There Was We…
Aaaaaaah whos we ?, you ask
Well since the usual suspects didn’t want to race with me, I asked my wife Cindy – well known second and with a couple of ARs like Swazi Xtreme Sport and the Arctic Team challenge behind her, not too inexperienced, just currently very unfit. I got my buddy Douglas who has done a Kinetic 30km sprint before, with the same borrowed Pick ‘n Pay mtb than before. And just because we weren’t inexperienced enough I added my friend Eddie who just returned from Iraq for a bit of a holiday. Unfortunately they only sit around in air conditioned tents in Iraq when not shooting at people or dodging IEDs, therefore Eddie’s current state of fitness, was, well, unsatisfactory. At least we had top seconds, my brother in law with a Landcruiser and my father in law with Eddie’s Jeep.
Things went pear shape on our way to Mnweni when we trusted the bitch in the GPS to navigate us towards the correct coordinates over roads that existed 20 years ago. But that’s a different story that can only be told over 3 beers.
So 02:00 I wake up get the maps from Hardy (the maps were a bit late so we went to bed the previous night, without our maps), plot the first ±20km hiking coordinates and by 03:00 we’re off.
NOW FOR TODAY’S LESSONS:
I know it’s going to take a while for me to live this down, but currently it’s still fresh and it hurts. So I might just as well pass this “lessons learned” on and just maybe you don’t have to make the same mistakes.
We got to PC1 without any major problems since I new it could be tricky in the dark and was paying attention to the map. The problems started from there on. Usually when I navigate we’re pretty much on our own, so you focus on your map and do your own thing. This time I was surrounded by a lot of other teams and going onto PC2 I was leaning towards going more left but because a lot of teams was too my far right I was drawn towards them.
LESSON 1:
This is a confusing lesson so pay close attention.
Be careful to follow what you know is right on the map and not to be drawn off track by a bunch of other teams who are all going in the wrong direction!
The opposite off this lesson is, If 5 teams are going right and you’re the only team going left think again !!
Go figure !?!
This meant that I ended up too late connecting with the stream in which we had to find a double drop waterfall. Which brings me to:
LESSON 2:
Find “safety rails” when navigating especially in the dark when you can’t make out the identifying features. I intended to connect with the river much earlier and then to hike up until I find the waterfall. In this case the river is the “safety rail”, you know you enter low and therefore just follow the river (safety rail) upstream until you find your CP – EASY. But because I was drawn to the right I connected with the river too late and unfortunately there was 3 other waterfalls where we connected. So we and a couple of other teams were searching these waterfalls up and down finding absolutely nothing.
The other problem was that according to my altimeter we were at the right altitude
LESSON 3
Use your altimeter !
Calibrate your altimeter at every known point !
Soooooo, in my defense I have a bit of a question mark over the exact position of the PC that was drawn on the map, personally I think it was slightly too high, and my altimeter agrees with me. But in the end I should have just practiced LESSON 2 more carefully.
Luckily it became light and I could make out some identifying features suddenly realizing my mistake. We run down the hill, got to the right waterfall (about 50m from where I initially connected with the stream) and clipped.
JUST A NOTE to the race organizers: If a CP is at a waterfall, please say top or bottom, because there is no significant difference between the top and the bottom on a map, but there is a massive difference between the top and the bottom for the poor adventure racer that arrives at the wrong side !
Lekker, lekker, we were on our way going strong (well as strong as unfit people can go), clipping PCs 3, 4 and 5 without batting an eye lid. That brought us to the top of the race at around 2000m and now we were going down to a CP at a river junction. I took one look at things, identified the junction from the top and we were off. I was so certain about myself and enjoying the relaxed pace talking nonsense that I didn’t even check the map properly. We arrived at the junction and found no CP. I assumed the CP was stolen so we took a picture and was about to go, when another team’s navigator (sorry your name has now slipped my mind) who was also searching for the CP at the same point halted me and drawn my attention to the fact that we were at the wrong junction. I whipped out my compass and what do you know the river was flowing in the wrong direction by about 45°. We quickly re-orientated ourselves, and went back about a kilometer to the right junction before continuing.
LESSON 4:
Never ever THINK you know where you are, make sure you know where you are by constantly referring to your map, verify every stream, hill, junction road etc. on the map. There was a zillion times while coming down the mountain that I should have spotted that the initial river junction I was aiming for was wrong, but because I was relaxed, laid back, not racing hard, just enjoying the day out, I made a rookie error. Together with this use your compass regularly to verify that rivers, paths etc. are going in the right direction, if not you’re most likely following the wrong river, path etc.
Well at least after this error I was so embarrassed that I didn’t take my eyes off the map again for the rest of the race.
Hardy and Bruce took us to a couple of spectacular view points like CP 7, where the water was rushing through a narrow gorge, and we had to do a couple of well executed river crossings where team work was essential not to be swept down river, especially for a small lady like Cindy. We even had to cross a couple of interesting rivers with our mountain bikes. The ± 15 km of paddling came at the right stage, in the middle of the race where it was most needed to get off your feet for a while.
The last cycling leg was unfortunately disastrous for us, we have just clipped the first CP on the bicycle leg when Eddie torn a calve muscle. It was confirmed today after a visit to the doctor and a sonar, Eddie will be off his feet for 6-8 weeks. Any case the fact that Eddi was hobbling along from this point forward was made tremendously worse by the fact that I gambled on using a different route to get us home. My second told me that it’s a beautiful road which he drove earlier in the day in search of beer for our “after race celebration” Well it turned out that he was on a different road because this one soon fizzled into a single track which eventually disappeared leaving us with a hike a bike from hell. Between Eddie’s calve muscle and my stupid route choice, the 30 minute cycle turned into a 3 hour extremely slow-going hike a bike.
After that Eddie and Cindy decided that’s it for them and it was only Douglas and me that completed the last hiking section of approximately 16km. We had the best kloofing section down a small river section at 03:00 in the morning until we got to the bottom and realized there was a very easy hike down into the river, we should have just continued about 50m further. Well that’s the thing about the dark, you just don’t see these kind of things.
Congratulations to Douglas, he really impressed me, for a guy on his first 24+ hour race on a borrowed mtb, he did very well. Eddie, well sh!t happens, hope your calve muscle gets better soon. And to my kewl wife Cindy – Excellent!
Hardy, Bruce and team, very well done on a fun race. It was definitely not easy, but because of the format any team that has done there homework and put in the basic training could have finished this race.
To all the teams that wasn’t there. WHERE WERE YOU ??, these Ystervark guys are putting on some quality stuff, make sure you enter the next one, the more teams the merrier, and we all want good competition.
Regards
Cobus van Zyl
YstervARk and the AMA-ZINGrace - (24hour AR)
