Some say that he has Supernatural powers, like radiotelepathic hearing. (Some say he just got it off the internet blogs….)
He is The Stephan!
Anyhow, The Stephan clearly got wind of the mutterings about his races being too easy.
(I mean Bad Medicine was actually finishing some of these!)
So The Stephan began plotting his revenge……
And what a spectacular race it was, in every way imaginable. It contained some of the longest legs I have ever seen in 11 years of adventure racing, through some pretty unforgiving terrain.
As Sue (“Isuzu”….our little diesel engine) says “getting cold doesn’t seem to be getting any easier” ….and we had our fair share in this race. The Sleep Monster was thoroughly defeated by the Cold Monster.
All the hype and pre-race adrenaline evaporated in an instant as the race set out at a blistering pace into the Rugged Glen part of Royal Natal Park. Before long we were in 2nd last place and the leaders had disappeared past the Camel’s Hump neck, the 1st checkpoint. We had almost expected some teams to head North out of the Park here and return to the Grotto, but it doesn’t seem anyone did that. WCAD, we later heard pulled a similar trick out the bag in their route from the Grotto to Witsieshoek….great, balsy idea guys!
We took the paths to Witsieshoek, but as we climbed it became clear that Con (the Fridge Midget) was struggling with his chest infection and the altitude wasn’t helping. We met up, for the first of many encounters with Hakuna Matata, and agreed to disagree on subtle nav variations…but we would keep on meeting up, proving neither of us right in the end. Thanks guys for the great company, even if we did have to take a lot of teasing about the yoga mats from you and T-Dragons (clearly THERE be Dragons, not Here be Dragons!)
The Chain ladders provided an interesting diversion and we had to push hard for a bit to avoid getting log jammed behind two large hiking parties. The vista from Tugela Falls was, as usual, mind-blowing (Jacob, I can see Nkandla from up here…) but the day was getting on. The marshalls there informed us that we were not to attempt any descent other than Rockeries Pass (a subtle miscommunication, it later turned out) and thus began a very long, very cold night on the top of the Drakensberg. (I live at just over 1400m in Joburg, and although the berg is just over a mile higher than that, spending too much time up there will not speed up your race!)
Watching our GPS track our nav was pretty spot-on until the last valley…. that was around 01h30am. Contrary to popular misbelief it is NOT flat up there. You cross multiple valleys with 200-300m drops/climbs in elevation as well as multiple ice fields. At night without a moon you are counting valleys and streams and the nav becomes tricky. We came to the realisation that we were not where we thought. And with no way to work out where we actually were, decided to use that tent. At 2am, in Isuzu’s words….”Hardship began with the discovery that the tent had shrunk about 5cm in the extreme cold and could not be coaxed into it’s poles even when cursed at repeatedly! Lucky for me, team work from the guys got it there and I evoked the mantra ‘Ladies First’!”
“Sleeping” (not!) 4-abreast, width ways in a tent is not good for crampy muscles! Grant (“Frewuigi”) nearly kicked Isuzu out of the tent when one of these spasms struck!
Dawn at 3000m brought the realisation that we were at the top of Fangs pass. Then followed possibly our only bad decision of the race…we backtracked to get back on the route to Rockeries. The retrospectoscope never lies, but one wonders how different our race might have been if we’d gone down Ifidi as planned (2 of us are climbers, we had 8 slings and a safety rope) or even Fangs that morning. Within minutes we hooked up with Hanno, Mike and Russ from Pure Adventures. Minutes later they dropped us. Over the next 2 days we would see them pass us many times (often moving significantly faster), but us “snails” (Lisa!!) were staying on the course, avoiding the scenic distractions of Lesotho and the Khatse dam. They seemed to revel in finding the path less beaten and ignored a clear smuggler’s path and the company of Hakuna Matata in favour of yet another detour into Lesotho. Their swim story still takes the cake but is best told by Hanno himself, who deserves a knighthood for continuing after a crash/injury that would have put ANY adventure racer I know out of the race.
Rockeries pass, when we eventually got there, seemed never-ending, as Isuzu’s toes (with their bleeding toenails) would testify. The views however made it all worthwhile.
Heading down the road to Mnweni Cultural Village, we were surprised to see Team Issy coming the other way to CP7, which we’d just passed. This is the way that the 3 South African teams that went down Ifidi would have come a full 24hours earlier. We learned later, because we kept bumping into them, that they had had an epic (there’s that word again) coming down Icidi Pass. (Local knowledge, thanks Stijn, meant that no SA teams tried Icidi, as far as I can gather.) The tracker read this leg at over 90kms, with only a 3k “value add”!
Transition at Mnweni was, like all transitions, (thanks Heidi and Stephan) a little too comfortable, but we eventually got out of there for the 4-hour cycle to T2. This transition was the exception, but it was 2am and the prospect of swimming the dam at that stage in the freezing cold just didn’t cut it, so we slept.
At 05h30 we rose and headed for the dam. Frewuigi and I had drawn the short straws, as we’d worked out that only two of us really needed to swim. (Isuzu later told us what a strong swimmer she was!!!) The water was not nearly as cold as we thought, just getting out was a wee bit unpleasant. When we arrived back with the boats Hakuna Matata had just arrived with Pure Adventures shortly behind them.
The paddle started out fantastically, with us pulling out distance between us and the other 2 teams. I wonder how many teams did that longer first portage over the road…cutting out 4kms of paddling. Slowly, though things started to go pear-shaped. At first I wanted to blame Frewuigi as it must have been his fault that I was putting in 2-3 times as many right paddle strokes as left. (I’m sure he felt just the same way.) But it turns out these boats leak!! (flashback to the Epics of 2003) When full of water the subtlest tip in balance (even a lopsided backpack) steers the boat squiff. We wondered why the boat was so bloody heavy at the last portage but we’d left the backpacks on so we assumed that was it. When we finally got to T14 to find out the river was too low to do the rapids section it was with a combination of disappointment and total relief that we took to the fire in the stone cottage to defrost and dry out. Our boat drained about 30litres!!
This is perhaps the biggest difference between the “racers” and “tourers”. The war stories and epic tales, wet gear steaming off the fireplace and soft matresses meant that it was 4 hours before we crowbarred ourselves out of Tugela lodge. All thoughts of privacy fled out the window as we made like the French teams and stripped off right there! Heidi – you were a darling to arrange that – but it was way too nice! We heard how the Irish team set up home on an Island in the river, Hanno and his version of the dark zone, we compared where teams had spent the night on the top of the Berg…and we drank cup after cup of steaming hot coffee – thanks Marshalls!
The next cycle got a bit blurry. I remember throwing my toys out the cot at one stage and my team agreeing to take a snooze in the long grass on a hill where a warm thermocline had settled. We later agreed that this was our best sleep of the race. 3 hours later we were back on the road, past Emmaus mission hospital, site of Hanno’s infamous wipeout. We turned at CP20 and came back up the hill, favouring this over a Hansel and Gretel session in the forest. Back past Emmaus and we were sleeping on our bikes again. At the T-junction we took 20mins in the long grass punctuated by a taxi driver in the pre-dawn who stopped to investigate the flashing red lights. Alien mlungus!! Dawn arrived and up the hill our pace slowed enough to be overtaken by two girls walking to school. We rode up and over into the Bell Park Dam valley, passed the old farmhouse and pushed our bikes up the grassy slopes before the Drak Sun.
That downhill into Dragon Peaks was wicked and I have the image of Frewuigi’s massive silly grin, as I ramped the final bridge, stamped onto my brain.
T4 was to be the Fridge Midget’s last. Unbeknown to us he had started the race with the intention to just get us through the paddle before chucking the towel in. He had been so strong and so brave and his lead in the nav had been indispensable, but listening to his obstructive sleep apnoea and fits of coughing throughout our 1,5hour sleep was disheartening and I hated having to break the news to him that his race was over. I’m pretty sure he already knew.
So with a lump in our throats we said our farewells. Fridge Magnet had been cool enough to plot our maps as we dithered with our boxes. It was late and soon gonna be dark. We headed up to Van Damms cascades and it soon got really dark and misty. We almost crashed into the beacon CP, which was not that hard to find (trig beacon….head vaguely in the right direction and keep going up) despite Isuzu telling me she could see it and me telling her that was impossible! Down to the contour path and we passed The Big Swing who had set up camp. By now it was pissing down and Issy passed us travelling quite fast. We caught them setting up camp at Blind Man’s Corner and tried to tell them there was a much better site a few hundred metres further on but that was clearly lost in translation. During the night 3 teams passed us, we later learnt it was T-Dragons, Issy and The Big Swing. All of these treams will tell you how hard it is hiking the contour path in the mist with a headlight. Unless you have a good flood (NOT spot) you have NO depth perception and keep kicking rocks/tripping over your own feet. Frewuigi went over badly on his ankle and this was to severely limit our pace for a while. This time with only 3 in the tent we slept better.
In the daylight we again moved better and the descent into the Injesuthi valley was so picturesque – glimpsed through gaps in the fog. Grant had planned to head down the road to T5 and Isuzu and I were going the head for the abseils. We arrived at Injesuthi with The Big Swing to find the Warriors bus and to be told the abseils were gone and to “hop on the bus Gus”.
At T5 we saw The Stephan, energetic as ever (how??) We were told that we were being bussed to T6 along with the back 8 teams.
The final challenge was staying alive during the hectic bus trip from T5 to T6! We were relieved to be unable to see exactly what we were dodging on the road, ducking backpacks and walking sticks raining down from the parcel shelf whenever we hit a particularly big bump! That bus really was driven like a rental!
The decision to move us puzzled me a bit and despite it being a relief, I would far preferred to have cycled the 110kms home to Orion Mont Aux Sources than have the 18hour wait at T6 then cycle 45kms home. The upside was, I have never experienced the cameraderie that we had at Sterkies Dam on Friday night. Watching the stronger teams come in from their 150km cycle. Really strong teams like Ugene and Trev’s Energy looking finished. Epic Stuff.
WHAT AN AWESOME RACE! Heidi and The Stephan, you guys rock! My only real complaint this time around was the complete lack of race route restaurants!! So we have to confess we stole part of that 18-hour delay and snuck into Harrismith for a real meal.
For two of us the hardest challenge of the race was the cold and sometimes moving faster was not an option. Our pace was slow but steady. Yes we knew we were not moving fast enough, but putting one foot in front of the other remained the priority. Although some watching from the sidelines believed we were suntanning and drinking tequilas, this was not the case.
We are just a bunch of ordinary Weekend Warriors but we pulled together as a team, moved as fast as we could, sharing food and encouragement. In Isuzu’s words… “Strong man Con (Fridge Midget) was always on hand with his tow rope in case I was lagging on the MTB legs…Grant (Freuwigi) happily bringing up the rear on the steep climbs was there with a hand in case I should slip, and Mark (DOC – don’t call me…) was leading with his local knowledge and advice. Thanks Guys, I (nearly) always felt supported and safe in your company!” What she doesn’t say is that she was the strongest of all of us.
We finished the race even better friends than we started and have memories to fuel us for a while (Some of them seared in!)
How does one manage to get past the anti-climax, which is the Finish Line?
Well a lavish post-race dinner and a good night’s sleep certainly helped.
What’s next team??!!
Mark (Doc – don’t call me, I’ll call you!)
Author: Mark Human | Team Bad Medicine | Expedition Africa, May 2013