Swisse Mark Webber Tasmania Challenge
Into the Hartz Mountains
Will Gray (Webber Challenge) / 10.12.2011
Once again, F1 driver Mark Webber’s adventure race offered a surprise to kick-off the day when the start gun fired and competitors raced quickly into, well, a bit of a standstill.
The competition has seen some interesting starts so far, with the quick orienteering kick-off on day one sending teams in all directions and the swim to shore on day two making some shiver from the cold.
Today, however, it was an altogether different experience as the Race Directors, Rapid Ascent, threw in a bit of a curveball with a bush bash that left teams confused and consulting their maps as they tried to find a way through the trail.
“It was chaos at the start,� said Mark Padgett of overnight leaders Team Iron House. “We’d all followed the French – you should never follow the French! – and we’d just run to this creek and everyone was trying to make decisions.�
Some teams persisted and chose to continue on, but Iron House was one team that chose not to, influenced by fresh memories of their previous day’s time-costly bush bashing excursion on their minds.
It was persistence on the wrong course that put paid to Iron House’s race on Friday, but the pair were more mature about things this time around. Padgett said: “Yesterday’s bush bash really cost us and we weren’t prepared to do the same thing again.�
Meanwhile, our international journalist team is seeking the time to climb up top, where we had already been and discovered a spectacular landscape, very similar to that found in Chilean Patagonia. It was a ‘pretty speccy view’ as they say in these parts, as the flat plateau on the alpine plain stretched into the distance, occasionally kissed by clouds.
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