Rangitata valley, New Zealand. 28.9.2014
I was little
bit nervous going into this 12hr race. For the last year I have been learning,
reading, listening and gathering as much information about vegan diet as I
could. I have been experimenting with it in my training for the last year, but
didn’t really fully commit to it. Until now. Leading to the race I was
recovering faster after training. I had more energy. I needed less hrs of sleep
every night, so I could get up and train early in the mornings, ….
The race HQ was
in an old homestead deep in Rangitata valley. I always enjoy driving into this
spectacular area. No wonder that this is one of the location where Lord Of The
Rings has been filmed. Our ChimpanzeeBar team entered this race too late – all
the rooms have been already filled up so we end up sleeping on wooden floor in
a game room without electricity.
28 teams were
shivering on the start line at 7am
anxiously awaiting shotgun start. The race consisted of two legs – running and
mountainbiking. In each leg teams had to navigate and find series of
checkpoints hidden around the country.
I was keen to
push hard. Navigation was
a critical part of the race. Luckily both of my team mates – Jim Cotter and
Greig Hemilton are excellent navigators. After few hours of running, crawling
up hills, sliding down steep slopes, crossing rivers we noticed another team
ahead of us. That was about the same time as Greig started to feel very sick.
We took his backpack to lighten his load, pushed him up the hill, but the other
team still managed to disappear from our view. We were clearly in 2nd place.
Greig decided to stay in the transition as he was barely standing upright. Jim
and I left on the bikes. At that moment we did not know where the other team
was, but we knew that we have to move pretty fast if we want to win. Jim did an
excellent job navigating as we moved smoothly from checkpoint to checkpoint. We
were leading by 1 min, but they were catching up on to us. We decided to take
it up a notch and bike hard. In the last hour Jim started to cramp on climbs.
Not a good news when you have a team chasing you. But Jim is tough and we
rolled across the finish line in first place.
Milan
Brodina
Team ChimpanzeeBar
