So the team for this race was Christiaan and John racing as "Team Boere" and Oli and I racing as "Team Wors". So we entered 2 separate male pairs but raced together as Team Boerewors (this way we would still be official teams in the pairs category). We had a seconding army of 6 in the form of Christiaan's parents, Hanneke, Elana, Stefan and Fran - these guys were SUPER-seconds and would always lift our spirits (and fill our bellies) after a long night hike or bike bash through the reeds. John is a little too obliging for his own good and ended up accepting every morsel of food that was offered to him - and when this comes from 6 different doting seconds, it's a lot of food I tell ya!

Our trip there set the scene nicely in the epic category: the trailer wheel got a flat and our seconds had to head back to Carolina to get it replaced, leaving the trailer on the side of the road. All of this in a rainstorm of note while the rest of us (out of cell contact in Swaziland) were getting seriously worried whether our 4th team member and our bikes would get to Rider's Ranch before the start of the race. All ended well though and the rest of that night was spent plotting maps and strategising about the optional CPs we would get. The format of this year's race really brought out the strategy in AR and made it much more exciting than a straight point-to-point race. There were about 25 compulsory CPs to collect and a further 50-odd OPs which could be collected via alternative (usually more tricky) routes. So the top teams who pretty much collected all the points, ended up with about 330km under their belts within the 54-hour cut-off. In hindsight, we should have ignored the OPs completely but maybe it was our ambitious navigator's fault that we decided to collect all 5 on the first hike... ahem ;-)

Leg 1: 17km hike (run/jog/swazi-shuffle)
The race started like most races do, with 43 teams scattering in all directions from the start point. It was 5am so in the first hour of darkness, we took a bit of a round-about route to CP1. The nav picked up from there and we managed to collect all 5 OPs at a comfortable jog. We were a happy bunch of racers until we had to head down to the HUGE river... 20 minutes of smashing through the reeds later (thanks bulldozer John!) we got to swim wildly across a fast-flowing brown torrent and cruise across the perfectly manicured golf course on the other side. Running into transition, the 3 remaining bike piles made us realise that it was probably only the top teams and Team Boerewors who went for all the points on that first leg...oops!

Leg 2: 13km bike
This was a relatively easy blitz along a gravel road - we decided to skip the 2 OPs on this leg so as to catch up with the rest of the field again. When the cameras came past we scored some interviews which will probably never make it into the final cut but hey, we got to shout our usual war-cry anyway J

Leg 3: 8km hike (+boulder gully of note!)
Our strategy of skipping some OPs paid off as we were back in the thick of things on this hike. The main feature of this predominantly uphill hike was a predominantly uphill "boulder avenue". When you see this marked on the map, you reckon it's probably a little gorge you have to go through but once you get there you have to remind yourself that this is Darron Raw's race and nothing is little in Swaziland! Scrambling up, over, around and under house-sized boulders can be fun for the first, oh... say.... 5 minutes. A full hour of this becomes a full body work out and by the time we found the path after FP1 (floating point), we were more than happy to see it! A steep slog from there took us up to our smiling SUPER-seconds near the top of the mountain.

Leg 4: 19km hike
I really enjoyed this leg from a navigational point of view - it's always satisfying watching a gaggle of teams descending at speed down the WRONG ridge while you happily plod over the right mountain. OK, OK, gloat over! Our resident MTB-pro, Christiaan, was starting to ask about the MTB component of this race and whether Darron had forgotten about it completely... I reckon it's a good format to get most of the slower hiking legs out of the way early on so that the second half of the race feels faster and easier to compensate for the 100km in your legs already... We went over a few more mountains, had a bit of a swazi-shuffle down a jeep track, crawled up a lekker-steep mountain past the "impossible-at-first-glance" gorge (thanks Darron) and finally strolled into transition at about 4pm. Things were looking tight for the 6pm cut-off at T6 (we would lose a point per 10 minutes that we were late) as we still had a MTB and hiking leg left to do.

Leg 5: 20km bike (30km including navigationisms)
We were assured that this was a fast, mostly downhill biking leg and we set off at pace down the solid gravel road. A major lesson was learned just after CP12: just because you're on a good gravel road going downhill, it doesn't mean it's the ONLY good gravel road going downhill! i.e. just because downhills are fun, doesn't mean you can stop navigating... ahem! So, about 3km down the road from CP11, I merrily told my team to head back up the hill and after much conversing with locals, we found CP11 in the dark an hour later. The darkness slowed us down significantly for the rest of the bike leg and that elusive cut-off went out of the window. About an hour later, after pushing our bikes through corn-fields around a dam, we found our seconds at T5 with their own epic stories of dragging trailers through mud to tell.

Leg 6: 5km hike
The gorge on this hike had a mini-road heading up it and the vegetation on top was friendly enough to allow straight compass-bearing following so soon enough, we strolled into transition and were treated to a tasty supper which did the trick nicely! We had to be out of T6 by 10pm to avoid disqualification and checking out at exactly 10pm, we were the last official team still in the race, about 14th out of the 23 teams that started.

Leg 7: 23km circular hike (epic) with power naps
Most of this night is one big blur of dagga fields, freezing river crossings, desperate path-searching in the bush surrounding the river and a long slow slog up a gravel road. An example of the level of apathy that set in here is that the 5km along the river took us about 5 hours of:

"Is that a path up there?"
"Mumble mumble mumble..."
"Are you looking for a path?"
"Groan."

At 3am after 22 hours of continuous racing, we took a much-needed 30-minute power nap on the path. We were cold and cramped but we slept like babies (Christiaan a little more deeply than the rest of us...). A few kicks in the back got Christiaan moving again and the first thing we got to do was drag ourselves across the river again... you get the picture. We finally hit the gravel road at 5am and set off on a long 12km slog back to transition. The day 2 "start" was at 6am so we had teams on MTBs cruising down past our zombie-like trudge up that hill. All their cheers and smiles did a lot to lift our spirits and sunrise finally put an end to falling asleep on my feet! We got into T6 again at 8am to some relieved seconds and a lekker energising breakfast. It turned out that the night hike and been a killer for many teams and we were now lying 3rd in the pro pairs ranking.

Leg 8: 15km downhill MTB
What an awesome leg! Just what we needed to get back into the racing mood. We bombed down the hill that had taken us 3 hours to hike up in a mere 15 minutes and before we knew it were already at the bike drop, ready to start the hike. We had decided to skip all the optional points to get back within the cutoff times and to maximize our chances of finishing officially. Unfortunately this meant we had to skip the spectacular ropes section which included a tyrolean traverse from one pinnacle to another, several abseils and jumars. Maybe next time!

Leg 9: 12km hike (bundubash)
We had another big river-crossing on this leg, which had us crocodile-spotting and sending Oliver first as a guinea pig ;-) One moerse slog up a mountain on the other side finally popped us out at a sign which read "wrong mountain, proceed to rope point". The CP had been marked incorrectly on the map and as we weren't doing the ropeworks anyway, we decided NOT to slog up another mountain and set off for transition instead, smashing through some forests on the way J Arriving at transition, there was much confusion about FP3 which we eventually figured out was near the bottom of the gorge and if we wanted to finish officially, down the gorge we had to go. An hour and some scrambling later we were back up at transition and ready to head off on our bikes again.

Leg 10: 29km bike
This leg was not intended as a night leg but just after we crossed the main river, a night leg it became. Once again cut-off was out of the window but we were still in with a slim chance of making the finish cutoff at 11am the next morning so on we pushed. This was a very enjoyable bike leg with singletrack riding at night and some fast descents as rewards for the bike-pushing uphills. We were racing with the all-ladies team of Team Dewpoint for the first part of this leg and luckily bumped into them before heading up the wrong valley. We made T9 at 9:15pm and once again had a quick supper to get back out on the route before the official cut-off of 10pm.

Leg 11: 11km bike (where the wheels came off)
In order to finish the rest of the race officially, we had to push through without sleep (or very little at least) and most importantly the nav had to be spot on. So it was very inconvenient when sleep-monsters got me early on and my motivation to figure out the nav was down in the doldrums. 44 hours of racing with just 1 hour of sleep tends to do that to me sometimes ;-) We had a 90-minute detour off the actual route and many discussions about whether to continue or not eventually ended at 1am at T10 (which we had hoped to reach by 11pm). Oliver and I decided to call it a day (or a night) as in my opinion, there was no way we would finish before cut-off. The Boere showed some serious head-strong and pushed on anyway just in case they had a shot. RESPECT! I gave Chris a quick crash course in map and compass work and they set off on the next hike while Oli and I got some sound sleep!

The hike turned out to be a difficult one to navigate and we picked John and Christiaan up on the tar road early the next morning and headed to the finish to watch the top teams coming in.

All in all we covered 182km of the 220km course. We gained some solid experience and still had an awesome race overall. Only 8 out of the starting 23 teams finished the pro race so we're pretty satisfied with our result. All I can say is: Singletrack Mania and BULL of Africa, here we come!!!

Thanks to my team - it was awesome to race with you and I was really impressed with some of the vasbyt! Also thanks a million to our SUPER-seconds... the thought of arriving at transitions with you guys is what kept us going through the early hours! «