This was my first YstervARk. If the others were anything like this then I missed out on three awesome races. Old school is cool.
The YstervARk series is branded as back-to-basics, old school, hard core, simple adventure racing. That made me a little nervous – can I handle old school when I’m used to the post-Hano Kinetic era? I’ve seen pictures and heard stories of broken boats, hypothermic people, big mountains and this weird plotting-using-co-ordinates idea.
This race was the YstervARk Legend. It was to be the last of a 4 race YstervARk series.
My team was Uncharted. We’re building up to Expedition Africa with the Kinetic Double Moon and this YstervARk race. I’ve raced with Wiehan and Lizelle a few times and this one went just as well. Our 4th member for XPD Africa is Danie and this was my first race with him. It’s good to have Danie on board. With three Afrikaans people in the team it shouldn’t be surprising that most of the encouraging phrases that pop into my head now are in Afrikaans. Lekker man!
We started at 11pm on Friday night. The setting was a campsite on the south side of the Magaliesburg range, a few kilometer’s from Olifant’s Nek. We knew we were in for a bike, hike, bike, paddle and hike home. We were promised some suprises along the way.
The field splitter was a run around the campsite to collect the passports. Olympus got back first with us close behind. We got about 200m out the gate when Danie realised he didn’t have a backpack. Oops! We caught our breath while the rest of the field streamed past us.
We rode hard to the first CP, which was “upstream of bridge”. The navigator and girl get to look after the bikes while Wiehan and Danie got wet feet – and they’d stay wet for most of the race. We left CP1 just behind the leaders and went hard to catch them. We caught them surprisingly fast and then breezed past them. Reviewing the pacing after the race is alway entertaining. We were going way too fast. Wiehan and Danie started to feel it. We had a 2 minute gap at CP2, but it wasn’t an obvious one, so everyone caught up as we found it.
We pulled away again, but this time Hawkstone showed their speed and pulled away from us. Hawkstone and Uncharted both took a route that looked good on the map but turned out to be a grass track. So we bailed back to the tar road and went around. We were then joined by Olympus. Alex W offered “some help with the Nav if you’re struggling”. We had a fun half an hour of chirping and flying along the big open road.
Hawkstone pulled away slightly into transition 1. There was an abseil immediately after T1, so they dropped into the hole first, followed by us and then Oympus. We still had no idea what we were in for.
We found ourselves in a cave and when presented with a map of the cave network and 13 CP’s I got very excited. Maybe a little over excited, but its not every day I get to do sprint orienteering underground! We set off a few minutes after Hawkstone. I think I have an unfair advantage at this – I’ve been orienteering for a long time. We passed Hawkstone on the way to #1. We managed to sneak away from them after the 10m crawl to get #4. It was awesome – a very accurate map, bats everywhere, some spectacular caverns. I’ll remember this leg for a long time.
We popped out about 5 minutes ahead of Hawkstone and eager to make it count. We were so eager that when copying down the CP’s for the next bike leg I forgot to ask about the descriptions. The bike was flat and fast and we hit it hard. We held out lead nicely up to CP21 (actually the 16th CP, but the organisors put it out of sequence. Mooi julle!
Skip this paragraph if you aren’t interested in my excuses for blowing the lead. They’re my fault and avoidable. Hopefully it won’t happen again – some lessons learned. First excuse, no descriptions because I was in too much of a rush. Second, badly marked by me – on the houses next to the road, not on the road. Third, it was on a join of 2 topo maps and it was slightly misaligned. Fourth, I’m convinced it was not quite in the right place. All of this doesn’t matter if you know its “upstream of bridge”. It matters a lot if you think it’s on some houses off the road 500m before the bridge. We were rescued by Hawkstone who came past while we were looking at the houses. I caught up to them and they gave me the description. Thanks guys! Some lesson’s learned.
We headed towards the dam a few minutes behind Hawkstone and starting to tire. They’re good paddlers, so we had our work cut out.
The paddle was about 7km on a slightly windy and wavey Olifant’s Nek dam. The first CP was a bit tricky – “willow tree on island”. Hawkstone made the same mistake as us, heading to a big island in about the right place. They seemed to find the right island much quicker than us and were off again. We came off the paddle with them still in transition.
Here comes my second mistake of the race: not swimming. This was just bad judgment. To get to the next CP, it was swim/wade 200m or run about 2km around. I thought the faffing on either side of the cold swim would make the run worth it, but I didn’t actually think about the numbers. The swim was way quicker. The bank was slow going. We still swam across the river. And the otherside was tricky – I tried going high, came back down to the bank again and generally lost lots of time. It was a bad decision and it killed the race for first for us. They were probably faster than us on foot anyway, but now they had a big lead too.
The hike was really spectacular, but way too simple for our strength. We need complex nav to do well and this one was 3 trig beacons. We climbed an amazing ridge that circled a natural amphitheatre. The ridge was sharp and steep on either side. We had views of both sides of the Magaliesburg. Danie could actually see his house at one point. We marched steadily through the 3 trig beacons. Hawkstone was out of sight. We got a glimpse of Xhale behind us.
Before going down the mountain we met Marshal Oupa Gert who asked us to put up our shelter. Our ‘shelter’ was a bivvy bag and 2 hiking poles, so we had to make some in-fake-storm modifications. We put up an acceptable shelter and set about dropping 400m to the finish. We climbed down a big chain ladder and then dropped the rest on a path towards the campsite. We lost the right path a few times, but made it to the end before Xhale who closed to within 15 min of us.
Our total race time was about 13 hours – 7 hours of which was in the dark. We finished in 2nd place.
Well done to Hawkstone – we were outraced. Well done to the Tshwane AR Club for putting a great race together. The cave is a good memory. Well done Uncharted – I’m looking forward to Expedition Africa. The positivity and bubbly-ness of this team is unbelievable. I’m yet to get us ridiculously lost, but I have not doubt they’d support me and each other through the worst of mistakes.
Next time the Tswhane AR Club put on a race – DO IT!
Author: Alex Pope | Team Uncharted (with Wiehan, Lizelle and Danie) | Ystervark Legends 120km, 9 April 2011
Image by Erik Vermeulen. Visit www.adventurephotos.co.za for more from the race.