The 2007 Adventure Race World Championship

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ARWC2007 – Thanks a Million!

Rob Howard / 05.06.2007

I hope those of you who followed our ARWC2007 coverage from Scotland enjoyed it, wherever in the world you were watching and whether you were supporting particular teams or just watching how this remarkable race unfolded. I know from the emails we’ve received from families of some racers that they were camped out in front of the computer all week!

The number of people watching is hard to determine, but SleepMonsters has served over a million pages of ARWC2007 reporting and at peak times the site was being read at over 5 pages a second, with in excess of 4000 people watching the SAT Tracker at any given moment. Nearly 6000 messages of support have also been sent to the teams.

All of this has only been made possible by the (very) hard work of many people and I’d like to thank the following for all their unstinting efforts;

Robyn Ferrar and Gary Vallance
Robyn and Gary were our reporting team at the race (along with myself), and we aimed to spend as much time as we could out on the course with the teams, talking to them and sharing some of their experiences.

This required walking/paddling/climbing to some very remote areas, thousands of miles of driving, many hours of waiting for teams (especially later in the race), long nights spent writing and posting photos, and little (or no) sleep.

Gary paddled along Loch Morar and across Rannoch Moor a few times, walked across Knoydart and went for a swim in Loch Ness. (Passing teams saw him floating on his back taking photos – the Loch Ness SleepMonster!) Robyn climbed onto the Cullin of Rum, up Ben Nevis and onto Binnein Shuas during the worst conditions of the race to describe to you just how horrible it really was! (And I got to climb Curved Ridge … which I’ve been wanting to do for years!)

Their reports were the core of our coverage and their energy and dedication were incredible.

Ric Searle (SAT Tracker)
SAT Tracker had an astonishing impact on our coverage of ARWC2007 and on the safety and management of the race.

The system was conceived and it’s development managed by Ric, and he was working day and night through the race troubleshooting, and updating systems.

Ric’s also programmed all the amazing Google Earth mapping for the race coverage. See All Event Posts