Team Tasmania at the Mark Webber Challenge

Richard Ussher / 11.12.2012

After the less than ideal outings at Xterra and Waikaremoana I nearly pulled the pin on this race, I didn’t want to let Braden down with a sub par performance, that was clearly on the cards, but I reasoned with the navigation aspect, and a extra strong tow line for Braden, I might get through without letting our team down too much.

Braden had a less than ideal start to the week when they were diverted from Melbourne to Sydney and spent the rest of the day trying to get into Launceston before the race started. Unbeknown to us it would set the tone for our entire week.

The race had a real premium feel about it, hotels, buffets and manageable length days, all of which made it a week to look forward to. Once the course was revealed it also promised to be a great week of racing. The great aspect of this race was the stage format but with a true navigation focus, which is relatively rare in Adventure racing but a format I really enjoy. There were also optional checkpoints each day which provided faster teams with the ability to gain time credits and meant that the top teams going for every control often were beaten in by teams electing only to gather the mandatory controls. It certainly made the timings look quite weird some days with bonus times reducing 7 - 8 hour days back to 1 or 2 hours of racing time on the clock.

Day 1 saw us spend a fair bit of the first day with Jarad and James in Team Swisse, the two Marks from Tasmania, the defending champions in team Iron House and Guy and Rob from Renault. The course of day one was a real treat – almost 70 controls meant we were never more than a few minutes from the next CP and the day flew by. Every one had small mistakes but Guy and ourselves found we’d made a bigger blunder than most by missing a CP in the first section. All of a sudden instead of being 2 minutes down on Swisse, Braden and I found ourselves 22 minutes back. The mistake was simply not seeing it on the map but we figured while not ideal there was still a lot of racing left to go.

Day 2 saw a monster climb up onto the top of Ben Lomond, 23 km and around 1500 vertical meters. We put in a few attacks at the bottom but couldn’t shake any of the team we wanted to – especially Swisse and before long I was back to just trying to hang in there, I was still far from firing on all cylinders. The most impressive thing on this day was one of the Aussie rowers not only staying with the front bunch but attacking towards the finish and being first to the top – on an old clunker of a bike and in flat pedals – hard man for sure!

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