Road to the Raid

It seems like an age ago that our team was racing in Australia at the Raid Qualifier.

Now with our flights to France in less than a week it all seems to be coming around super fast and before we know it I’m sure we’ll be out on the course pushing ourselves to the limit.

Continuing the trend of things going slightly astray for our team we will be without George for this trip as he has been having health issues that he hasn’t been able to shake, so enter super sub, Marcel (the crazy German) Hagner

The Raid World Champs this year are set to take as from France through Italy and finishing in Switzerland. An incredible area of the world with lots of high Mountains – in fact the race has over 25,000 vertical metres of elevation gain, that’s almost 3 times up Mount Everest and in around 5 days of racing.

This year the Raid have introduced several new rules aimed at competitor safety. Each team will have a 24 hour time credit which they must use during the race to take sleep in Transition areas or dark zones, and teams won’t be able to finish the race until this 24 hours of mandatory stops has been used. They have also introduced dark zones on some rope and glacier sections as well as the usual water sections.

All of these changes are going to add to the tactical challenge as teams plan how to beat dark zones and where to take sleep.

With 24 hours of guaranteed stops during the race, it should hopefully banish the sleep monster. The sleep monster is definitely a part of Adventure racing that not many athletes enjoy (if any), and it will be interesting to see how the race unfolds with all teams getting more sleep.

In our lead up to the Raid our team recently got together for a bit of a trek. Loaded up with food and gear for 6 days we headed into the Kahurangi National Park near Murchison and started heading north towards Takaka in Golden Bay. Our trip was as much about team building as it was about spending some solid time on our feet. With between 10 and 14 hours trekking a day we were able to cover plenty of ground each day. Nathan decided there was no point in going hungry so each of us was carrying more weight in food than in clothing. The good thing was as each day passed our packs got lighter and lighter.

The trip was largely uneventful although if you venture down one remote spur in the park you might just find Georges yellow ice axe.

The final part of build up was the Arrow 24 hour race in Christchurch. This year was in contrast to the snowy race of last year. We had to rope Aaron Prince in at the last minute to fill in for George whose health was still not right.

With Raid just round the corner we decided it would be good to try and race hard and to concentrate on competing at the level we would expect of ourselves in a international race.

We had a slight dilemma over who was going to paddle with who in the different boats. We had the use of one Quasar and one Hypernova. A slight speed disparity but how much would it be? We decided to keep our usual combos with Nathan and Kristina grabbing the Quasar before Aaron and I even got a say.

Within a few minutes, it was obvious that we had the combinations wrong as Aaron and I paddled as hard as we could only to watch the others almost float away from us.

After 45 min we decided it would good to swap things around to try and get the boats a bit more even so we pulled up on a bank and switched Nathan to the Hypernova and Aaron with Kristina in the Quasar. This evened things up a bit and so with everyone working at a similar level off we went. I later heard a rumour that we had fallen out but fortunately, that wasn’t the case – burr, water’s still to cold for me to be swimming.

A short run to the archery and bambi got hit a couple of times much to our surprise.  We got one small surprise on the 1st bike leg when we saw Team Sierra at CP 6. One of the other factors in the race was you could collect the controls in any order and our two teams had decided to collect them in a different order. It definitely steeled our resolve to keep pushing hard and not to get complacent.

For a flat looking course, Mt Grey was a good hard climb and a touch of snow on top to remind us it was winter. On descending the other side we were faced with a critical decision, take the track to CP 10 where Richard Anderson had warned of over grown tracks or a short bush bash and run the road. With darkness falling, we decided to play it safe and headed for the road. It seemed like a long way down the road, I could only imagine how long it would have felt like bashing through the bush!

With CP10 collected, we were unaware of the confusion that would descend on many of the teams at this point with many of them never finding it. Good work buy Nathan and Aaron all day saw us avoid any navigation problems, which always makes the day less frustrating and ultimately faster.

Further through and up on another largish hill we got great views of the lights of Christchurch and then it was down to our bikes and to find out where the last 2 points were going to take us.

On arriving at the bikes everything was getting covered in ice, showed how cold things were getting and it would only get colder for the support crews and teams out there throughout the night.

With the last 2 CP’s plotted it was off for a short ride to the finish. A good climb to warm us back up and then it was off to the last CP. We were surprised as we were riding along to bump into a few teams walking down the road on the trekking leg. There were definitely some circuitous routes being taken by some teams.

A quick stop to add as many layers as we could to stop from turning into icicles and it was off to the finish.

Finishing at 1:30am, we had been on the go for 17 ½ hours. A reasonably long time for us to be out on a 24 hour course but we had a great time and enjoyed the course.

The best thing about Adventure racing is the sleep afterwards and it was great to finally crawl into bed about 3am.

It was great to see the number of teams at the Arrow 24 and with many of them also racing at the AR Worlds on the West coast it should be a fantastic race in November.

To follow our team’s progress you can go to www.teambalancevector.com