Primal Quest Badlands
Crazy Horse Transition
Team Orion Health / 16.08.2009
It was perhaps not surprising therefore to hear Wayne Oxenham's voice cheekily calling "Ouch, Ouch, Ouch!" as they biked the final 100m across one of the Crazy Horse monument's car parks to finally complete this epic section of the race.
OrionHealth.com timed their arrival to almost exactly coincide with the start of the only Dark Zone in the race. Dark Zones are a time period where racers are not allowed to proceed on the course, usually for safety reasons. In this case the halting of the racers was rather unusually due to lasers. The Crazy Horse monument is host every evening to a laser light show that sends piercing laser beams across the night sky as far as the eye can see - not something that the race organisation wished teams to view too closely as their eyesight could be seriously damaged.
As the sounds of indigenous music played across the night air and lasers projected images and information onto the huge cliff monument OrionHealth.com packed their bikes away into their boxes and got themselves ready for the next section of the race - a long trek which will include the impressive ropes course that Primal Quest has in store for teams this year.
Wayne had apparently suffered two chain breaks on the course so far and finally having access to his bike box enabled him to get the teams spare chain from their kit and replace his one.
Asking him what the team's feelings about hitting the Dark Zone were he responded that the team "had already contemplated that [they] would sleep again here so we're okay about it" ... a sentiment seconded by Anna Berthelsen who piped up in the background that it was "great" that they had to stop for some more sleep! Wayne also commented that up to this point in the race the navigation had been "spot on" by Stuart and Brent - always an excellent thing to be able to say as any step in the wrong direction is wasted time and energy.
The team had not been missed by the bad weather that had lashed teams during the late afternoon/evening and although it hadn't hailed on OrionHealth.com it had been "bloody close to it!" The team had asked on arrival if they could sleep in one of the U-Haul trucks and having been given the affirmative after completing as much of their preparations as possible they climbed in and settled down for a planned 3 hours sleep.
Unfortunately for one of the volunteer logistics staff he'd forgotten that all of his gear was in the back of the truck and not wanting to disturb the team he had a pretty cold three hours as the temperatures plummeted.
SleepMonsters
