Pure and Precious;
We joke about it.
I am pure,
Jenny is precious,
.........and Steve? Get it;..... and;...... I guess you don't.

So team aQuelle needed a fourth member and immediately set their sites on Trevor. Trevor is young, Trevor is strong, Trevor could probably carry bags and tow us when we are tired. Good choice. Trevor, Steve, George and Jenny; three boys and a girl out for adventure.

We plan, we pack, we leave, in that order, all the way from Pietermaritzburg, through some funny little towns until near the border to Swaziland.

Here we stop at the only filling station in sight. The owners stops me on the way out and asks if we work for aQuelle.

"Actually we race for them" I say, and don't bother explaining. He explains to us that aQuelle is sold out every day in his shop and he is battling to get the local trader to get enough stock, it is so popular. "Outsells everything" he says, again and again and I nearly offer him the 36 bottles we have in the back for refreshment and to hand to worthy causes.

At the start venue we set up camp on a school field in a fresh breeze.
At 3h00 the breeze is a gale with the tents slapping themselves to death and the whip crack of guy ropes, keeping everyone awake.
At dawn it stops and the sky grows dark and heavy. A huge storm unleashes itself and the start is delayed indefinitely. We huddle in a gymnasium and wait.

At 8h00 we leave, on my third, and the rest's first Swazi Extreme. Steve navigates erratically for a while and then sets into a steady pace and we make good ground on the bike leg, regularly turning right and left until he announces that the CP should be close by on our right. I suspect something and turn the map 180 degrees to reveal a checkpoint on our left. We had travelled to the CP on a ring road in the wrong direction, but perfectly anyway. Phew!

We take the bikes down a track on the side of a mountain. Here the call is; "Ridable" or "unridable" which means different things to us or Jenny, as she rides just about anything. We follow team Single Track for a while and then break out on our own route, Steve leads us perfectly into the transition for a hiking leg. We descend into an abandoned mine and follow tunnels over cave-ins and around bat guano. I delight in shrieking every time a bat flits through my beam and Steve spends his time calming the girls from the other teams with scientific facts about bats, sonar etc. Just as he seems to get things under control I wail that they have got tangled in my hair, starting the panic all over again. This is fun, especially the fact that I have no hair to speak of. We emerge from the mine onto a cliff and into an abseil. My belay device turns out not to be recommended for abseiling as the rope gets stuck in it, and I alternatively hang jerking on the rope or plunging a few metres every time I get it freed. Memo to self; get a figure eight for descending.

Swaziland is amazing. After climbing an endless hill we arrive at an abandoned open cast mine in the late afternoon and weave between danger signs and spectacularly vertical drops into water, reminiscent of Kimberley.

Then it is onto the moors in the setting sun, descending mist and finally into the dark and mist with werewolves howling as the moon periodically emerges.

We get back from this surreal experience to a bike transition where chaos reigns with teams all confused as to the route. Eventually we form a peleton of about 10 and find the right path.

Racing into the night we immediately encounter fence after fence and then accidentally find the right gate and speed past buck and other snorting mammals until we reach a checkpoint which separates us from a major hike. Two hours power sleep and then into a kloof and over a waterfall which we can jump, and then into a bumslide with a two point touch down.
Imagine the biggest slide at waterworld. Tilt it until its vertical. Carve it out of century old black rock. Empty it into a black pool where you cannot see into the gloom. Shuffle your way to the edge and then slip over whilst trying not to. I had the joy of going first which meant I got to see the faces of the others plummeting downwards. "Eyes wide shut", "involuntary screams", "frozen with terror"; all have new meanings in my mind. The others try to deny it, but I saw and heard it.

So far so good. Then Trevor slices his leg open to the bone. The first aid kit comes out. Nurse Jenny uses just about everything to repair him. Trevor flies ahead, his adrenalin carrying him. Adrenalin doesn't carry one well for 10 hours; the time I estimate it to take to the next checkpoint. Trevor battles the weeds and lantana to checkpoint 22.He then battles the long slow uphill out the valley. We find a hiking stick and Trevor limps forward. He was wishing for a second one and we find one on the path and he limps onward. We head down a long hill and his limping figure reminds me of the retreat in "Saving Private Ryan". We get to the turnoff to the gorge and I make the team sit down. This is the job of the leader. Trevor, I announce, is going by the shortest route to the next transition for proper medical attention. Trevor protests and we explain to him that he is so weak now we could beat him up with one hand tied behind our backs and Steve and Jenny immediately start squabbling about who should be allowed first blow. We briefly discuss giving him a little food and water and a compass and sending him off to the transition, or burying him in a shallow grave on the roadside and denying all knowledge of him, and then Team aQuelle limp off to the transition, still together.

At the transition, Landy Puddu (a doctor) takes Trevor to Piggs peak hospital, reopens, and cleans the wound, cuts off the dead flesh and sutures it properly.

Piggs Peak staff are fantastic and Landy sings praises for the professional caring attitude they show, so seldom found in hospitals these days. Back at the transition we hear stories of an overflowing gorge, near accidents in the dark and a bone dry rafting leg and are told to go to the next transition at the Dam.

In the morning the race is restarted and as we are unofficial with three members only we decide to do the tourist thing and link with two other teams for an adventure rather than a race.

The second rapid of the day proves to be nasty and Landy, my boating partner in the absence of Trevor, takes a big swim, spending so much down time under a rock she is unsure that she will come up again. Later we heard that this rock got many and indeed it seems a miracle that no one drowned. After that Steve and Jenny scouted, Landy and I were used as the experiment for the line and the others followed where we went, or on a more modified line if ours hadn't been so good.

Two other death traps are successfully portaged; although by now the legendary team, "His Way", are famous for shooting the second one by accident and surviving with bruises.

The great thing about AR is that when you have had enough of one discipline you get to do another and the next hiking leg goes up one of the loveliest gorges I have had the pleasure of exploring. Unfortunately it was here that Steve succumbed to heat exhaustion. Jenny and I nursed him to the top having lost the rest of the pack and realising that we would be doing the final 65km bike leg on our own in the dark. As Steve was our navigator this worried me a bit.

Darren Raw the organiser arrives in a chopper and swaps places with Steve and we set off to catch the others hoping to be able to ride with them.

When we arrived at the Transition, they have waited for us.
That's what great about adventure racers.
When the chips are down they pull together for everyone, and Piers, Phil, Charl, Gary Tim, Rika, Landy, we thank you for that.

A beautiful ride in the full moon has us only using our lights on the technical or woody sections and it looks like we are home when Jenny has one of the most spectacular crashes I've seen for a long time, We are on a good road, downhill, doing about 35 kmh and she bounces through a drainage groove. Her back wheel rose above here head and she rode a long way on her front wheel only before neatly turning over and crashing and sliding down the road. When I get to her she was worrying about her bike, but the steady drip of blood onto her handlebars alerts us to the cut above her eye. My first aid kit has been severely depleted by this time and Landy saves the day with Steri strips and other stuff that medical personnel carry. We joke about how lucky it was that Jenny landed on her head as that is probably the figuratively hardest part of her body, and then have a short technical discussion as to whether the face is really part of your head and then Jenny gets on her bike to carry on. Rika, Who doesn't like fast downhill's gave a brief lecture on "riding too fast" and we set off again. Jenny rides slightly slower for three hundred metres then obviously forgets the lesson and careers off into the darkness, business as usual.

Two hundred metres from the end a tree eats my derailleur, but nothing is stopping us and Piers physically hauls me across the line to complete, albeit unofficially, my third Swazi Extreme.

Darron went large as always and elements of the race will stick in my mind forever. The hardest part of the race was seeing my team physically break one by one until only two of us were left. The best bits were the amazing scenery and huge variety we encountered, especially on the bike legs.

Our seconds are amazing: Phillip drove 578 km seconding us during the race. The roads were horrific and he handled them exceptionally. Kerry always had the right stuff in the right place and it is the seconds that make a race work easily for you.

Lessons learned

• Figure 8's work better than belay devices for descending strange ropes.
• The extra weight of a wetsuit is worth it for kloofing cold legs at night.
• Carry first aid to patch an entire team.
• Don't trust wild waters without scouting