Tecnu Adventure Racing South Africa 2014 Race Report

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Tecnu Adventure Racing – South Africa ARWS Race Report 2014 Expedition Africa is gaining a reputation as one of the premier ARWS events. This year Tecnu joined other top ranked teams Seagate and Silva and 15 other international teams to fill the roster at 40 total teams. Experienced South African teams including Merrell and Painted Wolf were bound to be the toughest competitors out of the local squad. Even Donovan Simms, who was sidelined at last year’s world champs after being diagnosed with cancer, was there to represent his homeland. That’s another inspirational story that needs to be told, especially after Merrell’s gutsy performance. Tecnu had our work cut out for us this year and we were excited to experiment with our recent speedy and strong additions including Mari Chandler and Rob Preston from Australia. Last year’s teammate Bob Miller is taking at least a year off to get

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Tecnu battles best international field at toughest race of the season in South Africa May 2014

Transcript of Tecnu Adventure Racing South Africa 2014 Race Report

Tecnu Adventure Racing – South Africa ARWS Race Report 2014

Expedition Africa is gaining a reputation as one of the premier ARWS events. This year Tecnu joined other top ranked teams Seagate and Silva and 15 other international teams to fill the roster at 40 total teams. Experienced South African teams including Merrell and Painted Wolf were bound to be the toughest competitors out of the local squad. Even Donovan Simms, who was sidelined at last year’s world champs after being diagnosed with cancer, was there to represent his homeland. That’s another inspirational story that needs to be told, especially after Merrell’s gutsy performance.

Tecnu had our work cut out for us this year and we were excited to experiment with our recent speedy and strong additions including Mari Chandler and Rob Preston from Australia. Last year’s teammate Bob Miller is taking at least a year off to get married, and Karen Lundgren has been racing around the world with Peak Performance.

Stephan Muller, the race director sounded a vuvuzela and 160 people hurled themselves at one of the toughest beach breaks in Port Edward. Kyle and I got out to a ripping start powering through the oncoming swell. The teams that were left in our wake suffered a brutal onslaught of waves, reminiscent of the chaos and carnage of an ancient roman battle. Some teams made it through, others retreated to the beach for a second go.

As we paddled down the coast through the heaving swell, we knew we were going to be making a beach landing. As we approached our take out several miles down the coast, we looked for a small wave to ride in, but a large roller was behind us. Our priority here was not to lose our lightweight carbon fiber Epic paddles, we would need those throughout the race. A giant wave picked Kyle and I up, pushed us from the rear and pitched us into the surf. We then had a 5 minute swim to capture our boat, remount and paddle in to our nimble teammates who managed to ride a wave in.

We promptly carried our boats to a lagoon, where we would resume our kayak after grabbing our packs. We took off quickly near the front of the kayak pack and had a quick debate on where the GPS tracker pickup was. Was it at the actual TA or was it near the backpack pickup? After a quick discussion with another team, we turned around and headed back to grab the tracker. We set ourselves 30 minutes back here by paddling off without it. We knew the race was neither won nor lost from this error, and we pressed on and made it to the first trekking section. As we crested a 1,000 feet canyon wall a baboon larger than me howled at us. We began our game of catch up and didn’t want to be one of the teams caught in a line at the rappelling section in a couple hours.

After slipping into about the 15-20th spot, we crept back up to 5th place by the end of the kayak, trek, and kayak leg. We prepared ourselves for an 80 km trek that would include an abseil (rappel) and take us through the night and into the next morning. As we ran beaches and traversed gorges, civilization was waning and wilderness was creeping in. We didn’t see the big game animals, but remoteness was evident and only small villages speaking their native languages were present. We arrived at the abseil, the same location in the movie “Blood Diamond” where Leo crested up out of the gorge. This section was rather precarious, loose rock and poorly managed ropes meant we would have to be very alert.

Teams in front of us had boulders whizzing by their heads. I found myself caught in a tangled mess of ropes that went over a tree and I had to unclip and re-clip back in after freeing myself from some trees. I think the later teams had a better go of it after the first 5 or 6 teams cleaned the abseil descent up for them. I surveyed the team as I finally arrived at the abseil floor and saw that everyone had blood coating some part of the body, it was sure to happen at one point or another in the race.

After several hours of adventuring through small remote villages, along beaches, and through gorges, night was setting in. Rob’s navigating and everyone’s persistence brought us within sight of two other teams. We had caught Silva and Merrell. They looked pretty exhausted and were heading off into the wrong direction, unfortunately they saw us, and Rob served as the lead navigator for all teams for a bit. As Rob held up at a junction, both Silva and Merrell pressed on. Rob looked at his map and couldn’t find out why both teams were not turning with us. We let them walk off a bit and then headed off the other direction at a quick pace. Their lights came back and they were following Rob’s lead again, but we took pressed the pace and lost them.

That night we reached a rather difficult section, there was a canyon with cliffs on the side and we decided to take a very direct route. We also saw the headlamps of a team below, Painted Wolf, and we assumed they took a similar approach. We all followed Rob by hanging on trees, dangling from vines, and using our hands as wedges in the rock cracks. Before we knew it we were about a third of the way down, with no way of getting back up. Oh sh*t, we were cliffed out! After I said my prayers, we put on our helmets and climbing harnesses and then hooked all

8 of our prussics together into a ‘ladder’ to descend off part of a cliff. On another section we had to tie off to trees so we could move laterally across a cliff face and not risk the 40 foot fall beneath us.

We made it out alive after an hour and a half and were happy to be on stable ground again.

After taking a couple more dizzying trails our spirits rose with the light and we descended through tea fields down to a canyoneering section. We were all excited to be moving forward at a good pace and we could see Seagate’s footprints in the mud. We were in second place heading into the canyon and it would be boulder hopping all the way down. Unfortunately, everyone’s shoes were fairly unstable on the mossy rocks but Kyle might as well have put butter on the bottom of his. The technique of moving quickly and with an occasional fall or a slip wasn’t even possible, every step was a hard fall. On top of this, when the canyon got too steep we would have to go high around the waterfalls and battle through thorns and vines that grabbed at your legs and throat. Two weeks later I’m still healing up from cuts on this section. The poor shoes took their toll and beat up Kyle pretty good.

Photo courtesy of Bruce Viaene

Painted Wolf sailed through the canyon and passed us to put us in third and Silva made up some time on us and they were nipping at our heels. It took us around 5-6 hours, fast teams around 4, and even slower teams up to 11 hours to get down the canyon. Eventually, all teams would reach the coastal resort and the TA, but only after some broken bones and a lot of blood.

We transitioned quickly and were happy to get off our feet; we built up our bikes and were out of the TA starting our first 150 km bike leg. The bike took us back into the uplands along old logging roads and through villages. Kids swarmed around us and parents cackled at our spandex Champion Systems shorts as we rode through other small villages. No one knew we were coming and the locals were more than a little surprised.

After avoiding some tar roads and riding through the night, Silva eventually caught us. We had interpreted the rules as not being allowed to travel on roads, when apparently there were sections that you could travel on. This helped Silva catch back up to us, and we enjoyed some competition riding dusty fire roads together with a few nav options. We got a taste of some good technical single track here and there, and luckily our Light & Motion Seca and Stellas lit up the trail for some great and fun descents. Mari, on her new Turner 29er, looked like her technical skills exploded through the roof and she was riding things she wasn’t even attempting a couple weeks before. This ride wasn’t easy by any means as we put on over 12,000 feet of climbing on this leg.

As we dismounted the bikes at the next TA, we walked our kayaks down to one of the larger rivers that head out to the wild coast. We passed Silva in the TA as they were catching a snooze. The water level was low and we were navigating sandbars along the river. As the sun came up,

we still couldn’t see much with the mist and dense fog sitting on the water. We had to jump out of our boats and push the kayaks out of the sand more than 10 times. Luckily, the paddle was shortened due to the water levels and we were out of the water after about 2 to 3 hours of paddling.

Next, we transitioned to a trek, one of my favorite sections. This trek was not incredibly long but took us high above the river valley and then along the coast for some of the most scenic vistas of the race.

It was beautiful except for the sections where we saw Silva behind us stripping down and running in their underwear after fording the rivers. When you wear that small of underwear, you might as well wear a thong… maybe it’s a Swedish thing. Those images would haunt our team keeping us awake over the next night.

Regardless, Silva kept the pressure on and they only trailed us by 5 to 30 minutes for much of this section of the race. There was some tricky nav getting to our next TA, and most teams were using some of the locals to guide us to the next path and point us to the coast. They didn’t mind and seemed quite fascinated with the race. The difficult part was explaining to the non-English speaking locals that we wanted to head to the beach. We made swimming and surfing motions, wave and beach sounds and nothing seemed to work. Eventually we connected when the local made a gesture and noise for a crashing wave. Everyone was laughing and the entire 20 villagers and our team were playing this game of charades. They helped put us on the right path and we arrived at the TA after a couple hours of some additional trekking.

We caught Seagate in the TA and Silva wasn’t far behind us. Our strategy was to sleep an hour and then race the last 240 km bike section hard. I had been pretty sleepy going into this as a result of having a little trouble throughout the race getting calories in and drinking enough. We were very happy with our position considering the bike is our team’s strongest discipline.

When we woke up, Seagate and Silva weren’t far in front of us. After jumping on the bikes we were immediately riding along the hard beach sand at low tide and then hiking our bikes up ridges. We powered through the rest of the night and were making decent progress. Around the morning I started running into some problems and it was extremely difficult to eat and drink. This wasn’t an immediate onset, but rather something that had been building throughout the race. I was dehydrated and deficient on calorie intake. This was going to be a battle over the next 20 hours it would take to finish the bike.

We made our way through big rolling hills, ascending and descending into canyons, hike-a-bikes and we were ticking of kilometers. Unfortunately, as we kept track, these kilometers weren’t going as fast as we wanted them to. I was going dreadfully slow on some climbs. Kyle had to put me on tow and Mari had to take some of my pack weight. The dehydration and bouts of vomiting had sapped almost all my energy and I was going into a hole that would be impossible for me to recover from. At one point I became so dizzy, shaky and depleted of energy I couldn’t ride to the next store 2 km away. Kyle and the team were more than a little concerned. I knew I needed some medical attention but that wasn’t going to be an option until we crossed the finish line. We still had well over a 120 km to finish on the course, which is very daunting when you can’t do 2 km. The team helped me rest in two spots, I pounded an Endurox R4 and fell asleep at a police station. We then got up and rode to a store; here we hung out for about 2 or

more hours as I tried to get some calories in me. My team waited for a sign that I was ready to go, but I would try and get up and my stomach would sit me back down. It was also affecting my breathing as I couldn’t get a full breath of air in.

I don’t know if Rob and Mari thought I could finish, but Kyle and I both knew I would suffer until I crossed that line or was forcibly taken from the course. I told Kyle, I just want to cross the finish line so I can get an IV drip.

After a little bit of rest, we started on the remainder of the mountain bike. We were riding through more rolling hills for a while and still hitting some big climbs here and there. It wasn’t terribly exciting, and the air quality was horrible for parts of it since the villages were clearing and burning their grass fields.

As we rode throughout the day, we got into the night which was even harder to stay awake with no energy in your system and a 20 hour bonk.

The team really pulled together and we went as fast as possible, we hadn’t seen Silva in some time and I was hoping that someone on their team was struggling as much as me. As we battled through the rest of the night Mari put her headphones in and sang Nicki Minaj songs to help keep us awake. Kyle and I requested her to sing about 20 times and she never disappointed. She really nailed the single verse she knew. I started dozing off on the bike and landed myself in a rut that hurled me into the ground. I was a mess. I dusted myself off and was too tired and delirious to know if I actually hurt myself.

After that long, long night we found ourselves at the finish line at 3:00AM with Heidi and Ian from the race organization waiting with a bottle of champagne.

We found out we locked in third place. We were happy with our placement considering that my sickness probably slowed us down by about 8 hours or so over the 240 km ride. The competition was the hardest out of all the World Series races thus far. We are really looking forward to the World Championships in Ecuador and seeing how this team can do running on full cylinders. We now know what we need to tweak to have a good run there.

A huge thanks to Tecnu for getting us out there, and Adventure Medical Kits for bandaging us up throughout the race course. PHL, makers of Endurox R4 and Recovery bars were essential in helping us get back on our feet and moving forward. ProBar’s organic and tasty bars fueled us throughout the race. Light & Motion lit up the night and Kinesis sunscreen kept us protected during the day, and Epic for the carbon small mid-wing paddles that were instrumental in us paddling fast in the challenging conditions. Darn Tough kept our feet relatively blister free and in better shape than most teams who suffered in the trekking legs. Out There for Mike Klosers killer versatile AS1 and AS2 packs, and Headsweats for protecting our noggins from the elements, as well as Julbo USA. If you haven’t used their Pipeline and Trail sunnies you are missing out on an amazingly versatile and durable pair of sunglasses. Skins compression gear for helping us recover and reach the podium and for making VERY durable compression gear

that held up under tough, tough conditions. To Champion Systems for making us look good in our racing kits. A big thanks to Leki as well; we used their lightweight carbon trekking poles for those monster treks. Up next, defending our title in July at the Cowboy Tough 4 day Expedition in Wyoming. Thanks to all of you for your amazing support of the team. We love you guys!