On November 29th all the team got together in San José, Costa Rica, for one more adventure. This time it would be the Adventure Racing World Championship 2013, the most important race of the year for us and all adventure racing teams. Me, Urtzi, Marco and Jon Ander were ready for one more chapter in our book of adventures!

 

Race preparation was exhaustive as always but we managed to put everything together on time and be ready to leave for the start line at 4 am on Dec. 2nd. It was a long bus ride until we arrived on the border with Panama, where the adventure began... Beside us we had all the best teams in the world, willing to give their best to get a good position or a world title. And ahead of us we had over 800 km of challenging course until we reached the finish line.

 

We started in a 100 km mountain bike with a challenging uphill in which we had to carry our bikes in a very muddy trail... We had a slow beginning, we broke a chain, but managed to finish this section in the 7th position. Then we got into our kayaks to paddle nearly 65 km through rivers, finishing the section in the 5th position together with teams Tecnu and Quasarlontra. We packed our kayaks and ran with all our kayak gear for 27 km until the next transition, where we would get our kayak again and do a 10 km portage until the next river. And that’s when things started getting wrong...

 

We thought we had a good portage car for the kayak, but the truth is that we did not try it before with these specific kayaks... So, of course, it did not work well and we lost nearly 3 hours on that. We also got very stressed and the team was not getting along and it took us a long while to find a solution. But fortunately we managed to finish this stage and luckily we met team Silva getting out of a wrong trail at the end of the 10 km, so we got into the river with them and team Merrell. None of us knew exactly where the checkpoint was, but we all looked for it together and managed to find it. It was a very good team work. The only problem is that we were supposed to get water for the entire paddling section in this river, but we did not and ended up paddling for over 10 hours without water...

 

So we kept paddling and paddling and entered in to a channel where we found team Seagate that had been lost for a couple of hours. We then decided to look for the checkpoint in a different channel and ended up loosing other couple of hours until we finally decided to go back and search for another channel, which fortunately was there, and so was the checkpoint. At this point the tide was almost as low as it could get and we battled against it to get to one other checkpoint, after which we had to stop for three hours to wait for the high tide to get through a short cut and save 12 km of paddling in the heat without water.

 

After a good 3-hour sleep we continued the paddling and met many teams that had been way behind us. We finally found a house where we got some water and just before the night came we decided to do a 4-km portage to save 6 km of paddling. It seemed a good idea at first but it was a very bad idea at the end... There we were again with our deficient portage car and again arguing to find a solution. It ended up we had to struggle to not save any time at all. But we forgot this and managed to do a good transition and get on the mountain bike as fast as we could to go to the superman, a 120 km/h tyroline that we really enjoyed. On the way there we passed many teams and arrived there in 5th place, where we received the news that team Silva was out. After the superman, we continued on the mountain bike leg and battled to finish this long section within a very good time, being 15 min behind the 3rd team. The finish was the so longed for 4-hour mandatory stop.

 

We ate well and slept for a little over 2 hours and got ready for the 95 km trekking leg that we were really looking forward to do. We began climbing up to over 3,600 m where we had to run for many hours until we arrived in the Refugio, passing team Tecnu on the way there. Once we passed Chirripo peak a very strong wind and rain began as another obstacle on our way as we followed a trail that appeared and disappeared on the ridge. When we finally arrived at the Refugio we got together with teams Seagate and Thule. That had been a tough night and everybody was very tired. We rested for almost two hours and then left to do the 2000-m downhill back into the jungle. The trails were really muddy and progress was really slow, but we pushed hard to try to keep up with the first two teams ahead of us. In the valley we had a really hard time to find the right trail due to the poor information provided by the map. The end of this long section was in a medical station where we were examined in order to be approved or not to continue on the race, and we also got some medication for feet and any other thing that was disturbing us. At this point we were only 1 hour after team Seagate and 40 minutes after Thule.

 

We then did the transition to the mountain bike leg that would take us to the rafting section. We were happy to be on time to pass the dark zone, but we unfortunately had problems with a bike chain and lost 2 hours trying to fix it. But we managed to get there and we were then in the Pacuare River enjoying the beautiful river and the fast rapids. The rapids finished in a transition to a 90 km kayaking section in rivers full of crocodiles. So we rested for a couple of hours before getting in this section, which we did mostly at night. We were really tired and we had the tide against us for a long while. So we decided to tie the kayaks and sleep for a couple of hours, so the tide would go up and we could avoid it for a while. It ended up that we slept and continued paddling against the tide, but at least we rested a little... We continued paddling really sleepy, it was a very long night, so we tried to sing to help us get through it. The day came and we were in an endless channel that we never saw the end. We paddled, paddled and seemed not to move much forward. After many hours we reached the checkpoint in the hotel, where we stopped for some minutes to have some juice, take a shower to remove the salty

water and get some energy to finish this endless and painful kayaking section. We saw team Seagate and it seemed that they were going to withdraw from the race, due to a foot infection...

 

After reaching the end of the kayaking section, we did a fast trekking towards our bikes. We were in the second position and had team Thule many hours ahead of us, but in adventure racing anything can happen, so we had to keep fighting. We did a slow transition and slept for an hour before leaving for the 156 km mountain bike up to the border with Nicaragua. We did a good start but lost almost two hours to get the first checkpoint, which thankfully we found after a while... We then started sleeping and falling off our bikes, it was very hard to keep riding. Our progress was very slow, but we had to keep moving. We stopped once for 20 minutes for a nap and then continued until the sun came up and we found a small market where we rested for another hour, drank coffee, bought some food and continued. This section was very boring because the roads were horrible and there was nothing specially beautiful in it. We just had to get over it but we were definitely not having fun.

 

After almost 16 hours we finished this huge mountain bike leg and arrived to the last two sections of the race: a fun canopy and the last rafting section towards the finish line. We took forever in this last rafting as we were very sleepy and did not have hands strong enough to hold the paddles. We then found out that we had to carry the rafts out of the river up the street, as a last non sense effort before crossing the finish line.

 

We finally ran with our good feet to the finish line and were for the first time in our lives subcampeones del mundo!!! This 2nd place was the best position that team has achieved, so far... We are very proud of our accomplishment and thank very much our sponsors, family and friends for supporting us. 

 

Special thanks to Columbia Sportswear, Skins USA, Giant, Nutrisport, Spiuk, Zirauna, Darn Tough Vermont, Sea to Summit, Seland, Nordenmark, Evasion Running Mallorca, Camelbak, Light & Motion Bike Lights. THANK YOU!!