OtterBox Action Asia Challenge
Tough Day As Humidity Torchers Otterbox Participants
Media Release (Action Asia) / 19.05.2014
Perseverance, team spirit and hard work played a crucial role Sunday at the OtterBox Action Asia Challenge adventure race at Tai Lam Chung, Hong Kong. The course and weather punished teams on the 45 km race and the other 2 supporting events, with a total of over 420 participants representing over 31 nationalities.
“It’s always nice to see a new course for the Challenge as this added great variety. It is always difficult with trails here in Hong Kong as there are not a lot of choices”, said overall team winner Ryan Blair of Champion System Adventure
“With this race going now 16 years (laughs) there are only going to be so many choices to design a course like this with the biking, kayaking, running, but the Action Asia and team did a great job trying to create something new and exciting with a good course and some really nice technical running. Conditions were interesting with the rain and mud the last few weeks and the gorge which was hidden away was so steep and narrow in some places making it surprising. There was a lot of water in there, which was nice as it cooled us down, I had to jump in many times, but the biggest challenge for me was just managing this humidity as you just felt like your head was going to pop and explode. It’s a team race and my teammate Jay helped me a lot as he was just so strong.”
Team mate Jantarabon Kiangchaipaiphana added “The kayak was hard as in Chang Mai I’m usually only doing running and biking so this wasn’t easy.” The Champion System Adventure team had an overall winning time of 4 hours 14 minutes 52 minutes.
Blair added “We didn’t know how far in front we were until the end as we just kept pushing and pushing right till the end making it that much harder”.
Team X-BIONIC grabbed 2nd overall having to fight hard with Team Chiru for the higher position on the podium. “The pain wasn’t going thru my head, it was going through my ankle as it was like an Easter egg with swelling”, said Pierre Le Magnan. “I tried to take it easy on the final technical ridgeline heading down to Tai Lam Chung as I didn’t want Marcel waiting for me, but we wanted to catch up or maintain our distance on the bike which we did,” he continued.
X-Bionic teammate Marcel Hagener added, “I knew Pierre would like the bike, but after doing over 700km in Tibet with over 10,000 meters of bike climbing last week we were still feeling it” said Hagenar, who is one of the top adventure racers in the world and a previous World Champion.
”We had a little issue on the abseil as we had to share a figure 8, which made it a bit more exciting as Chiru was next to us on the abseil and we were neck in neck near the end of the race. We just cruised on the kayak as we knew the leaders were in front and the others were behind so just wanted to make it home to the finish. An amazing course for the run and the gully was really technical and beautiful” finished Le Magnan, happy with 2nd overall in 4 hours 47 minutes 23 seconds.
“There were no issues at all on the marking as didn’t go wrong once. We we’re in 3rd coming down the final ridge before the bikes, talking to each other, and we knew it was hot and tried to pace ourselves as Jeremy loves to go out hard. We knew pacing in the heat was important,” said Cosmo Richards of Team Chiru who grabbed 3rd overall. We caught Pierre and Marcel in the gorge and overtook them” continued Richards. “Not on the bike as they were so much better, or better than me at least” said Jeremy Ritcey.
Richards continued; “ I ran out of water in the gorge, a bit of a mistake as didn’t realize it would take so long as was it quite slippery and we couldn’t go too fast and hit a bit of a low. Jeremy had a bit of a low on the bike before that and we were just trying to recover from that. They (Pierre/Marcel) got us just before the abseil. Think I went 30-45 minutes without water before that in the gorge so was totally dunking myself in the river and think I even drank a little. We were feeling a bit better going back to the bikes on a section of the Yuen Tuen trail that we knew the leaders were good in the heat and we would struggle. I think we did well.
Ritcey continued, “Yeah we tried to go steady on the bike all day as I haven’t been biking much lately. We got out of the gorge in front of them and said let’s just stay steady, but if we can stay in front at the abseil we might have this”
Richards added, ”We were together on the abseil with Pierre & Marcel, but they just did so well on the kayak as Marcel is world champion, he’s a machine as we knew we had to have a lead on them going into the paddle and to be honest both teams on the paddle thought let’s just enjoy it and we knew we had 3rd and weren’t going to catch them so that’s what we did”. The Chiru team grabbed 3rdoverall in 4 hours 57 minutes 6 minutes.
The Full adventure category participants had approximately 13 km of trail-running , 23 km of mountain biking, 5 km of Ocean kayaking, 2 km of river rock scrambling over the 45 km course. Pushing your body to an absolute limit to see what participants are really made of is very common for many adventure racers in the rugged outdoors of Hong Kong. Course maps of the exact route were given out the morning of the Challenge.
The OtterBox Action Asia Challenge reminded participants and the public how important it is to HELP CLEAN THE AIR & SEA and to all to do their bit turning off electricity and getting outside to enjoy the ocean, trails, coastlines.
This event could not have happened without the kind support of OtterBox, Action X, Watsons, Inov8, Skins, OL&N, Ocean Potion, Digital Butter, Salonpas, Sky BBQ and the Action Asia Foundation HK Charity.
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