Of Toughness and Tactics

Sarah Hearn / 10.06.2015

­How do you get a press release from an adventure racing team who have just spent a solid 73 hours traversing hundreds of kilometres of mountains, valleys and rivers on foot, bicycle, kayak and adrenalin? How do you write a report that succinctly expresses the essence of the epic feat of human endurance it takes to triumph at the ARWS Expedition Africa 2015 in the Kingdom of Swaziland?

First, get them the vanilla milkshakes they are craving.

Then, listen carefully to what they are saying. As it will be mostly incoherent and unprintable, take a photograph. People will Like that regardless.

Ask the team how they feel. They will not know. Their world has suddenly stopped moving. And they have what can probably be diagnosed as the opposite of motion sickness.

Send them to bed and put together the information you have from seeing them out there at transitions and checkpoints and as moving dots on a screen for three days.

Merrell Adventure Addicts bring together four phenomenal athletes. For Captain Graham ‘Tweet’ Bird and ‘Tiny’ Don Sims, this is their third win at Expedition Africa racing together. For Grant Ross and Robyn Kime, newer and younger recruits, this is their first win here, and incredibly, for Robyn, her first ever expedition adventure race.

“You think you will get exponentially more tired. But you just level off and it doesn’t get worse."she said. "I was running along, so tired, and I thought maybe I should try and eat something to wake me up. But I was enjoying that zone. Just going.”

Working together, the team is impenetrable, moving in and out of transitions like an armoured vehicle. Comments and banter, photographers and supporters bounce off them as they roll through, focused only on themselves as a unit, efficiently picking up and dropping off what they need and heading on.

“I saw your footprints all the time.” Said a member of Peak Performance, the Swedish team who came in third after Estonian Ace Adventure.

This year’s course was cleverly designed and perfectly executed once again by race organisers Kinetic. Tough, long, hard, brutal, demanding as well as beautiful, scenic, inspirational vistas of the local and natural splendour of a stunning pocket of Africa.

Adventure racing sends you out there where a tourism brochure wouldn’t. This race put competitors on a bicycle along 290km of district roads and pathways, 115km trekking over mountains, across nature reserves and plantations, 45km down rivers on kayaks and through rapids on rafts, into an 800m caving labyrinth and plunging over waterfalls down a 1km canyon.

A dark zone implemented to avoid having people eaten on the water at night meant the race was intentionally divided into two.  With the race starting on Sunday, no team could begin the kayak and rafting leg before 06h30 on Tuesday, which meant that those who arrived earlier than that at the transition had to rest. Those who arrived the earliest had the most rest. The strategists delighted at this conundrum. Push hard and break the body but give it a good few hours to recover, or take it easy and slower and save the muscles for the second round of battering, thus sacrificing sleep time?

Team Merrell opted to combine the two, starting slow and trundling through the first day in upper mid-pack  position, then picking up the speed on the long cycle leg to bring them first into T4 where they got to enjoy a good rest overnight.

From the next morning they dominated the field, keeping their lead through the water, up the mountains with tricky trek and bike legs and into the final trek starting around midnight, by far the most taxing in terms of navigation. Here another cunning plan by the organiser ensured many supporters of the team didn’t make it in to work on time this morning.

Checkpoints ensure the team reaches certain spots on their way to each transition and the ultimate end point. How they get to that spot is up to them. They are provided maps with a scale of 1:50 000. The final route had a checkpoint on the far bank of a dam. Swimming 300m across the dam would cut off 5km from the 34km hike. Freezing cold, pitch dark. Dilemma.

At 04h20, Team Merrell reached the dam with Team Estonia close behind. Those watching on the live tracking site overlaid on Google maps watched their favourite dot apparently enter the water and then backtrack. Then Dot Estonia did the same but higher up. What followed was four hours of anxious and obsessive screen watching as the two teams raced each other around the dam and over a mountain, the navigators trying desperately to pick the best lines, working blind in the dark night, and the rest of the team trying desperately to believe that they were moving forward in the right direction.

At 08h00 Merrell Adventure Addicts picked up the South African flag and ran together down the finish chute and across the line. And stopped.

An indescribable, overwhelming emotion rose up in me as I witnessed this, incomparable to that experienced by those four amazing people, but powerful enough to bring tears again even as I write this.

Well done to this incredible team and their sponsors who proudly stand behind them.

(This report is, like the team itself when in action, focused solely on one subject. 22 other teams also put their hearts and bodies over the start line and some of them are still out there. Team Merrell members rise from their deep slumber to greet each one as they finish and in the next report, more attention will be paid to these and the race details.)

Look at live tracking and Kinetic fb for updates and photographs.

See All Stories On This Race