Team Seagate Reporting From Ecuador

Nathan Fa'avae / 07.11.2014

Hola from Ecuador!

From team Seagate (Nathan Fa’avae, Sophie Hart, Chris Forne, Stuart Lynch)

We are in the final preparations for the 2014 World Adventure Racing Championships. We’ve been in Ecuador for over 2-weeks, it’ll be closer to 3-weeks by the time the race gets underway. Due to the altitude in the mountains we’re racing at we really had to come over early and try an acclimatise to the elevation and less oxygenated air, being the sea level dwellers we are.

About 200km of the 700km total race course is at a reasonably high elevation for adventure racing, over 3000-metres. I think we’re adapted well but we’re nowhere near our sea level ability. Thankfully the race course starts high and finishes low, a downhill trend to the lower lands and eventually the ocean.

We don’t know the exact course but we know the stages, distances and estimated stage times.

Stage 1 Hike 29km 4-hours
Stage 2 Mountain Bike 67km 4-hours
Stage 3 Hike 44km 10-hours
Stage 4 Mountain Bike 144km 14-hours
Stage 5 Hike 45km 12-hours
Stage 6 Mountain Bike 159km 19-hours
Stage 7 Kayak 69km 7-hours
Stage 8 Mountain Bike 42km 4-hours
Stage 9 Hike 40km 16-hours
Stage 10 Kayak 59km 9-hours
We reckon it’ll take us about 110-hours (depending if we get stopped by a dark zone on the river kayaking stage, you’re only allowed to kayak between 5:30am-6:00pm)

The race is said to start close to Quito, likely near the Volcano Antisana, a short steep climb to a peak then descend to the Amazon before climbing back to the Andes, then it’s a gradual descent down river, by bikes and hiking to the coast, finishing with a sea kayaking stage to the end in the seaside town of Mompiche.

Our training has gone really well, we enlisted the expertise of a New Zealand alpine guiding company Adventure Consultants to design an altitude training camp for us. They compiled a 10-day program that saw us training and sleeping and varying elevations to help us adapt as best we could in the time we had. As much for fun and practical purpose, we climaxed the camp by climbing Cotopaxi, the second highest peak in Ecuador towering over the Quito basin at 5911-metres.

We enjoyed a great ascent in excellent conditions, still a challenge but very rewarding. We hope the time invested in adjusting to the altitude will serve us well, I don’t expect we’ll get much or any faster but we should be clear from any health or medical issues altitude so often produces for endurance races in thin air.

There are 52-teams from 20-different countries competing, we are the only New Zealand team but there are 3-other kiwis (from the inov-8, Bivouac team) who are helping out local Ecuador teams in the race.

It seems we’re entering the event as pre race favourites based on having won two Adventure Racing World Series Rounds (NZ, South Africa) which has allowed us to climb back to the World Number One ranking.
That said though, it does not account for much on course, we have a monumental task ahead of us to win the World Championship with many excellent teams competing and also a course that does not particularly play to our strengths.

Our experience racing jungle courses is that the jungle is so dense it forces teams to use trail systems to travel on, this significantly reduces the navigation skills needed. We are also a very strong kayaking team and while there are two reasonable paddle stages, they are near the end of the race which often means they hold less value. The altitude does not suit us either but that should not play a major part as nearly all the top teams are faced with the same challenge. Certainly the local Ecuador teams who live in the mountains will have a huge advantage in the early stages but there is a lot of racing after we leave the mountains so we are pleased about that. We expect to lose some time not being able to speak Spanish also!
That all said and done, we are a resourceful and experienced team, once on course we’ll always be looking for ways to travel as fast as we can through each stage, we love to race and we are very good at focusing on our own performance and not get distracted by other teams.

We’d love to win the race, but first we need to race like a champion team and second we need to finish. If we do those things I hope we’ll be competitive.

For Chris, Stu and I, this is our 8th World Championship event and we’ve all won the title twice before each, so we know what it takes. Sophie while lesser experience than us, is absolutely no stranger to this level of competition with many international wins and also a world title to be proud of, this is her 4th World Championship.

We are looking forward to seeing more of Ecuador, we’ve enjoyed our time here so far but it’s all been in the mountains, the amazon and coastal regions we expect will be equally stunning.

For me personally, I dread the pre race proceedings, gear inspections and ability testing, a huge waste of time in my view, so my patience gets stretched to the limit! One day hopefully the sport will acknowledge the pointlessness of it and we can get straight into what we’ve all come for, the adventure.

This is the first time we’ve raced here but we’re anticipating an excellent course, the organisation team are very experienced and we’ve only heard positive things about the racing in Ecuador, I think they’ll do a superb job and host a highly worthy World Championship event.

The race starts on November 9th.

You can follow the action at;
http://live.huairasinchi.com/

THANKS to all our Sponsors!
Seagate, Rocky Mountain Bicycles, GU Energy, Absolute Wilderness, Antichafe, Patagonia Clothing, inov-8 footwear, Aarn Packs, Endura Eyewear, Revelate Designs, Gloworm Lighting, Tineli, Wildside Travel, Bridgedale Socks, Wind Paddle, Xinix, Railriders

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