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Beach Holiday or Adventure Race?

Jan Smolik / 23.08.2007

When teams lined up for the start, nobody would guess these people were here for an adventure race. A vast collection of flippers, snorkels, goggles, air mattresses or tyre tubes rather suggested, that they were here for holiday. The reason was simple. The first trekking stage was around a lake, and very often it was quicker to swim across than run around. And it was allowed not only to swim but also to use any swimming aids teams chose. They only had to carry them for the whole stage.

The race started exactly at 10am. After a mandatory section to the nearby junction, teams dispersed to all sides. Although it looked strange seeing teams running in exactly opposite directions, all choices were good. All teams reached CP1 at approximately the same time.

From the very start the Finnish team Omjakon took the lead. On their futuristic looking air mattresses they moved through the water like fish and at the end of the 4-hour stage they were already 40 minutes ahead. But other teams were also fast and thus the race started at a higher speed than the organizers expected.

In the following stage the teams did not leave water. They continued in canoes and paddling 25 kilometers on the flat water in plastic tourist canoes is only for really tough people. Fortunately, an orienteering section broke the almost infinite stage. Teams could split into pairs to collect all the checkpoints in the special map. Fastest to sweep through the forest was Nev-Dama, who were slowly moving from the middle of the pack towards fourth place and even to medal positions. Strong racing from a team of three adventure race beginners. They are undoubtedly the biggest surprise of this year’s edition of Czech AR.

During the second stage the race order unfolded. First was Omjakon, followed (after big gap) by the winners from the last two years Tilak (Czech), and (after another break) by Sport2000 (Czech). Then rest of the teams arrived about 30 minutes apart.

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