Sabah Adventure Challenge
Salomon Suunto’s Maddess & Ritcey at the 150km Sabah Adventure Challenge
Michael Maddess / 15.04.2010
It was very hot when we arrived late at night as we heard the airline captain say over the announcement it was 39 degrees, but we were convinced it was 29 as we thought that temperature would be impossible. Then they said daytime temperature was 41 that day in Kota Kinabalu and we looked at each other half laughing and with a bit of a gulp in our throats ..
Next was a 2 hour min-van journey, winding along through the mountains while we gulped down our new 1.5 litre carbonated sport drinks with take-a-way boxes of fried rice with Malay things I couldn’t pronounce. We were bouncing side to side stuffed in the back seat with the luggage and bike boxes and our destination was a place called Tambunan along the Keningau highway in between a bunch of mountains.
We arrived late and tired and all the other competitors were long gone to sleep. We’d missed the race briefing, so ran in to say hi to organizers who were still awake sorting communications out, got the day 1 course maps and ran back to finish preping the bikes, get our gear up a staircase in the dark and finally arrived in our rooms to go to sleep. It was 1am and the race started at 3am. We set our alarms for 2am for 1 hour of sleep!
Woke up and wanted to go back to bed as we felt jet lagged. Having changed we worked out our food strategy, plan of attack and left at 2:45am with 15 minutes to spare … only to find out my rear tire was completely flat! We ripped the tire off, went through 2 tubes realizing the pump didn’t work on either and finally found a 3rd tube that the pump valve worked on and got air in. Tube inserted in the tubeless tires after cleaning all the white gunk out and we were off. (Basically I had not let enough air out of the tire on the flight and due to the airline pressure had blown the tire.)
<b>Setting off in the Dark</b>
One minute to stretch, said hello to a few friends at the start and bang we were off in the dark … Immediately everyone ran the wrong way around the lake, but this didn’t matter as everyone just followed each other with the Swedish and Malaysian team (same members of Malaysian Eco-Challenge team) taking the lead. We stayed around 20-30m behind the top 2 teams and stayed there for the first 4km dirt road run until the river with the top 3 teams slightly pulling away.
SleepMonsters
