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Merrell Adventure Addicts Bimbache Extreme ARWC race reportMonday, 18 October 2010 13:02
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Merrell Adventure Addicts finish 14th at ARWCFrom Sunday the 3rd October to Friday 8th October, The Merrell Adventure Addicts competed in the Adventure Racing World Championships that were held in conjunction with the Bimbache Extreme Adventure Race in the province of Castilla y Leon, in Spain. The Merrell Adventure Addicts were one of 61 teams from over 26 countries around the world. After 720km the Merrell Adventure Addicts finished in 14th position.Graham “Tweet” Bird’s report: As usual the week after competing in a major expedition adventure race is spend recovering, eating, sleeping, unpacking, cleaning and most of all REFLECTING. We returned to South Africa late on Sunday (10th October) afternoon after finishing at lunchtime on Friday. A quick trip home by any standards. This did not leave a lot of time to share experiences and thoughts with the other teams that competed in the race. I did get the sense that all were generally happy with the race and organisation. Emma Roca’s Team Buff Coolmax raced a brilliant race from the front to win ahead of Mike Kloser’s highly experienced, Team Black water (Nike). The 722km race was broken down into 152km of trekking/running; 438km of mountain biking; 108km of paddling & 24km of skating. There were 22 sections with a total vertical ascension of 21,500m. The race essentially went from the town of Avila to Salamanca via the Mountain Bike legs with us stopping off to do loops of trekking and paddling along the way. Though this type of route is not always liked it is practical and allows minimal gear transfer for the organisers (i.e. bikes) and also more importantly makes the short course options for the slower teams a lot easier to manage. The race was unsupported with the organisers transporting our gear from transition to transition. We saw our food box 6 times throughout the course, meaning on average we carried food for approximately 10-15 hours at a time. The race was characterized by a lot of fast legs with many transitions with the average predicted time per leg at around 4 hours and the longest predicted to take the leaders 14 hours. So not a traditional expedition race in the true sense of expedition racing where there are long legs that take many many hours, possibly days. There has been some debate on the South African AR forum this past week about the format of the race and the suitability of this type of course for a World Championships. I can understand this debate due to the quality of the live coverage. Don’t let the coverage influence your opinion of the route. From my point of view as a racer and navigator, the race route was great and challenging. The fact that there were loops and not a traditional A to B route was not an issue. We still had to complete 720km and it still felt like a journey. We worked off approximately 42 A4 maps and I actually did not know exactly where and what direction we were going in overall other than the piece of the route we could see on the current map. The navigation on the MTB legs was very technical with the small farm and mountain roads hard to see on the maps. Also some of the small farm roads were very overgrown which made route choices difficult in some parts. The trekking navigation was also tricky especially at night. The organisers had a very simple ruling in place regarding short course and this was made clear to all the teams in the route book and at the briefing. If you were more than 24 hours behind the leaders you would not be able to do a loop and would have to continue on the MTB legs. Some of the slower teams also chose to skip loops in order to beat the finishing cut off of Friday evening. So with teams having missed loops being mixed in with the other teams it did make it difficult to follow exactly what position you were in. However, for the teams still on the full course it was easy see where you were lying and how far behind. So trick is to stay on the full course! We as the Merrell Adventure Addicts did not have one of our best races. It was one of those races where things always seemed to go the wrong way. We had a lot of bike mechanical issues, more than we have had in a race before. Suppose this is to be expected after having three International races where things have seemed to always go the right way. For the first few days we were continually racing a few hours off the top five which is where we were comfortable being. We knew how we had planned to race but just seemed to battle to pull it off. Each time we tried to get going and execute the plan something would happen that would break the rhythm. We also made a very basic and fundamental mistake on the Wednesday afternoon. We had just started a 23km trekking leg that had some tricky navigation without paths. We were tired, tired in that we were moving slower than we should move, but not that tired that sleep was an absolute necessity. We stopped to sleep for two hours with only three hours of daylight left. The navigation on the trek at night proved way more technical than we thought. We just missed seeing a CP looking down one ridge and ended up searching for a few hours for it. Something that probably would not have happened had we pushed on in the daylight and not slept. The vegetation on the trek was also tough and it was difficult to pick out the ideal and fast route at night. Halfway through this trek we realized our mistake and that we were going to fall 24 hours behind the leaders and hence not be allowed to do the following loop. This changed our mind set and disappointed us. I also made a huge mistake by not collecting a CP as we headed into the transition area. This meant a 3.5km trek back out to the CP and then back again!! Cost us two hours. (Well at least this time we got the opportunity to go and clip it unlike previous race). For the remainder of the race we chased to get back into the field having left after the hike a few hours behind all the other teams. We actually finally got into our rhythm and raced like we should have from the start. Go figure!! Unfortunately there were no boats available for us when we arrived for the final 78km paddle into the town of Salamanca, so we ended up cycling to the finish. The race also turned out to be colder than we thought. We got caught out really badly on the first night when the rain came down. We had chosen to go with our lighter jackets and ended up freezing on the bike ride. We ended up in a Café for 40 mins trying to unfreeze only to have to get back out into the cold once we had warmed up! Needless to say we packed the heavier jackets in at the next transition. The days were hot and the nights, especially in the high mountains were cold. Upon reflection, I felt that we had failed to take advantage of all the experience we have gained in the past few races and made basic errors that we should not have been making. However we again left this race realizing that we can race with the top teams but just need to concentrate to make it happen and maintain the consistency and drive. My team mates were great and despite the disappointing result, we actually had an awesome time on the race. One of the best races I have ever had dynamically. To Hobbit, Tiny, Smelly – thanks for a great time! Next time! And finally to all our sponsors, particularly our new title sponsor MERRELL, for all your continued support and belief. And one final thank you to all the supporters out there who followed our progress on the race and sent through messages.
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