Old Spice Adventure Race
Czech Adventures
Ryan Elliott / 02.09.2005
We arrived at rainy Prague airport to be greeted by Miroslav, one of the course organisers, who was our designated driver and our first glimpse of the friendly, helpful nature of this event. Then on arriving at the van we had our first challenge of the race before it had even started - fitting four bike bags, four 100ltr boxes and 5 rucksacks into a four-seater mini-van with a relatively small boot!
The race venue Dobronice was 120km south of Prague in South Bohemia and 2hrs later we arrived to be greeted by race director and one of the Czech Republic’s top AR racers Thomas Vanek. Race base was an outdoor extreme sport centre with each team having a hut as their base of operations. Straight to bed for us then like a bunch of naughty school kids with a day of briefings, kit organising and general orientation to look forward to.
The next day dawned, minus the rain thankfully. We had a quick brekkie and the rest of the day seemed to breeze past in the blink of an eye with briefings on race rules and route, kit checks, team orientation, general introductions and dinner.
Down The River
Race day dawned and contrary to the organiser’s forecasts it’s not raining. This was the only one of a few porky pies we were told and the rest were not so much to our liking, but more on that later! We were shuttled to Bechyne, 20mins away, for the start and we were off! The town orienteering was a great warm up and with blood pumping we set off on the first challenging stage, the 35km trek along the banks of the river Luznice. The final destination was Tabor, passing base camp, and 9 (!) weirs that we were to find out we would be coming down later. Holy cow!
So 5hrs later we arrived in Tabor still feeling pretty good and only 45mins behind the leaders. It was nice to dib in and get CP1 out of the way and we were quickly dashing along underground tunnels and soon had 4 out of 5 checkpoints when ... stumped on the last one! After a frustrating waste of 20 minutes we realise it was at the start and we’d missed it because a local photographer distracted us with a photo opportunity and blah blah. Lesson 1 learnt!
SleepMonsters
