Thanks for your comments posted here. I’m only getting to them now. I had bad signal out there and sending posts was my total focus.
Certainly the most contentious post was my one about the slow pace of the back teams on the first hike, where they took around 36hrs to reach T1.
I wanted a good story from these teams on just what was happening up there. All we can see is the timing – not even tracks because the trackers don’t pick up on top of the mountain. I got a great story from Pure Adventures that covers the first hiking leg and many incidents after.
There are so many factors that throw teams off – let’s look at some of them.
Navigation.
According to the other teams – and themselves – Pure Adventures was all over the place. Dashing here, dashing there. Bad Medicine saw them shoot off ahead in one direction and track back behind them in another direction multiple times. I got Pure Adventures’ story for you. They acknowledge that their long time on this leg was totally due to navigation (and the T2 to boats section too) because physically they were in great shape.
Darkness and distance.
It is black as night out there (no moon) and the escarpment is a sharp, sharp drop off. As Con Loubser from Bad Medicine says to me, “I would like to see you navigating the 30km to Rockeries on a moonless winter’s night”. It wasn’t easy out there and teams that camped, like Bad Medicine, made a good decision to stop and wait for morning, even though they had a cold-cold night. The leg was listed as 75 kilometres in distance. Sue Belcher from Bad Medicine says they did about 95 kilometres.
I had Stephan’s expected times for the first teams on hand. They came in 18-minutes behind Stephan’s estimate. Teams behind the front bunch had night to contend with. And cold. High up on the mountain. Like Stephan, I expected the last few teams in by noon (Tuesday) – even with down-time during the night.
Altitude.
I had no idea so many racers would suffer from altitude-related illnesses up there. Nausea, headaches, vomitting… Especially the foreigners and coastal people. While 2300m (or there abouts) isn’t high (not for Gauteng people who live at 1700 – 1800m), it was probably the rate of ascent that played a big role. Teams were prepared to take the technical Icidi Pass (first up of the three Passes) just to get down as soon a possible.
Feet and legs.
There were some not fabulous looking feet even early on. At the top of the Tugela Falls I saw a couple of people not walking as good as they should have been. Too early for sore feet, IMHO. And then there’s the descent. Downhills mess people up far more than uphills. They’re a bit like an accident waiting to happen. Hakuna Matata’s Nikki Smit had a rough time descending Rockeries. Her ITB flared up and was “a swollen, round ball” on the side of her knee by the bottom of the Pass. Ow!
These things make a hiking stage take far longer than expected, even if it is the first hiking leg when teams are fresh. It also means that later hiking stages will take even longer and Stephan rolled with the punches to adapt and accommodate where possible.
Dark zones.
Konrad sent through a comment asking about dark zones.
Dark zones are sooooo contentious. Really cool paddling tends to be the more difficult stuff and it generally isn’t safe for night paddling. Keep in mind that a lot of the course planning is done with a specific schedule in mind – expected time for the first group of teams and keeping in mind mid-field teams. It’s impossible to accommodate every single team in the planning because after the front teams you just don’t know where others are going to be sitting. In theory, you’ll be more accurate earlier in the race.
Come hell or high water dark zoning is going to mess with some teams and benefit others (by creating a gap between them and a possible competitor). Teams are messed if they arrive soon within the start of the dark zone. This gives them a LONG night sitting doing nothing much and allows teams behind them to collect.
Of interest, many of the teams caught hadn’t slept the night before (Monday) so they made good use of the time to dry clothes and get some sleep. I don’t think any were in too early on so it worked well for them.
The benefit of reaching CP14 was that teams had a warm place to sleep – on mattresses – with tea and coffee made for them by the race marshals. Some only got in very late so those few hours of sleep were just what the doctor ordered and were very appreciated – it got them through the rest of the paddle, the cycle to T4 and that next night efficiently and nicely rested.
The dark zone only applied to the section of river directly after CP14 (Tugela Rapids). Those anywhere else on the river could still stay on the water at night. But, it was freezing cold so many got off the river at some stage to sleep – a cold and uncomfortable sleep. In some races dark zones are applied for whole paddle sections.
With only a short section teams could push hard to make it in time or take it easy to get in during the dark zone (not so much under pressure) by keeping going steadily into the dark zone and up to the CP.
I have seen teams given the option to portage during the dark zone. This is usually hard, hard work and is only ‘worth it’ if the terrain along the river is decent. Forward progress can still be made. Here the terrain wasn’t conveniently portage-able and portaging these boats is helluva difficult for anything except short distances.
Teams who get way behind schedule on a previous leg (like the first hike) then are totally off schedule and they could get caught by the dark zone badly – but then maybe not too if they end up 24hrs behind the leaders. Then they’ll go straight through (in this case with the rapidly dropping water levels the section after CP14 was canned).
At the end of the day dark zones don’t work for everyone but in this race it actually seems to have worked out well for most teams here.
Just on the strategy,just bear in mind that not all teams did the full paddle after dark zone( not sure if indebushi was one of them). The other factor is that teams that spent time in the dark zone did not have to do the compulsory 6 hours at midway camp.We must just be careful that we are comparing apples with apples. This was a unique race with many twists and turns especially on the route completed so it is very difficult to say who’s strategy was a good one!!
Spot on Nikki.. You guys rocked and it was an honour to be apart of your adventure 🙂
Fabulous event.
Moving stories.
Loved the triumph and disaster.
Awesome! Well done Nikki. A super post.
You see, I said there had to be good stories – and there are 😉
I’ve been sitting for a good four days now battling with the decision of whether or not to respond to Lisa’s article on the French delicacy, snails! I won’t lie and say that as one of those three ‘snail’ paced teams I was not extremely annoyed, irritated and peeved off, not only because of what Lisa wrote, but also by the comments posted by the people who were sitting at home, and not at minus temps at 3000+ meters! But I have made relative peace with it now and instead of bearing a grudge, I will tire you all with our side of the story!
I can’t make any excuses for us going so slowly on the first leg, but I will endeavor to give those who were not there a better understanding!
I will address our issues from start to finish….. Were we prepared? This is always a difficult question to answer….. No one is ever 100% prepared, you simply cannot predict, factor in how your body will react to things like altitude and neither can one control weather and temperature. Our team, although relatively novice, had done numerous training camps together in prep for EA. we did a real snotklap session in the Transkei with pouring rain, flooding rivers, difficult nav. We did mountain hikes (and yes we managed to do 30km in less than 12hrs!!!!) we paddled, we kloofed, we biked, we ran, etc etc etc. I did countless nav exercises. Were we prepared? Yes, as best as a relatively novice team could be.
So what went wrong?
I would say that our first issue was altitude. Now for you okes living up and around jo’burg, altitude in the berg is probably not an issue, but living at sea level and going up there, it is a totally different issue. Altitude is indiscriminate, it affects you no matter what your fitness level! And having experienced really bad effects of altitude last year in Ecuador, it is not something you take lightly! Our progress was slow up to the chain ladders, but then again it is hard to move fast or at all when you simply cannot breath! I wish I was able to sit up there and have a little picnic as was intimated by some who commented! But keeping going forward was our biggest focus and priority!
Navigation was not really an issue for us, but I will comment shortly on this; the berg is anything but flat on top! It may look like it is a flat table top from waaaaaaaaay down there, but get to the top and it is a myriad of rivers, hills and valleys! There might very well be a path indicated on the map, but I can assure you there is nothing of the sort up there! I can proudly say that our nav was pretty spot on, but with fading and then NO light, it was slow! Eventually we had to stop and set up our tent when we started to near the escarpment edge as there was a very real danger of going off the edge!
Sleeping up there, or attempting to sleep up there was not ideal at all! And was something we had so desperately wanted to avoid! Lying on snow and rocks in a tiny tent, with a minus degree catabatic wind blowing through you is not my idea of a social hiking holiday. Sleep for some of us was not an option. We got up to shoes that had frozen solid INSIDE our tent, as well as frozen water bottles.
Then came the issue of snotsiekte. Our little night of shivering inside space blankets and sleeping bags could not go by without at least leaving a calling card of some sort!
This all said, we managed to pass a number of teams up at the top!
The descent was brutal! It took us four hours from the top of the Rockeries to where one can actually say you are out of the kloof. The path was open, but hellish steep with loose sand, stones and rocks and going any faster was not possible, or viable, as the many patches of fresh blood on rocks etc proved! By the time we reached the bottom, there was a fair selection of blisters, bloodied or missing toenails and obviously my tennis ball sized swelling on my ITB, from not only our, but the other teams as well! Were our shoes badly chosen? Considering we had all trained in them a fair amount with no drama, no! But walking across snow and ice and crossing semi frozen rivers is bound to have its affects somewhere along the line!
Our stop at Mweni Village may have seemed to those at home like we were once again having a little bears picnic…. We were in fact plotting maps for our next three legs!
Once off the mountain our team definitely picked up speed and by the end of the paddle, we had caught up to and passed about 5 teams!
Obviously logistics are a nightmare when you have slow back markers! I have spent my fair share of time volunteering at races, from small local ones to big international races like XPD in Australia. But things happen out there that are not in the control of either the racer, or the organizer, and that it why as an organizer you either have to impose a time limit, or have really good contingency plans! I am not able to comment on either of these as I do not know the plans that Stefan had regarding this! All I can say is that Stefan and Heidi did an amazing job at getting everything where it needed to be and only ever treated us fairly and greeted us with huge smiles and encouragement! For that I must say a huge thank you!
To the other teams that took on this challenge, successfully or unsuccessfully, well done! It was an epic world class event from which i think we have all, learnt a great deal!
Great having SO many media people on the course..it really was good to follow, I do think it got spread a bit thin though. The news feed on the main site sort of sorts that out, BUT it doesn’t help if people don’t use the hashtag on twitter(#expafrica). Minor gripe, but it’s really easy to do.
Of course I’ve got some comments. I thought the first hike leg was too ambitious, so long, so much altitude and all at altitude. but boy did this get turned on its head. Just looking at silva’s times – 14 hours for a 76km, 17hours for a 56km and 20 hours for a 29km! I really wonder if the first leg really made teams burn so many matches early on that they fell away badly later. it did look amazing on the day, bad weather which came later would have been quite a challenge – i guess there was a planB for this.
another pertinent point for me leads exactly to what fred picked up – the race to beat the dark zone is not always one worth winning. there were 8 teams that made it to the cut-off within the last hour. Indabushe didn’t make the cut-off, rested well at CP14 and then did the final section of the paddle 13 hours later and had a really strong second half. They beat every single one of those 8 teams in the end. I’m not sure at what stage they gave up racing the cut-off, but it seems like it was pennypinchers AR strategy too once they fell behind.
so when is expedition africa 2014?
Actually for the middle teams the dark zone seemed to work for some teams. Indabushe who had been dark zoned finished in 8th position – well ahead of many teams who had not been dark zoned. It all depends on your race strategy and Indabushe made it work for them.
Thanks for the comments Lisa, of course everyone can have their own opinions and we have to respect each others’s. Nothing wrong with yours. We thoroughly enjoyed being part of this expedition, even though we were 1000kms from the berg. Regards and congrats to all the teams and a safe journey home.