Adventure Racing World Championship 2016
AMK - Second But Ambitious To Go One Better
Rob Howard / 13.11.2016
Team Adventure Medical Kits has chased Seagate for the whole race, and they never quite managed to catch them. The US team finished second almost exactly 2 hours behind the winners and crossed the line with smiles on their faces and waving the Stars and Stripes.
When I asked the team captain, Kyle Peter, how often they’d seen Seagate during the last 4 days he thought about it and said, “More times than all the other races in my career combined.” This time his team had been close to Seagate, putting the pressure on, and felt they could catch them.
“Yeah, we thought we could catch them, and at no point did we think they’d got away from us,” he said. “We came here with the objective to beat them. In the past we’ve been at the front of the chasing pack, but we didn’t want to be there. If you get into a mindset that top 5 is OK then you are limiting your ambition and ability and we didn’t want to do that.
“Catching them 4 or 5 times encouraged us and showed us we could race with them. We came with the plan that we’d be decisive and at times have to monster mash a stage, put the hammer down and keep the eyelids open. And that’s what we did. We made some mistakes, the main one being losing the track on the big trek, but we didn’t let that get us down and kept our spirits up.”
The team were soon sitting down to their champagne and pizza in the XPD finish lounge and Peter added, “We’ve been working towards this for some years, but we’ve not finished yet, there is still an objective and we want to achieve it.”
The team are already thinking ahead to next year’s World Champs, and that one is on home soil at the Cowboy Tough race in Wyoming. Their second place here is a fantastic result, but it’s clear they see it as a stepping stone and the desire is still there to go one better.
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