Peparing for your first multi-day adventure race

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Wednesday, 17 March 2010 14:34

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Seven steps to the big time

Lisa de Speville

The multi-day adventure racing scene in South Africa has slowed to a stumble over the last two years; yet sprint races, which strictly speaking are not adventure races, have flourished. I’ve always believed that if you give people an easier option they’ll take it.

‘Uge Events director, and adventure racer, Eugene Botha nailed it when he recently commented, “The problem is that most people new to the sport make adventure sprint events their goal”.

“Oh dear,” I replied. “Adventure sprints races are hardly a major goal: they’re completed by nine-year old children on oversized mountain bikes!”

When out-of-shape adults take up running for its fitness and weight loss benefits, they often focus on Comrades Marathon as their goal. Water-inclined choose Midmar Mile; cyclists look to Argus or 94.7 Cycle Challenge and multi-discipliners up the stakes with Ironman. Why then do these same people consider a 25km marked-route adventure sprint as a goal?

Adventure sprint races were first introduced in 2001 to entice participants into the sport. It was hoped that these bite-sized events would give participants a taste of the sport, without much commitment in the way of training, proficiency, time, equipment and money. What we didn’t consider is that the all-out pace of these short 2-4 hour events would be extrapolated to multi-day races; it’s little wonder that adventure sprinters think: “I could never keep this up for three days!”.

And so these fast and fun races flourished, while numbers at multi-day races have diminished considerably over the last two years. The ninth edition of Swazi Xtreme, Southern Africa’s longest running multi-day adventure race, has just been and gone. Like other multi-day events, entries were down, but the adventure was not. After three days of cruising the wilds of Swaziland, 63 of the 64 competitors completed either the SPORT (three-day staged) or PRO (60 hour non-stop) courses (the 64th competitor started the race ill). That’s the highest finishing ratio in the history of the event.