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Team SleepMonsters.com Win in Slovenia

Rob / 06.07.2003

The first ever Adventure Race Slovenia was won by Team SleepMonsters.com. Dave Hooper, Ski Sharp, Fiona Paterson and Howard Lowe completed the 200km course in 47 hours 38 minutes, finishing just over 2 hours in front of the top Slovenia team ‘GRS Celje’.

Of the 32 starters, the majority Slovenian teams, only 9 completed the full course, so it must have been a tough introduction to AR for the locals! This makes the performance of GRS Celje even more impressive, especially as they lead in the early stages. (SleepMonsters.com took the lead at CP8 and kept if from there to finish.) GRS Celje also managed to stay ahead of Team Poland (3rd) and Czech Extreme (4th).

The race began and finished at Velenje and included 60km of trekking and 80km of mountain biking through the Slovenian Alps of Kamniško-Savinjske and the Šaleška dolina and Savinjska dolina valleys. There was also a 25km ‘mountaineering’ section, rafting, swimming, a 70m abseil and what was called ‘old fashioned rafting’.

The new race seemed to go off without a hitch in fair weather, though there were some accusations of unfair behaviour and vandalism at one point! It was a mountainous course, with most of the big climbs and descents in the second half of the race, and the only comment from the SleepMonsters.com team came at CP15: “Despite the fact the competition is extremely hard we\'re enjoying it very much.\"

They showed their experience early on at CP7, gaining a good 10 minutes in transition and the pace of race clearly surprised the organisers from day one. On arrival at CP10 they got the chance to rest briefly as a dark zone was enforced until 4am for safety reasons and 3 chasing teams caught up.

Three of them set off together again (Czech Extreme rested another hour) but from there on SleepMonsters.com knew they had a 90 minute advantage as the dark zone was a time out. Having had more rest than the others with ‘time in the bank’ they could now safely race alongside the other leading teams, but still pushed ahead to the finish back at the lakeside at Velenje which they reached late Sunday morning.

The live reports on the race website declared them “(unofficially) crowned as first heroes of Slovenian adventure”! We’ll bring you more news once the team get back with the full story.