IT Consultancy and Adventure Racing

After a big 2007 on the entering races front, 2008 kicked off early with a weekend trip across the ditch to take on a 3 person, 50hr race in New South Wales with a new team, 4TC.

Flying across to Sydney I managed to lug my 50Kg of possessions through Australia's quarantine and customs facilities, and after a bit of a sit down, I was just organising the hire car as JAFA Grant Burke walked out with all his weekend's supplies ( bike and paddle included ) managing to fit into a single ( huge, admittedly ) bag, and after informing the company of an already present ding we hit the road South.

The drive across the GAFA was uneventful, and the stop for pies was pretty uninspiring, but we were definitely ready for bed on arriving at Danielle Winslow's house in Canberra, so a quick catch up after not seeing her since XPD and we all hit the sack with an early alarm set.

Friday morning we had to pack Danielle's little estate car with an amazing variety of brilliantly organised gear - racing with an organised local makes these things so much easier, Danielle had even cooked us up batches of muffins, scones, banana bread and health bars for race food ... I'm not looking forward to the amount of work required in reciprocating!

So after dropping off the hire car, and with 3 people, race gear, camping gear, and 4 bikes on the back ( it's always good to have a spare, especially as Grant was riding a _brand_ new bike after having one stolen last October and having to wait for the importers to get a new pink frame shipped over for him ) we wheelied our way South.

A brief pie stop at what was reputed to be a great bakery just continued to reinforce New Zealand's superiority in the art of filled pastry production, and after a bit of stressing about time/ speed ( It was 'Australia Day' weekend, so as a special holiday bonus the Australian Police hand out double fines and demerit points over the weekend ), we arrived in plenty of time - they were only half way through handing out the 25hr team's bibs - to hear ourselves described as an Australian/ American team, a misunderstanding I attempted to rectify!

The next 12hrs was reasonably full, setting up camp and going through the registration formalities, which were impressively rigorous for a 'short' race - medical questionairre and Navigation tests were aced by Pharmacist/ Australian Orienteering rep Danielle, we tried to be funny on the team sheet, and when Grant and I rescued a team that got in trouble in the surf kayak test there wasn't a lot of doubt we had passed that section too.

Grant had been having some trouble with his front tyre slow leaking, so he pumped it up to full pressure again, and a short test ride gave the illusion that everything was fine, an illusion that was shattered a few minutes later by a surprisingly loud explosion as the tyre got blown off the rim .... Hmmm, time to remove the rim tape, install a tube and hope that's the end of the matter!

The maps and course were handed out without any formality, and after 2.5 hours going over the information and working out a high level route, we went back for a briefing that took us into the early evening. Lights came out after that and the detailed route was drawn in, maps dissected, the gear boxes going to the remote Transitions filled, and finally duraseal applied to all the paperwork before about 6 hours of fitful sleep.

Awaking in the morning to the sight of Goanas, Wallabies and nervous adventure racers wandering around the Potato Point camp site, we all wolfed down our breakfasts, applied liberal dosings of sun screen and vaseline, and headed down to the beach for a 7am start.

There were 30 teams taking part in the 50hr race and about 25 in the 25hr race, so about 150 racers would be covering the first section of the course, where we would beach run/ Coasteer north, paddle the rather amusing if sluggish 'Toy Boy' 3 person sit on top kayaks North again, coasteer back south, ride/ carry our bikes across beaches back to the start, and out into the bush for a loop trek back once more to the camp ground, and then the courses would split as we headed on a longer bike ride than the 25hr teams.

We had estimated that these sections would take us around 9-10 hrs and were hoping to be able to foot it with at least half of the 25hr teams over this period, as well as the top third of the 50hrs.

The coasteering and swimming sections were a lot more pleasant than their NZ counterparts tend to be - the difference between shivering coming out of lake Taupo during a race 2 months ago, and the pleasant float down a fast flowing river in this race was noted by Grant and I, whether this difference helped or not, who knows but we made good time on our feet and paddled reasonably solidly to arrive at the second coasteering section over an hour ahead of schedule and in about 15th overall.

The first coasteering section had really been rock running down by the beach, which while pleasant, was not a patch on the 2nd one that had us scrambling up placed ropes, getting sucked through gaps in the rock by surging swells, and a fantastic '7m' cliff jump that certainly felt like it was north of 10m rather than south! All of this was topped off by jogging down a beach to dump BAs and pick up bikes still trucking along very nicely.

Given that we're a new team ( Danielle and Grant have raced together, and I've done a short race with Grant ) I was very impressed by how well we worked together, looking after each other, moving efficiently through the sections, and feeling strong and comfortable while doing so.

The only slight problem with this race was that due to the lack of support crew, and the small number of boxes, we had to be careful at TAs to make sure we took with us everything we would need later on, so while D&G packed their running shoes into their packs, I decided that this section was actually more hike than bike, so put my bike shoes away - I should have thought of that before dropping them off at this remote bike location last night - and we headed out for about 4K of road and track before we hit the sand dunes, and walked 2-3K with the bikes.

A brief ride through Tuross heads township and we had another swim as Grant and I crossed a river channel to bring back a raft, we filled it with bikes and paddled back across to finish this 'bike' leg with another Km walking along a beach and then riding to our campsite to get ready for the first big tramp.

Walking into the campsite with a number of other teams in close proximity, we headed straight to our tent and transitioned into trekking gear, and jogged out past the TA officials to find that we were in around 13th ( though probably a little higher as we were checking in on the way out rather than the way in ).

We walked up onto a ridge, and quickly got into the 'walk the ups, jog the rest' routine that is a pretty popular approach to AR tramps, happy with our direction but a bit unsure of our actual position, and what constituted a marked road on the map. A team emerged out of the bush on our right, which concerned us a little, but following the 'go from a known good point' approach, we carried on along the ridge to the next junction. This confirmed that we had passed the first check point, and that was where our mystery team had emerged from, so we back tracked and dropped down a gully to grab the CP. As we were heading out another team was approaching from the direction we were hoping to arrive from, so we got on with getting back to the track and dropping down the other side of the ridge.

There followed some pretty spectacular bush bashing as we dropped down to a lake and followed it's wide valley out to the west.

One of the big problems with Navigation, especially in hot countries like Aussie, is deciding when a mapped stream is actually a stream as opposed to a culvert, or even a barely visible depression. Because it had been raining pretty heavily in the weeks prior to this race we were expecting to find flowing water as we traversed the valley floor, but all we actually found was denser bush making the going harder, so as we started to rise out of the other side we decided to just take a rough bearing, and head west looking out for further features.

Sure enough we soon arrived at a stream bed junction that we could see a couple of other teams had crossed over and were heading west still, we decided to buck that trend and stuck with the main body of bush, heading South West. Sure enough we soon came across another Westerly valley, another team just starting to head up it, and shortly afterwards the welsome site of another CP.

Next came some pretty full on bush bashing as we crossed up and over a couple of ridges and the followed densely packed river beds into the rest of the bush CPs, wishing for a bit of road/ track, and in my case wishing for some long pants as my legs were getting badly ripped up. Danielle's navigation was spot on through here, and though we were annoyed at our route choice - thinking maybe out to the track and back in to the CPs may have been better on a couple of occasions - we kept moving forward, and kept picking up the CPs.

The last 3 CPs were all back on the sea front, so it was pleasant to get out of the scrub, especially as this literally involved crawling through the final section to come out at a CP by a small inlet. We then jogged up the beach, where we were followed by another team who I could swear had missed the CP, but they seemed happy enough heading up the beach and they were too far behind to question. Grabbing the last couple of CPs with a touch of coasteering, we headed back into the campground where I diverted to grab some drink, having run out shortly before what with this leg taking us a couple of hours longer than projected. As I filled up a bottle the TA marshall asked me where the rest of my team were, and luckily I could just spot D&G running between the caravans, so pointed them out and went to sort bikes.

Reasonably quickly onto the bikes freshly loaded with food and water, and after a final check that we weren't jettisoning anything that we would need later on, we headed out the same way as we had on the tramp - handy as it meant I could switch off and start navigating after the routes diverged. Diverge they duly did, and then we followed a loop track about a km around the outside of the tramp we had just done.

After picking up the first CP we came across the girls team that we had rescued on the Friday's kayak walking down the track, so checked that they knew where they were "yep, we're just taking a really long route to CP9" ( they were taking the route we had thought could be good after we had endured the bush bash ), and headed off.

We were now heading towards the rope section, which had a 22:00 cut off, but as it was early afternoon still we had no concerns about that, just about the question as to which of the 2 routes we should take to get around the lake ahead of us. We had decided that the swamp route may be preferable to the beach route, so we approached the lake and came out on the shore line where there were a number of tracks already present, and no bikes visible in front, so it looked like a good option.

We carried the bikes across the first, incredibly warm, rivulet, where the ( hopefully ) very salty water stung my cut legs quite nastily. I just hoped the stinging was from a high salt concentration disinfecting my legs, and not from a high bacteria concentration infecting them! Across the other side of the rivulet we managed to ride across the muddy flats, this is always fun riding, right on the edge of traction, as you just put the bike into a low gear and spin away, the wheels going round 2 or 3 times as fast as you're going forward, and turning into mud doughnuts as they collect the gloop that they seem unable to bite into for traction.

Excellent fun, and we managed to keep this up all the way to the hard packed beach edge, which was also rideable after we'd stopped for a brief chat to a couple of Danielle's friends that were out riding in the area, and to smack the dirt off the tyres.

Getting onto some beach front tracks, we passed a team that Danielle said were really strong on their bikes, so after they cames past when we were briefly stopped, we had a wee sprint race to the ropes section, where Ally was the Marshall, so she welcomed us in, plying us with food as we lashed into the harnesses.

The ropes section was a brief interlude to the ride, with a central pole, and ropes heading out in 3 directions for about 20 metres, you had to climb up a wire ladder, then holding one rope and standing on a second, traverse the 20 metres out to the end before sliding down a fireman's pole.

Unfortunately we managed to take a little longer through here than the other team, and left following them, we caught them where they were doing a map check at a gate. My initial reaction was to ride on, but thankfully I spotted that my marked route had actually bypassed a CP, and we did need to go through the gate. It was therefore quite amusing that we went through and rode down the track while the other team's navigator rode off along the main road!

Collecting the CP we then had a little bit of pre-ordained route that would take us under the 'Princes Highway', the main road in the area that was totally out of bounds for the race, and back onto forestry track on the other side. We went through here in a bunch of 3 teams, and despite Danielle's protestations that she was no good on a bike, we managed to overtake them and pull away on the really nice section of stream side single track that followed.

A bit of communication difficulty saw us standing around a bit longer than necessary while trying to collect the next 2 CPs, but all in all we were efficient through here, riding some lovely single track, and seeming to make the right decisions about route choices, especially when I decided to alter our original 'drop into a valley and big climb out' route to use the more undulating ( same overall amount of climbing ) ridge top route, which pleased Danielle when she asked 'how long till the big climb' and I could tell her we had passed it - very good for mental state!

Even better for the mental state was the long, flowing, wide downhill that effectively brought us into the TA, which we arrived at still in daylight, with a couple of teams heading out, we had a brief chat to Keen TORQers who were just heading out, sorted our transition, and followed them out - this time with me wearing tights to hopefully keep my legs from getting more damaged.

A quick change of route plan had us now using the track that followed the river rather than crossing the farmland, and then the headlights came out and we headed up the trudge to the first CP, and then down the steep back side into the quite thick looking stream valley.

Another great period of foot navigation followed from Danielle, with us moving through the CPs in a couple of hours to arrive at the start of the night time river kayak along with Keen TORQers, and another team that we had picked up in one of the gullys.

A slow transition followed, and we let the other 2 teams get away from us as we faffed around attaching glow sticks to the boat and BAs and just generally sorting our lives out before carrying the boat down to the river and pushing off.

What followed was definitely a psychological low, as can be beautifully seen in the results, where we allowed Keen to take 40 minutes out of us, and Aussie Animals to gain 15 minutes. When the water was flowing, then paddling down the moonlit river with overhanging trees, and glow sticks representing 'good' and 'bad' chutes through the obstacles was fantastic, but unfortunately the water only seemed to flow for 100 metres at a time before the sand covered bed would shift the channel somewhere completely different. I'm bad enough at reading rivers when I can see them, so despite the torch strapped on the front of the boat, this was an arduous section, and we regularly ran aground - thankfully the sit on top boats made getting out and back on very easy, small solace given how many times we had to disembark.

Australian race organisers seem to be a lot more blas‚ about kayaking safety than their NZ counterparts, as was shown by the weirs in XPD, and here by the fact that we were paddling down a river with a

couple of barbed wire fences strung across it. Thankfully given the remarkably pedestrian flow, and the series of glow sticks attached to the fences, there were no safety issues, and it was nice to see this section being included without the hassles of a dark zone!

Given the dark and the mind numbing nature of the paddle we had little idea how far we had gone, so it was a pleasant surprise to see a bridge emerging from the mist, and we dragged the boat across to the river left before carrying it up to the transition, and rejoining our bikes, just where we had left them about 6 hours earlier.

It was still very dark, so the lights were out as we headed into som farmland that soon looked quite different to the map - a split in the road didn't seem to be marked, so I decided to follow the left fork, and we came down a hill to find fencelines that appeared similar to the marked roads, but without much in the way of tracks. Trusting the map, bike computer and compass, we followed the marked route and came back out onto a decent track - the farmer had obviously decided to straight line a previous dog leg, and we could have saved some time by going right at the fork, ho hum!

Back on tracks we upped the pace a bit, though not a huge amount as we were soon heading upwards, but we kept moving quite nicely, judiciously using the tow ropes, and encouraging each other well.

This was a pretty serious ride all up, though it was mainly on forestry road, an unfortunately large chunk of it was ascending. I was heading towards sleep at this point, and rode off the road a couple of times, though a quick heads down ( cut short by being attacked by Australian Fauna ), and then the sun coming up helped enromously, as did the psychological boost that I gave Danielle when I informed her that we'd managed to cut out the first big climb that she had been dreading, instead replacing it with the same amount of climbing in a more undulating form.

Unfortunately that wasn't the end of the climbing, as we had to get to our next TA at the top of Cobra Mountain, so we trudged on up, in the wake of a team who were good enough to go zooming off down the hill ahead where we had to turn right. There were another couple of route choices to be made just ahead, so I urged D&G to dig in for a bit of a burst to make life more difficult for our new pursuers, though I needn't have worried, the next CP was an out and back, and we collected it and got back onto the road without seeing any other teams.

A final little section into the TA, and then for a little kick in the pants the actual TA control was right on the crest, a short walk up the hill!

Next we were heading out onto the crux stage, this tramp would take us out in a big loop dropping down from our current 850m down to about 100, back up to 700, down to 3 and then back to this same TA, which unfortunately would stil probably be at 850. Add in all the undulations that you naturally get, and we were in for a lot of climbing in this leg that we were projecting to spend 8 hours on.

Setting out we spent the next hour and a half walking down a ridge, before a bit of indecision and then dropping into a rive in search of our first CP. Heading downstream for about 10 minutes we didn't find the CP, so headed back up, and very annoyingly could see the CP just upstream from where we had dropped in - a waste of nearly half an hour all up, and a good indicator that we were getting pretty tired.

We carried on downstream and hooked left up the next river valley, finding the next CP, and being surprised to see a team heading down off the ridge to get it, pushing on we grabbed the next CP about a K further up the river, and decided to grab 20 mins kip to refresh.

Managing to find somewhere to lie down that didn't involve getting attacked by anything proved a bit of a challenge, but a worthwhile undertaking, as we were soon snoring away, and D&G felt thoroughly refreshed when we awoke. I felt pretty groggy, and would continue to do so for most of the rest of the tramp, but that may also have been a symptom of knowing that I was just following on this section, and would have to start concentrating again once we got on the bike.

Danielle did a great job again, and we seemed to be making decent, steady progress, not seeing many others until we came across Keen TORQers with 3 CPs to go, they hadn't slept yet and we didn;t need to be told that, one look was enough.

It was a short climb to the next, most remote CP, and we arrived there a minute or so ahead of KT, and saw them briefly as we were trying to get Danielle's phone to send a text to the organisers telling them we had arrived at CP39, but unfortunately it wasn't playing ball, so we figured we'd just surprise them by showing up at the TA.

All that was left now was slogging up a couple of very big hills, and down the valley in between them, so we got on with it, moaning more and more as the crest flattened out more and more, and the climb seemed to just keep on going up, but of course it eventually ended, and we ran into a women's team who were on the short course ( This tramp was about a 30K loop, those arriving after 11am did about a 15K loop collecting the closest 3 CPs, and those arriving some time later would get sent straight onto the next ride ), and complaining bitterly about the tramp so far.

Leaving them behind, we dropped down and looked for 'an old, indistinct track', which turned out to be reasonably easy to follow along the ridge, and the fact that we were nearing our end goal boosted us nicely, as did the fact that we caught and passed another couple of teams - short coursers who were suffering a reasonable amount, but the morale boost was still noticeable.

When we finally crested the ridge we came out onto a road and immediately ran into a couple of the Marshalls who had been getting worried about the fact they hadn't heard from us, so they were very pleased to see us safe, sound, and feeling good enough to jog into the TA.

My feet had been giving me some grief for about the last 3 hours, but as I knew we were approaching the finish, and didn't have much more time on our feet before the race was over, I hadn't bothered doing anything about them, so in TA I took the opportunity to air my feet for 5 minutes. Thankfully they hadn't actually blistered up or anything, they were just suffering form being very damp for a very long time, and the airing, along with the application of some barrier cream, and slipping into a fresh pair of dry socks was all the attention that was needed.

A reasonably leisurely transition was probably another low point of the race, but we were ready to go when Keen TORQers arrived, and we left knowing that we had a reasonable gap on them, and that we were feeling fresh and relaxed while they were still looking pretty bashed, having by the looks of it not slept still.

Onto the ride and it was time to take a gamble. There were 2 obvious routes round to the first CP, one was about 2/3rds road, and then quite a bit of off road climbing to the CP, the other, which we were going to take, was more offroad, but I figured that the offroad downhills were going to be more rideable than the ups.

Riding along the road and then turning into the fire trail, we were pleased to note that it was a decent, wide track. Covered in small stones, and incredibly steep in places, much of the upwards track was still unrideable, but at least all the down was rideable, some of the up, and it was good walking where it was bad riding.

We soon overtook a short course mens team, one of whom was so buggered that he was being towed, and as we approached darkness, we decided that we needed our wits given the loose surface, and at the top of one particularly pedestrian hill we carried straight on for 100 yards rather than turning right, and lay down for 20 mins.

Getting up and attaching lights we were straight into an amazing downhill, where Danielle's lack of MTB experience started to show, so we stopped, had a chat, and rearranged. I knocked my speed back a bit and led Danielle, telling her to stick to my wheeltracks, and then Grant would follow behind, thus minimising the dust clouds and distractions for D.

3 K of loose, steep, yump-filled downhill later and Danielle was still stuck to my back wheel, now with no front brake as she'd managed to cook the fluid dragging the brakes all the way. While the brakes cooled down we explained this phenomenon to Danielle, who hadn't experienced it before, and then we set off again, with D trying to roll as much as possible to give the brakes plenty of opportunity to cool down.

This formation seemed to work very well, and we made good progress, pushing the bikes where necessary, and riding a very reasonable amount, through the CP and out onto the road. We had to follow the road for a while before dropping back onto some fire track and then onto some trails that had been drawn onto the map, which was all going nicely until the distance started ticking over a bit far and the fire track didn't appear. A compass check had us going in a very random direction, and a map check had us having missed a road junction about 3K ago - shit!

Turning round, Grant warned me to take care, and avoid 'getting home-itis', a warning which was pretty unnecessary as I'd just cocked up, this wasn't a symptom of anything other than not reading the map properly!

We rode back over the big hill that we'd just unnecessarily climbed and turned right at the bottom of it, following the map a lot more carefully all the way to our left turn that took us away from the groomed surface and back onto fun tracks.

Turning off the fire trail we got onto a piece of single track that would have been pretty challenging without the sleep deprivation and lights, and was absolutely superb with it! Another CP down and we were following a drawn on track out, which concerned me for a while, but kept heading in generally the right direction before depositing us on another trail. A nice little maze of trails and single track followed, with us happily picking up the rest of the CPs that preceded another water activity.

We had to paddle across a river in a kayak, pick up a raft from the other side, paddle back, load the bikes into the raft and then return to the far side begfore continuing to ride. This palava was made slightly more difficult by forgetting to untie the raft from the bank, and then a little communication issue where everyone wanted to do the same thing but couldn't effectively phrase the requirements, and then team 4TC and all it's bikes were on the South Bank.

A team just ahead of us were cycling across a field, so we ignored them and found the track that headed in our direction, mucked around finding an indistinct junction, and then were finally caught by them when I spotted that the map had been badly folded and I was missing just over a K of track. A K that included a cp - arse! Luckily the CP happened to be about 100m from the corner we had stopped at, which was obviously fortuitous, and cost us very little time.

Riding into the last TA we had quite a quick transition onto the kayak, given that we had to mark up 3 CPs on a map, and attach glow sticks to everything, it went pretty well, and we headed out. Navigational communication proved a little difficult on this leg, but after the first CP, we got around it by me having a look at the route to the next CP before we headed off, so I could visualise the directions I was being given, and we picked up the last 2 CPs pretty quickly, pulling away from a team that had closed up on us before the first CP.

After the final CP it was just a case of retracing our steps and then paddling across an inlet back to the campsite and bed.

Rounding the corner to the final stretch meant also rounding the corner into the wind, and the last 20 minutes or so of paddling I chilled quite significantly - severely taking one for the team as the others said that they were still quite toasty behind me ;-(

What came next almost certainly was a case of 'get home-itis' as we really hadn't planned our approach to the Finish at all, and spent at least half an hour mucking around trying to work out where we should land, and then whether we could get through to the sea, before finally accepting that the track on the map was probably the way forward. Unfortunately this track climbed out of the beach to start with, and then turned to narrow single track that required the kayak to be carried on it's side before finally we came out into the camp site and managed to walk nonchalantly up to the finish line 45 hours after starting.

So that was it, 5 in the morning and Team 4TC were having it's first post race cup of tea in the race HQ, talking about the teams that were still out on course, and being congratulated on finishing the full course ( one of only 7 teams to do so ), and managing to complete our first race in 4th place overall, 2nd mixed team, and bagging a goodly amount of cool stuff from the generous race sponsors for our efforts - thanks a lot Mountain Hardwear, Montrail and Euro optics!