The Coastal Challenge
Hills and Wrong Turnings
Lisa de Speville (Photo: Sergio Pucci) / 26.01.2005
It’s now 8pm. We’ve just had dinner and are all under the same roof. It is pouring down – like really pouring, which it isn’t meant to do – being the dry season and all. We’re camped on a soccer field above a beautiful beach overlooking Drake’s Bay, which I presume is named after Sir Francis Drake?What an amazing stage 5! We set off from our overnight camp just after 5am to be shuttled to the start about 9-miles away. The proverbial gun went off just before 06h00 to start what would be our first off-road jungle stage. Barely 500m into the stage the hills started and didn’t let up until 3km before the end of this 38km stage. My wish came true today and for the first time in this race I spent as much, if not more, time walking as running.
Coming up to aid station 1 at the 6km mark, we learned that a few front-runners had missed the right-hand turning off the road and into the jungle, continuing down a steep hill. I heard later from Beverly that they’d run until they reached a dead-end, turning around for the long upward trek. She estimates that they lost about an hour. She said too that they’d each independently made the error – I think that the aid station people were not yet in position when they came through – and although she wondered why she hadn’t seen any route markers, she presumed that she’s just not noticed them as the other guys were also running on the same section.
Some time after aid station 2, Charlie came flying past, then Charles and then Beverly – making up for lost time. At the point where Beverly overtook us, I’d estimated that she should have probably been about 45min – 1hr ahead of me …
Ups and Downs
Back to the route… leaving the road we headed up, up, up into the jungle. Wow! Great steep, technical, upward single-track of sticky red clay covered in fallen foliage. We ascended up on to the ridge of the mountains, following a vague path for a few kilometers before reaching a jeep track and later a sticky red clay dirt road. High up the vegetation opened up revealing the most incredible view of meandering rivers, which cut through dense jungle, flowing into the ocean. Truly spectacular!
From here on we were in authentic Costa Rican rolling hill terrain. But, these are not just little gentle rolling hills. I’m talking very, very steep up and down gradients. Dave McCluskey eloquently described what it felt like approaching the start of each hill as, “When I looked up it was like looking up at one of the skyscrapers in New York City.�See All Event Posts
