Like all the mornings that week, Sunday 31st July 2011 was very cold. What was different was that instead of being asleep, in bed at 5am, Steve and I were at Jabali Private Game Reserve doing the finishing touches for the Senseless Winter Adventure Race. Registration was going to start at 7am and with the venue situated about 1.5 hours outside of Johannesburg and 45 minutes from Pretoria we knew that most of the race’s participants would be awake too. In fact, Team Kluens & Steun was the 1st team to arrive at 6:30am and they had travelled all the way from Polokwane for the race.
We had 43 teams at the race, 4 from Team Portable Shade (PS), who have put in a massive effort in growing adventure racing in schools. An awesome 9 teams where entered from Assitport Adventure Racing Club (www.assitportar.com) – a Big thanks to Mark and Monique for their fantastic effort at growing the adventure racing community and providing an environment for people to participate who have never adventure raced before.
The race was scheduled to start at 8:30am, but the start was moved to 8:45am to accommodate a couple of teams that had under estimated the distance that Jabali was from Johannesburg. This later start helped it warm up by a couple of degrees.
The 1st leg was a short run of about 2.5 km’s which would have teams collect their map for Leg 2 and visit 2 control points. From the start, Steve and I had expected teams to either run along the road to the map point or go over the low part of the koppie and meet up with the road. There were 2 other options that we hadn’t expected. The 3rd option which Cyanosis took was straight up and over the koppie with a couple of teams in tow and the 4th option on the day was to just go in the completely wrong direction.
If people only remember one thing from the Senseless Winter AR, I’m sure it will be Leg 2. Leg 2 gave teams the option of either hiking or cycling to the same point. That point was the entrance gate to a military radio tower on the top of a HUGE mountain. The hike saw teams run 1.5 km’s to CP3a at the foot of the mountain, then climb over 250 meters in less than 1 km collecting CP4a and finally to CP5 at the Radio tower gate. The descent wasn’t easy either. The bike route was 10 km’s long up to the radio tower passing by CP3b and CP4b and despite about 70% of this route being on tarred road it was a route that got steeper and steeper with a 200 meter rise in the last 3 km’s. The route back from the bike was obviously going to all be downhill and very fast. Most of the top finishing team chose to hike Leg 2 but the stand out team was Team Black Dolphin who chose to ride up to the Radio tower and then carry their bikes down the hiking route.
Cyanosis and Here Be Dragons were the only teams to complete Legs 1 & 2 in less than 1 hour (57 & 58 minutes respectively) with the all school boy team of PS.CUL8R taking only 62 minutes. Many teams took over 2 hours with a couple of teams taking even more than 2.5 hours.
With two legs remaining, teams had the choice which to do 1st. Leg 3 was a bike leg with Leg 4 being another hiking leg. Teams were encouraged to do the Bike Leg (Leg 3) if they had hiked on Leg 2 or to do the Hiking Leg (Leg 4) if they had cycled Leg 2.
Leg 3 (Bike) was a short 5.5 km cycle that had about 10 km’s of OP’s (Optional Points) for those that still had it in their legs. More than half the teams got some of the OP’s on Leg 3.
Leg 4 was another hike. This time there was also a short horse ride a couple of kilometres into the hike. Unfortunately not everything with the horse ride went to plan and not all teams got to ride the horses. However, the teams that did, really enjoyed it. The CP’s made up about a 4.5 km route with OP’s adding another 3.5 km’s or so. This time about 1/3 of teams went for some OP’s.
The last element of the race was a short obstacle course. Teams had the opportunity to do the obstacle course anytime during the race after they had completed Leg 2. The short course had teams climbing through hanging tyre tubes then crawling under a ground sheet and finally crossing two gym poles to test their balance.
Navigation is the big difference between Adventure Racing and sports like duathlons. It was also the biggest problem for a few teams. Many teams seem to have become used to just following the team in front of them and their navigation skills are getting rusty.
Thank you and well done to all team that entered the Senseless Winter AR, we hope you had a good time.
Special thanks to our sponsors, Sportsman’s Warehouse (www.sportsmanswarehouse.co.za), 100 Plus (www.100plus.co.za), LineBreak (www.gear2race.co.za), Titanium Designs (www.titaniumdesigns.co.za) and Cube. Also thank you very much to Bryan and his team at Jabali.
Finally a big congratulations to our category winners Cyanosis (Mixed and 1st overall), Here be Dragons (Men’s and second overall) and Titanium (Women’s and 7th overall), and as importantly every one of the teams that managed to complete the course.
Author: Andrew Wiggett | Race organiser