The AR World Championships - Costa Rica
The Morning After the Night Before
Rob Howard / 03.12.2013
As a foggy dawn broke Transition One was busy with teams preparing to set off on the first paddling stage. By this stage the transition field was awash with mud and the mosquitoes were massing and biting, but as teams rode in (coming along the road from both directions), they didn’t care, they were just glad to have arrived!
It had been a long, hard first night of the race, and the competitors and their bikes were caked in mud after the overnight rains. It sounds like the teams did miss the worst of the deluge, which left the roads a foot deep in water in places nearer the coast, but they did encounter some rain. “It wasn’t too bad,” said Wendy Fjellstad of Team Peaklife Sport, “we had some rain and put our jackets on, but it wasn’t cold. It was the mud which was the problem.”
Her team mate Karl Webster was more forthright. “I’m not sure whose idea of a joke that was,” he said, “we carried the bikes for hours and the muddy gullies were horrendous – I’m sure no one has ever ridden some of those trails before – they were not meant for mountain biking!”
At the time this team were deciding whether to wash the bikes or leave them, but most took them down to the river to wash off.
In transition at the same time were the La Ruta Landrover team with ‘the Italian adventure racer’, Marco Ponteri (he is usually the only one at big races like this). He was with the team representing ‘La Ruta’ perhaps the world’s premier endurance mountain bike race, which crosses Costa Rica coast to coast, and race founder Roman Urbina is on the team.
He was busy dismantling his bike in the mud and commented, “I didn’t really enjoy carrying my bike for 5 hours – you should ride a bike not carry it! As you can see we are not really adventure racers – we are mountain bikers pretending to be adventure racers!”
Team Dark Horse from the USA were busy sorting their gear, and discussing why the kayak gear box was not at this transition, which it isn’t apparently! “It’s just another one of those little challenges,” said Tom Smith. He was talking to Molly Houseman who is on her first long adventure race. This a quite a race to start with!
“The mud and carrying was crazy,” she said, “there was one place where there must have been about 50 people queuing to get down a slot canyon of mud in single file, and everyone was helping each other out. We did get wet for a while, it went from fog to mist to rain to a downpour.” This is a team with some experience of Costa Rica as both Smith and David Darby have done all 4 Costa Rica Adventure Races, but after that night Smith said, “Pongo is off my Christmas list now, he’s not getting a card!” (Pongo is the nickname of the Race Director.)
There was no let up for the teams either as they all had to drag their heavy bike boxes through the mud across to the truck and pump up their own kayaks, which took a while. Once that was done they could slide down the muddy bank into the water of the Rio Coto Colorado. They would follow this for some distance out into the delta and onto the ocean, but even at the put in position it was broad and fast flowing.
The leaders had passed through this transition much earlier, moving an hour quicker than the predicted race time, despite the weather. Thule Adventure had made a break and were chased into transition by Columbia Vidaraid , quickly followed the rest of the top teams. Near CP5 on the ride there had been 14 teams all together in the chasing pack, and even by TA1 the first 12 teams came in within an hour of each other.
Seagate and Haglofs Silva were particularly quick in transition and as teams set off onto the ocean it was the 3 most successful squads of recent years, Thule Adventure, Seagate and Haglofs Silva leading the way, but the chasers were not far behind.
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