AREC – Mayhem in Asia

Pavel Paloncy (Team Elvac/Nutrend/OpavaNet) / 14.05.2014

This year’s AR European Championships was hosted by Lycian Challenge in Turkey and this AR was a real adventure. Unfortunately, at the expense of it still being a race.

The race field consisted of 24 teams and seemed to be very competitive. All the racers gathered together for the first time at race briefing, which was carried out in a bazaar-style, changing and adjusting the rules on the fly, according to public opinion and loudness of the team’s response. One important point was made here: Teams had to plot the coordinates to their map once they would get them, but the Turks confused Northings and Eastings ...

So, at 6 AM on the race day, the coordinates were handed out and teams frantically began to plot them into their maps. Sometimes they had to be tweaked a bit to make sense, sometimes they did not make sense at all. Information about change of location of a certain CP was distributed among all teams, give or take two or three teams.  A real 76hour adventure was in store for all of us!

The race prologue, a “City Special” in Kemer surprised all the teams. Everyone anticipated some kind of city orienteering, but it turned out to be a stage of tubing down the local river.

This only showed how experienced the field has grown during recent years. A few years ago it would have probably resulted in several maps being drowned, some headlamps not working and other disasters. However, this time racers just checked whether all the contents of their packs were properly sealed in their dry bags and went on with this funny stuff.

Next we tackled the first and longest MTB leg, with 90 km and 3000m of elevation gain. We made some mistakes and learned the maps are very, very inaccurate.  In the next section we learned that trails that are drawn in thin black exist more or less on a random basis.

We used our experience from these sections to navigate through tough sections, then we failed to use our knowledge once again on an easy section, got into major trouble, but reduced it into a minor time loss. This was a formula we repeated several times during a race.

Leg 4 [30 km mountain trekking] led us to the first special task – rope descending. At 14:30 we ascended to a misty summit over 2000 m above sea level. As we approached the ropes we could see many teams in survival blankets waiting for their turn to abseil. After a while we were approached by an organizer informing us that was very likely that we would not make it before the deadline.

To make this clear: There were several teams waiting in the queue before us and it took around 40 minutes for each team to descend.  The deadline for the closure of the task was at 7 PM but the organisation applied this also to teams waiting in the queue. We refused to give up the abseil and lose two checkpoints and luckily made it before 7 PM. Some other teams gave up prematurely or were not lucky enough to make it, so they ascended the summit in vain.

The race was restarted in a Gundersen start with 40 minutes intervals. We cleared 32 km of mountain trekking, another 30 km of MTB, mostly downhill and started making ground on the teams before us.

After a short and refreshing river paddle, we set off on a 40 km trek, where we were probably the only team to have chosen a route along a road and saved some time.  (Ed. Race leaders adidas TERREX also did this.)

We were still on a full course and met more and more teams skipping CPs, so we knew that we were trending up in the results. At the end of the trekking stage we had to rethink our position, and decided to skip the last two CPs on this trek in order to take all of them on other sections, especially on the kayak section, as it looked like those CPs were “cheap” timewise. We had a short nap at the mosque (TP – transition point) before tackling the last, but by far the hardest biking section. We set off for an exceedingly long and steep climb, but were sharp in our navigation, as the third and last night began to loom.

After another short nap in TA2 we were finally ready for kayaking. However there were no sprayskirts for us, no organizer to remedy the situation and as more teams came to the TA, there were not enough kayaks for them. We were assured that in 10 minutes we would get the sprayskirts, as we were not allowed to start without them. 10 minutes turned out to be 4 hours, so we re-evaluated our position and chose to skip much of the kayaking as the canyoning and abseil on the next trekking stage were worth more points.

Frustrated as we were, we got back into racing mood, moved quickly on the trekking and reached the canyon at our projected time. We put on the mandatory wetsuits and almost boiled ourselves in the canyon. The canyon was bone dry and jammed with too many teams. It was the same for the waterfall abseil, so we waited another 80 minutes. Finally we returned to our kayaks … but they were not there! The organizers didn’t have enough kayaks, so ours were leant to another team. (“Kayaks will be ready in 10 minutes.”)

We had another 2 hours of waiting for the kayaks, then the last kayak leg and an exhausting and frustrating swim to the finish line. We skipped 2 CPs thanks to our decision, and 8 more CPs thanks to the missing kayaks. In a 75hour race we had to wait for more than 11 hours, twice as much as any other team.  Four days after the race, without a single word from race organizer about this (and many other) situations the results were published.

Well, we did some mistakes, we recovered from them, we had some possibly race-ending situations but handled them and were making ground, but we did one big mistake at the beginning – we wanted to race.

Turkey was a very beautiful place to have an adventure, but this was a very frustrating event to race at.

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