Wenger Czech Adventure Race
A Challenging Start to the Wenger Czech AR
Jan Smolik (Czech Adventure Race) / 28.08.2015
It is already dark in the city of Tábor but it is still pleasantly warm and nearly a full Moon, which promises a lot of light during the first night. The leading teams have just arrived at two special tasks that take place here. We were expecting them almost four hours ago, but the fact that river is 20 centimeters below the navigability limit for canoes made the paddling section especially challenging.
But let us start at the start. The race set off from Dobronice at 10 a.m. The starting place was located just above the race headquarters high above the valley of the Lužnice river. There was a beautiful view back to the valley and if you looked straight through the starting arch you saw the Temelín atomic power plant (one of two in the Czech Republic).
The first stage was trekking and most teams moved at a very fast pace. From the very beginning it was clear that four teams would dominate the race while the others cannot keep pace with them. These were four Czech teams (Salomon/Suunto, BlackHILL/OpavaNet and Fenix Multisport/Adidas) along with Russian-Ukrainian team MDK/Camp. These teams mostly ran together. Actually, by the end of the trekking stage MDK gained five minutes advantage over the Czech teams who arrived as a single twelve headed pack.
The rest of the distance to the river where the canoeing section started was covered on inline skates. The leading quartet was broken by technical difficulties for Fenix Multisport. One of their members had trouble with his skates and they lost almost an hour.
All the remaining teams in the race have opted to skip their first CP that was hard to access and you had to run for a while. Team Beacon AR which is from the Great Britain was the only one to use scooters instead of skates.
However, these two first stages were merely a warm up for the next stage that proved to be a nightmare. Fifty five kilometers paddling on a river that has almost no flow is hard enough. But with almost no water in the river it is extremely hard. There are places where there is almost no path between the stones and you have to either slalom in between or get off and pull the boat. The progress of the teams was really slow.
This stage actually was not all that straightforward. There were orienteering sections on the banks of the river. Teams were expected to split where two members run and the others stay with the boat. They could either stay on the spot, or continue downriver and meet their team mates there.
Strategies differed and fastest to arrive to Tábor was Salomon/Suunto. They said that the remaining teams waited for each other too much, but their boats still moved downstream and they did not lose much time in the orienteering sections. Team BlackHILL/OpavaNet arrived only ten minutes later. It was interesting to see that while Salomon people paddled one in each boat, BlackHILL racers sat both in one boat and towed the empty one. The Russian team MDK arrived almost an hour later and it must be noted that all four people were sitting in the boats.
Tábor has two special tasks. There is via ferrata and only three hundred meters away there is a climbing section. The via ferrata is not very difficult, any beginner can climb it. It mainly rises up above the valley of the river and there is only one exposed horizontal section which is about a meter long. But it is fun enough especially after the long paddling.
The climbing section was composed of eight different routes. Every team member had to choose two of them. Every unclimbed route means a difficult penalty run around the climbing area. The first three teams did not have any trouble and managed to climb all the routes.
As of writing this article, only three teams have made it to Tábor. This is about two thirds into the paddling stage so it seems the suffering will not end any time soon.
You can follow the race tracking at http://follow.me.cz/tracking/?race_id=83
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