Seagate Warm Up For World Champs in Malaysia
Team Seagate / 19.10.2015
The World Champion Adventure Racing Team - Seagate, are on the pathway to defend their title in the Pantanal region of Brazil, in November.
With high temperatures, wetlands, jungle and rain forest awaiting in Brazil, the team (Nathan Fa’avae, Chris Forne, Sophie Hart and Stuart Lynch), selected to race in Malaysia last weekend as part of their campaign.
The Iron Bound Challenge is the greatest adventure race in Malaysia and this year was staged in the Royal Belum Rain forest, in Perak. This dense rain forest area covers 290,000 hectares and is believed to be the oldest rainforest on earth.
Team Captain Fa’avae says; “Coming out of a New Zealand winter we identified we wanted to do some training and racing in the tropics before heading to Brazil, to help adjust to the heat but also to remind ourselves of the realities of racing in high humidity and soaring temperatures”.
The team chose the race as it is well timed being a month before the 2015 Adventure Racing World Championships.
The race will featured the top Asian teams from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia and Malaysia. There were also squads from Mexico, Denmark and two New Zealand teams lining up in the 32-team field.
Kiwi Team Torpedo7 (Marcel Hagener, Simone Maier, Hamish Fleming) were fresh from winning the Wulong Mountain Classic and the Zunyi Challenge in China. They were joined by Hadi Masron, an pro athlete from Singapore.
Asked about Seagate’s goals for the race Fa’avae explained pre race “we’re not trained for stage racing, we’re building up to an expedition race so I don’t expect we’ll be very speedy, but the style of racing is valuable conditioning for us, it’s good to get away with the team for a week and get our heads into the racing environment, this is very much a training camp for us but at the same time we want to achieve the best result we can, it’ll be fun having the other Kiwi team to race, we’re lucky they’re here as it’ll ensure we’re pushed hard”.
However, once the race begun, Seagate raced to the front to be leading after day one. "It's a super tough course, only 4 out of the 32-teams finished the day, other teams were short coursed." commented captain Nathan Fa'avae.
After one day of racing in the Royal Belum Rain forest in Perak, Seagate led from Torpedo7 (NZ) in 2nd, Denmark 3rd and Mexico 4th.
The day started with 2.5km run, "we took an early lead with Torpedo7 but they slipped back a bit, Hadi Masron their fill-in from Singapore was struggling with the pace."
Into the kayaks saw Seagate build a sizeable lead in the first section (7km). The team then had another 3km run then a further 11km by kayak, paddling on the largest dam lake in Malaysia.
Onto the 68km mountain bike, which turned into an epic in every sense for Seagate. "The heat was stifling, and the trail was really slow, lots of trees fallen over the trail and really difficult to move fast, the heat reached 30-degrees so we were burning up." explained Fa'avae.
"With just under 30km to go I broke my rear derailleur so we spent 15-minutes making my bike a single speed and then it was a massive team effort to get to the end of the stage."
Dropping bikes they had a short bamboo raft paddle to under a bridge and then had a 50-metre rope ascent, followed by a quick jog to the finish.
"Overall it was an excellent training session for our team, the heat and sun reminded us of what we can expect at the ARWC in Brazil and the bike mechanical actually got us really team focused and on our A-game.”
The athletes woke to a surprise at the start of day two. The course stage was meant to be an 11km mountain bike ride, followed by a 9km jungle run, a 20km kayak and climb / abseil to finish. However, some families of elephants had moved down from higher in the rainforest and were camped on the section of the jungle trail the teams were planning to race through. Wildlife officers prevented the race from continuing with the risk of the elephants being frightened and the likelihood of athletes being hurt as a result.
The race took the day one results as the official results which meant Team Seagate won.
Fa’avae says, “We were disappointed not to race the second day, it looked great and the training is beneficial for us, but we didn't want to upset the elephants and we didn’t want to be chased through the jungle by them either”.
1st Seagate (NZ) 9:39
2nd Torpedo7 (NZ) 10:56
3rd Merrell (Denmark) 11:22
