Costa Rica: The Coastal Challenge

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UK Team Helly Hansen puts in a strong performance...

Jacqueline Windh / 05.02.2008

UK Team Helly Hansen put in a strong performance, with Nicola MacLeod winning the women’s Expedition division and finishing 11th overall.

Team Helly Hansen are really an adventure racing team, but they decided to head down to Costa Rica for this running/hiking race.

The core of the AR team consists of Nicola MacLeod, Mark Humphrey, Ski Sharp, and Howard Lowe, along with a few other racing friends. Nicola was the only main team member who could make it to Costa Rica, so she recruited her co-worker Gideon Burke to come down with her. Both are officers in the British army. They still needed one more person to make a team, so they had a look on The Coastal Challenge website and found Luc English, a British geologist currently based in Nicaragua, and contacted him. He was in, and they were ready to go!

I had a chance to chat with all three about their impressions of this race, and what’s next for Team Helly Hansen. Nicola has 10 years of AR behind her and Gideon, as a soldier, is also accustomed to tough terrain, but Luc’s background is much more in road-racing, from 10k up to marathon distance.

Nicola said she found this race a lot harder than she had expected. “I had already done the Kalahari race so I thought this one would be a bit of a holiday, because you don’t have to carry your own food. But I turned up here, and it was actually harder – because of all of the elevation changes on this course, and the rough terrain underfoot.�See All Event Posts