Team Ecuador Nissan, Winners of Huaira Sinchi 2012

Team Ecuador Nissan / 19.03.2012

The 10th edition of Huaira Sinchi race… for us was special.  This amazing race has now run for 10 years and allows us discover lots of incredible places in the country where we live.  As a team from Ecuador we always want to give our best at this race and put in a lot of effort to be strong competitors against the super competitive international teams that come to race here every year.

This year again there are really strong teams on the pack … we know some of the teams from other races and they are really competitive. This year there were teams from USA, South Africa, France, Spain, Denmark, and Colombia.

Finally, on the 18^th of February at 6am in a small town named Aloasi the race we’d been waiting for for months started… It starts with a 27km hard bike ride; climbing from 2900m to 4100m. Our strategy was to go out the first day as fast as we could, give everything to try to make a good gap to the rest of the pack.  We went out as we planned, it was a hard uphill ahead of us, and we set a hard pace going out… Half way into the stage we turned back on ourselves, and there were no teams following us at least 10 minutes… It was good but we knww that it was just the first stage of the race and a lot was still to come. We finished the bike and after a fast transition we started the first 20km trekking leg to cross at 4800m between the two Illinizas.  Everything was covered in snow and that morning the Illinizas where amazing.  We reached the saddle walking at a strong pace, trying to keep pushing hard.

After the PC we had to start to go down at an amazing place with a view of the two Illinizas and the mountain landscape with a lot of snow and rocks. It was tricky navigation until we reached the next PC, which was in on a ridge.  Here we had to follow the ridge to the entrance of a trail and we made a small mistake and ended a little to the left of the entrance of the trail where everything was covered with really thick bush.  We lost some time trying to find the entrance and after some time we get onto the track again and started to go towards the first rope section. Here we saw another team so a lot of the effort climbing the mountain was lost, but still we were in 1^st position and we had a lot of racing still to come.

We reached the end of this hard trek and made a fast transition into a 90km hard bike ride with a lot of climbs and still between 3000-4000m.  The weather was still cold and raining at times. We started this ride really fast to take advantage of the daylight as much as we could. It was a hard ride with lots of climb and some tricky road navigation decisions until we reached PC8 that was a pc camp for the adventure category. Here we stopped for some hot coffee for few minutes and then kept on our way to the transition at the Quilotoa crater.

It was a hard first day of racing, with lots of altitude gained, rain and cold. We make a good transition for the next 23km trek, the team was tired from all the effort we put into these first stages but on our minds was to keep moving as fast as we can.  We started this trek (supposed to be a 5h trek) heading to the rim of the Quilotoa crater in a cold and windy night.  

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