Kayaking

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.