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Last teams safely home

Jan Smolík / 02.09.2008

While most teams finished on Friday, 9 racers remained on the course for the third night. Rekre Team was the last to finish ranked. They are Czech Adventure Race regulars, however they take it more like a holiday and recreation than real race. They stop in restaurants a lot, sleep eight hours a night and just enjoy themselves. During previous years, they usually did not finish the full course.

This year they really decided to finish. Instead of eight hours they only slept four. During the last night they reduced it to fifteen minutes, like regular racers. They finished with a time of 72:37, more than 30 hours behind winners. On the final ceremony they promised not to race again, because only a fool makes the same mistake six times, but everyone believes it is just some more “I will never race again� talk.

The other two teams finished incomplete on Sunday morning, and finally the race was over. Although the time of winners was a mere 42:22, it was probably a tough competition. Only nine teams of the nineteen who started made it to the finish line, and three others finished unranked because they were incomplete.

The Finnish team proved to be great skaters. They even did not remove their skates in a rocky area with some boulders. Nobody knows how they got across them, but even the footprints they left prove that they had them still on.

The Ukrainian team who had to borrow a Czech racer, Jan Kotyk, just a few hours before race proved to be completely Ukrainian: Jan admitted he had Ukrainian grandmother.

The English team was the most unpredictable. After they stopped racing, they split into pairs, and so they arrived to many checkpoints twice. News from the checkpoints was sometimes really confusing, with Camracers leaving earlier than they arrived.

Although the race has been over for just a few days, the organizers are already thinking about next year. The want to change it, so the time of the winners will be more like 50 hours, as in previous years. The most probable time for the race to take place is the second half of August. The organizers have already negotiated with partners in the city of Cheb, so there is a good chance that the race will take place near the western border of the Czech Republic. There is also an idea that part of the course could lead through Germany. So keep an eye on SleepMonsters for a more detailed race announcement, or check out the SleepMonsters calendar.

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