SX Sport: Team Senseless Killers

Team Senseless Killers (no mass-murderous intent implied) – an amalgamation of Team Senseless (Andrew Wiggett and Steven Yates) and Team Killers (named after the band ‘The Killers’: Robert Crichton and Amy Witherden) – was privileged to partake in the tenth and last Swazi Extreme, held from August 6 to August 8 (August 9 for some), 2010.

DAY 1: A close call

Day 1 began at 06:00 as the sun rose, with a fast paced hike/run – we ran most of the way as we were all fresh – from Nisela Safari Lodge, through the cane fields to the first transition. The teams were close together at this point, and we interacted with Sport and Pro teams. Team Jabberwock came into transition just after us, after already having run up and down the mountain to get their OP – very fast indeed.

Here, we switched over to bikes and began quite a fast-paced and enjoyable 56km bike ride that took us on some good district roads to a weir and a river crossing, where it took about ten minutes to locate an elusive CP. We surprised a majestic marshall eagle on the way, which made us realise how lucky we were to be out in the beautiful Swazi countryside.

 Two Pro teams had passed us just before the river, and we pushed hard to try and stay with them. Rob and I were taking a while to warm up on the cycle, so Steve and Andrew – by far the stronger riders – towed us on and off.  It was after pushing our bikes up a particularly rocky koppie to a trig beacon, and after stopping for a CP at a school where the local kids were very curious about what we were doing in their village, that we found ourselves on a good dirt road, moving fast, as Rob and I were being towed.

Our first setback: my crash. I let go of the tow rope by mistake and in trying to grab it again, my front wheel turned and I went skidding over the gravel. After some mopping up of blood and a quick hammer gel to help with the shock, we continued at a more moderate pace as every bump hurt my bruised body. Team Swazi Moto caught up with us soon after this, but we stayed with them and came into the transition together.

We were quick to get into our paddling gear and put in for the 15km paddle before the other team, although at a rather dodgy spot on a corner blocked by reeds, so that there was no choice but to go under them. Rob and Andrew made it easily (Rob being a very experienced paddler and awesome river driver), and Steve and I had a little dip after Steve lost his paddle and we couldn’t brace going under the bushes. My confidence knocked, Steve and I had another unnecessary swim when I hit a tree block. So we lost time and Team Aieesh – made up of pro paddlers Hilary Pitchford, Deon Bruss, Gordon Johnstone and James Stewart – passed us. The rest of the paddle on the canal proved to be more tricky than expected with the fast flowing water, but we got our CPs and pushed through to the transition.

The last stage of the day was a 10km run/hike, on which we still felt relatively fresh, but lost time after choosing the wrong exit road, so that we were about 500m off the CP that would lead us to the path that we needed to follow. The rest of the hike was good, with some excellent navigation from Rob and Andrew. We also knew that we were on the right path due to the footprints of the team ahead of us. Although Andrew’s knee gave him some issues, the rest of the hike went well, and we finished at Van Eck dam some 20 minutes behind first-placed Team Aieesh, in 9 hours 20 mins.

On our first night camping by the dam, we had some contact with Pro teams, but didn’t see them much after that.

DAY 2: Hilly as hell

The day began with a fast 12km ride through Big Bend and the cane fields, to the transition at the Lusutfu river. We had a bit of a lead on the other teams, as we pushed hard, but Pro Team Jabberwock pulled the others up to us near the end of the ride.

At the transition we took time to wrap our backpacks in plastic bags to try and keep them dry, then headed for the river, for what was our most scenic stage. This was Andrew and Steve’s first river trip and it was 20km long. Three teams were together at a tricky portage over a weir – which Rob said afterwards that we could have shot – but paddling-strong Team Aieesh quickly passed us and left us behind. We were just behind Team Jabberwock, one of the only Pro teams to have started the day with us, most of the way on the paddle. Again, Rob and a smiling Andrew sailed through the rapids, while Steve and I followed with a few swims, thanks to my bad driving (my defence: I was always a flatwater paddler!) – sorry Steve. So we lost a bit of time, and then a little more getting stuck on the sandbanks lower down in the river. It was very tiring getting out and pulling the boats every few hundred metres. By the end of the paddle, Steve, Andrew and I were exhausted, but we were surprised to find that we were the second team at the takeout (Jabberwock took out just ahead of us), as Team Aieesh had missed the arrival of the marshals by minutes and carried on about 4km downstream to the Mozambican border before turning back. We were surprised to see Swazi Moto pull into the takeout soon after us, as we thought we’d be a lot faster in our K2s. But they would have managed the sandbanks more easily than us in their Fluid sit-on-tops, so I guess we didn’t have much of an advantage after all.

With Team Jabberwock just ahead of us and knowing that we could get ahead of Team Aieesh if we pushed hard, Rob set a quick pace up the mountain (he was still fresh after the paddle) and we caught and passed Team Jabberwock, which couldn’t run as Kobus had hurt his knee. I felt ill-prepared for this hike as I thought that it would be a quick hike to a transition and a longer hike from there, but it turned out to be a 25km steep hike from the river out of the valley. We kept a good pace, jogging on the flats and downhills (where my knee started to act up) and walking on the uphills. We mostly walked as it was pretty much all uphill and we were all extremely tired by the end if it.

From the transition, we headed out for an 18km bike to the finish of Day 2, on a good district road. Murray had had to change Andrew’s back tyre as a bubble had developed. Rob was cramping badly, so some towing was in order. The team chasing us, Swazi Moto, made a mistake when they saw us on the main road just after we had returned from a detour to get our CP, and pushed to try and catch us, thereby missing the CP and having to turn back to get it. So we ended Day 2 first, with about a 20 minute lead over Team Aieesh and a bit more than that over Swazi Moto and DNA Dynamics, in 8 hours 20 mins.

Our camp on night 2 was interesting, as we were confined to a horse paddock with one tap and a feeding trough as our only source of water. Getting (relatively) clean that evening proved difficult. We were all pretty sore that night, but a couple of painkillers and sleeping in our Linebreak compression gear, meant that we were relatively fresh by the morning.

DAY 3: A test of will

The start of the final day was delayed to 06:30 as Darron was not back to get the maps organised by 06:00. This gave us little time to prepare the maps, but we got off to a good start as we were feeling good enough to jog a bit. We lost time negotiating the labyrinthine tracks through the rural villages, and then did some bundu bashing while trying to find the start of the abseil. Rob had seen the abseiling guys through the bushes and wanted to head straight there, but Steve, Wigs and I had seen Darron on the other side of the gorge, at what we though was the abseil and insisted that that was where we needed to be. After much deliberation and running up and down the same path about three times, Rob lead us to the abseil, which proved to be a lot higher than I thought. My heart was certainly racing on the way down.

After the abseil there was a “special task”, which involved jumping about 8m into a pool. Rob and Steve did this quickly enough and we should have carried on straight away, as only two members of the team were required to do it, but Andrew and I decided we wanted to do it as well, as it was seriously hot by that stage and we wanted to cool off. Wigs took about 5 mins to pluck up the courage to jump, and I decided not to do it after all, as it would have taken me even longer to make the jump! This hike was meant to be 20km, but we must have added about 4km more after our mistake, so we got into transition about an hour behind our competition after we had met up with Swazi Moto and DNA Dynamics on the track when we were going the wrong way.

Disheartened after losing time on the hike, we moved as fast as we could through the transition to start with our final stage: what was meant to be a 76km mountain bike through to the finish at Simunye. Well, our hopes of making up time quickly faded when Andrew had a blowout 500m into the ride, and Steve’s chain broke about 3km after that. We also failed to believe the local Swazi chief trying to point us in the right direction down a not-so-obvious path into the valley and went determinedly straight over the branches that had been carefully laid across the road to indicate that we were not meant to go further along that track. Once we were finally on the right track, Andrew, Steve and I had a collective sense of humour failure as it proved to be unrideable, while Rob was still quite chirpy.

After 5km and three hours of hike-a-bike – struggling down a rocky path and then carrying or pushing our bikes up an equally rocky track on the other side of the gorge – we were seriously miserable. Steve had taken a tumble in the 500m that we could ride our bikes at the bottom of the gorge, and hurt his elbow pretty badly. [It turns out that he has a lateral fracture on his radius and a partial tear of his rotator cuff ligament] We missed our CP on the way up the valley, so Rob ran down to get it, while Steve, Wigs and I collapsed under a tree to recover and eat some of the best tasting sandwiches in history (thanks Sylvia).

At this stage, we were only 17km in to our ride after about 4 hours. We knew we still had a long way to go, but it was in fact much further than expected or advertised (Darron has a wicked sense of humour). We pushed on at a moderate pace, knowing that our legs would not handle any kind of hard riding. Towing was not an option as we were all equally exhausted. As we hit a tarred road that took us into a small town, we put on our headlamps and red lights for the back of our bikes, and knocked off about 12km relatively quickly on the smooth road. In town, we stopped at a petrol station to fill up our water bottles and buy some cooldrinks – so welcome at that stage. It was getting dark when we turned off the main road onto a dirt track to get two CP’s. Darron had said that the last 30km of the ride was fast, and it would have been – in the light. None of us expected to be riding in the dark, and hadn’t packed our bike lights – only Rob was wise enough to so. So we struggled along in the dark trying to share what light we had, with one of the guys in the lead calling out obstacles to watch out for (there were a lot of thorn bushes). It was more about feeling our way than anything. We were all fading fast and Steve started to feel nauseous as the pain in his arm and shoulder got worse, and we stopped many times to eat and push our bikes up hills on which we couldn’t get momentum because of the rocks that we couldn’t see in the dark. When Steve had a puncture, Rob and I lay down in the grass and watched the magnificent stars.

It was a pure test of will by this stage, although Rob was still strong and Andrew did some brilliant navigation in the dark. Once we got off the dirt track and onto a smoother road through a nature reserve (unsurprisingly, Steve didn’t want to stop to look for the hippos that we could hear in the dam that we rode past), we could go faster, but it was mostly because we knew that it couldn’t be too much further and we just wanted to get to the finish. About 500m before the cricket oval that marked the finish, Steve went over a branch that ripped of his derailleur, and had to be towed in to the finish. Thank goodness that didn’t happen earlier! So we limped in to the finish to the cheers of our relieved seconds. We came in fifth overall and fourth Sport team.

After 89km and 11 hours of riding, we were so happy to have finished, that we didn’t care about not making the top three. Day 3 took us just under 16 hours in total.

Looking back:

On this race, we learnt that AR is more about survival than anything else and that you can never take anything for granted, even a good lead over your competitors. Anything can happen out there.

Our seconds, Sylvia and Murray were amazing and looked after us so well. They were happy to get our bikes ready at the transitions, pack away our discarded, dirty clothes, make us food and refill our hydration packs. Thank you Sylvia for putting that money into my pocket just as we were about to leave for our final bike ride – being able to buy cokes and juice saved us when we were seriously low. Thank you Murray for slaving away and putting up our tents when we were too exhausted to move. We couldn’t have done it without our seconds.

From my perspective, this race was one of the most difficult but most rewarding experiences of my life.

Swazi X was 280km and 33,5 hours of pain and fun, testing our bodies and reveling in the beauty of our surroundings.

Thank you Team Senseless Killers for the most amazing adventure and well done for surviving an epic race.

Author: Amy Witherden | Team Senseless Killers | Swazi Xtreme, SPORT. 6-8 August 2010