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What does a volunteer do in the XPD race?

Brian Boyle / 14.08.2004

What does a volunteer do in the XPD race? Well apart from shifting mountains of gear, mainly bike boxes (more about them later.) There is manning CP’s. Support in Headquarters. And if you look as though you have a few spare moments there is more gear to shift. And what about being a Mailperson also.

Cache boxes. 9 separate drop off points for competitors gear (9x 20 teams= heaps).
Bike boxes to be loaded on and off and on and off and on and off trailers. Some damn boxes as big as compact houses. By the end of the week any one of the volunteers could well qualify for weightlifting at the Olympics. And H2O. Boxes and boxes and boxes of the stuff. Then checking and double checking so there are no disasters.

Manning CP’s round the clock to be ready and waiting each and every team. And as the check times show sometimes several hours between teams. And I guess, this is the special part, due to the location and nature of the course, with no public presence or team support crews, being there to cheer on the competitors. So far it seems that most checkpoints have been in the windiest spots. A dust storm on Thursday night may have made for a spectacular sight for some, but try holding down the CP tent and keeping tarpaulins over the competitors gear.

And a Mailperson? After downloading the pages and pages of messages off the race site, cutting each up, and then coordinating delivery at CP’s. The teams have some really special people supporting them. And the messages are obviously great motivational manna. One received even purporting to be from a top athlete in Athens! What do the teams do with them? One team rations themselves to reading one message per hour while on the go.

So is being a mailperson also important? Sure is. Another task cheerfully undertaken.

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