A couple of months back, I got a phone call from Becs asking if I wanted to do the Kathmandu adventure race which we did last year. I agreed, thought no more of it and continued with my half-marathon training. After completing that, I pretty much sat on my arse for a few weeks. My legs took quite a beating during the run so I wanted to take things easy, and once the World Cup started my sleep patterns went out the window anyway and training suffered.

Still, I was determined to do the race, as was Becs, so we rocked up to the Royal National Park at 7am on Sunday as ready as we’d ever be. The format was pretty similar to last year apart from the fact that we’d be bussed to the start after registration, and would only be given our course maps once on the bus. This left us very little time to mark up the maps with our chosen route, but given the terrain, and the admonition to stay on the tracks and not go cross-country, there was really only one route to take.

We were in the second wave starting at 9:30, so when we got the command 200 people headed off on the run segment, starting from Heathcote. Another 200 had left at 9:00 to avoid overcrowding on the course, and once we’d reaced the second checkpoint the crowding wasn’t too bad. Neither myself nor Becs were overly keen on the run section and took it relatively easy, especially since the still freezing air was aggravating Becs’s asthma. The run to CP4 & 5 was rocky and involved a lot of climbing and descending which hammered my legs. There was only one way to go and we ended up behind a line of people travelling at around our pace, so there was no point in attempting a pass.

We finished the run section in 1hr 20mins and went straight to the canoes, this year’s surprise discipline. The canoes were Canadian style, so it was a quick paddle to CP7 and back to the boathouse at Audley Weir. We both had paddles, so thankfully Becs had to do some work unlike last year when we had to row a section and I did all the work! No sandbagging this time! Once out of the boats we had to climb the same bloody set of steps as last year up to CP8 and the bike transition. We walked the steps, same as last year, as it was still early in the race and my heart rate was already up around 170.

Got to the top and onto the bikes which was going to be our best leg. This section of the course overlapped a lot with last year’s, so it was faily easy to navigate and we’d no problem finding CPs 8, 9 and 10. My mountain biking in Canberra paid off in spades as there was a long, rocky downhill between CP 9 & 10 which I flew down, passing quite a few other riders who were a bit more tentative. All was going well until we were heading towards CP11. We had a bunch of people following us down some singletrack when we got to a slow, twisty, rocky section. I made it through and kept going only to hear a shout from behind as Becs had crashed. I went back and discovered that while she’d gone over the handlebars at a slow speed, she’d landed on her kneecap on a rock and was in quite a bit of pain. She was adamant that she was continuing, so we took off again a bit more slowly.

The next couple of checkpoints were OK, though Becs found it increasingly hard to put significant power through the pedals, so riding uphill was an issue, and running anywhere was out of the question. Thankfully we’d got the running out of the way early, though there were still two short sections which we had to walk instead of jog.

Once we’d made it to CP16 there was another surprise in store for us. We were given a map of an old folks’ home and had to run around looking for answers to clues, and also shovelling some dirt as the hard-labour part of a landscaping project. Once we had all the boxes ticked, we had our cards examined and, if satisfactory, we got our CP17 marked and were back on the bikes.

By this stage we’d been going for four hours and Becs’s knee was swelling up and getting more painful. Thankfully we’d only a few bike CPs to go, none of which involved riding uphill. There’s a rule in AR which states that both team members must remain within 100m of each other at all times, so we made full use of that by getting Becs to stop once we got close to the CP and having me go and punch our card. We checked off CPs 19 – 23 in quick succession, then we’d a high speed descent of Audley Hill back to the registration area for our final leg – kayaking.

Heading out on the kayaks was made particularly hard since we were leaving from beside the finish area, and quite a few of the better teams were already sitting there enjoying their post-race hot food. The smells were particularly enticing after surviving the previous 4.5 hours on gels and water! Max Adventure had acquired solid, plastic kaaks for this year which were a marked improvment on last year’s inflatable ones. With me weighing a good 20kg+ more than Becs, sitting me in the back of the inflatable ones saw them bend in the middle and become a pain in the arse to paddle. This year it was much better and we’d no problem flying down the river to our last two CPs, 24 & 25. Once we’d got 25, it was a straight race back up the river to get in under the five hour mark. We made it with 40 seconds to spare, crossing the line in 4:59:20 which we were pretty happy with.

We munched our way through the post-race food, hung around for the presentations and congratulated Amanda & Matt who’d won the mixed teams division. We also managed to pick up a spot-prize! Woo hoo! The official results were posted on the Max Adventure web site on Tuesday and we managed to come 13th in the mixed category which we’re delighted about. Becs reckons that if she hadn’t crashed we could have got as high as 8th too. All in all it was a pretty good day, particularly as it didn’t rain at all – a first for our AR team. We’ll have to examine the calendar now and decide when our next race is going to be!