Adventure race report

Sunday 11 th December 2005
By Joss Pollock

After another crazy training and Christmas party filled week, Claire Murray Celebrity extraordinaire and my partner (they didn't even have a name sticker for me I am so insignificant!)   found ourselves up early on a Sunday morning in the middle of no-where yet again!!   We were surrounded on the start line of the BONAQUA Youth Challenge with a few hundred Chinese teenagers in Dunlop volley cotton shoes (not the ideal footwear for 3hrs of trail running but no surprises there!)   Getting to the start line was an arduous task in itself.   After a 45min drive to Tai Mei tuk, a 30min bus trip followed by an opening ceremony, how bizarre! We set off at a good pace only to find that half the field of kids had set off even faster and we were meant to be the professionals! Later we found out the other celebrity team (two male professional triathletes) had led the top 1/3 of the field round the first check point (a crucial and costly mistake!) and off into the wilderness.....ourselves included!

So we did the last 1/3 of the race at the beginning and ran around like idiots for an hour finding checkpoint two before checkpoint one!!   We then had to backtrack a few kilometers and ran all the way back to the start to find checkpoint one and the orienteering map. Neither of us had any idea what to do with the bloody thing, so spent the next hour loitering around teenage children waiting for them to read the map find the clue then we would follow in close behind pretending to read the map and take the stamp straight after them. Needless to say we made it back to checkpoint two with a card filled with stamps, all in the wrong squares! So we were given a 20min time penalty, there's a reason why we do triathlons and not adventure races professionally!!

After our enforced 20min refuel break - well planned really, we headed up into the hills for some beautiful - but very tough trail running. Claire the superstar, who had started running the week before after a long lay off with a fractured back,   ran like a machine and we passed hundreds of struggling teenagers for the next 1hr. Then onto the canoes, in which we also spent 1hr overtaking struggling teenagers!   I don't think I have ever seen so many people going so far off course and generally drifting out to sea...the organizers certainly had their hands full and we could take full advantage of all those hours training in the pool and developing upper body muscles!

Then finally, we reached the finish line which was littered with the wounded, groaning teenagers - most of them suffering calf cramps from poor foot wear and nutritional choices.     Needless to say Claire and I have hung up our adventure racing hats and will concentrate on something we are good at......Eating and drinking over Christmas!!!!!

Have fun.

Joss