What a great race! Where do I start?
Friday turned into a mad rush to pack in the whole family; we had to turn back to Bronkhorstspruit to fill up with fuel – got moaned at by the whole family for not watching the fuel dial. Greg was using my iPad to navigate instead of the map provided on the Ezemvelo web site! Big mistake! We ended up going right around the reserve and onto a cattle field where we met the farmer, a great big friendly guy, with a broken car! His wife and daughter arrived shortly thereafter and out came the towrope. The first of many!
He offered to escort us over a 4×4 track straight through his farm over the Wilge River and in the back gate of Ezemvelo, but first we had to follow him to his farm house to drop off the broken car. This took a while as the ski rope could not cope with a 4×4! What a trip and what an adventure and the race had not started.
As an adventure racer you always chase the perfect race where everything works right. CPs,OPs, bike, nutrition and performance. This one can very close for PS.Hawkstone. I had a great race and did not blow, our team has just been sponsored by 32Gi what a product it made a big difference to my performance!
PS.Hawkstone raced hard for the win but we got piped by Alex Pope and his team by four minutes!
It was a good dice on a great venue and course. The format meant we had to get all the CPs and OPs and finish first. While we were strong and the weather was perfect we just could not catch them. I should have had the tow rope to assist Amy just that little bit. Rob your nav was spot on thanks. Amy you are amazing to race this well after your last two weeks of hard graft very little sleep and virtually no training!
After we finished we were informed that we had missed a CP and would get a 30 min penalty this was a blow as we had not missed a CP. But, for some reason in our haste, I had not clipped hard enough to make holes on the card! The good news was Wiehan had done the same in their team so we both got the same penalty. Now we had to wait and see if we both had enough time on third to hold our positions!
PS.CUL8R arrived just 2 min too late so we held on to second with Greg and his team coming in a close 3rd.
PS.DaCar (both 15) were given the prize as the best performing Junior team as the organisers felt Greg’s team had upgraded themselves into the open category by coming 3rd.
PS.Ruthless raced their first race without adult supervision both only 12 years old. They collected all the CPs in time and finished last but what a race they did great, well done!
To our sponsors thank you very much for making three junior teams possible and all four making it onto the podium!
Author: Alec Aviernos | Team PS.Hawstone | Senseless AR, 5 February 2011