The AROC season Finale - Ettalong
8 April 2006

Imogen Pearce - Team arocshop.com.au

As the partner of AROC’s Kris Clauson I have followed the adventure racing scene from afar for the last 2-3 years. For much of this time I have been working as a biologist in Antarctica and have kept an eye on Kris’s races via the internet and email. Naturally I have been very proud at his successes, although at times a little bemused at the images I downloaded of grown men and women clinging to water buffalos or riding giant inner tubes, and somewhat bewildered at the tales of sleep deprivation, ripped toenails and blisters the sizes of golf balls – but from the excessively large grin on the faces in the photos, I was pretty confident it must be a world of fun!

My chance to give adventure racing a go arose when Kris asked myself and one of our friend Alexis Bull (Lex) to race at the 2006 AROC sprint champs. I have competed in multisport events in our home state of Tassie, and Lex is a seasoned multisporter and raced geoquest and the recent XPD. However, having only just returned from 72 days at sea working 16 hour days on a marine science voyage I was initially a little hesitant, my only exercise for this period being on a treadmill (tho I have to say attempting to stay vertical on a treadmill in 10m seas is no easy feat!). In the end I decided I was keen to give it a go and hopefully get in a little shopping in Sydney on the way!

We flew into Sydney on the Friday before the race, lugged our bike boxes to the train station and after dragging Kris kicking and screaming from the women’s lingerie department in Myers (he just loves to shop!), we caught a train to Ettalong Beach where the race was to be held.

Coming from Tassie where snow was just starting to settle on the mountain and the temperature was hovering around 9 degrees, the balmy mid 20’s of N.S.W was doing a lot for my smile factor, then riding up to our accommodation for the weekend, my smile widened even further. The resort was amazing, our room had a spa and an incredible view! – ‘Hell’, I thought bouncing on the king sized bed eating a cornetto…’if this was adventure racing- so far so good!’ Our third team member Alexis Bull had to work on Friday and so couldn’t make it to Sydney until late, so around midnight Kris went and collected him from the train station and after a quick g’day we all fell into bed.

The day of the race dawned and while Kris went up to drop our mountain bikes at a transition, Lex and I went down to collect our maps for the event. I was somewhat overwhelmed at the masses of incredibly fit, buff looking people busily running around and my pale Antarctic glow felt a tad stark amongst the tanned bodies! We met up with Alina (McMaster, one of the race organisers) and as we were her sponsored team (arocshop.com.au) she gave us a couple of t-shirts to wear. This was one of my main worries about this race, by racing with Kris, AROC had offered us sponsorship, so I felt some pressure to perform, and with the team t-shirt on I felt something of a fraud!

We had about an hour to look through the map together, contact it and pack our running packs, then headed down to the chaos of the start line. Our first leg was a kayak out through the surf and round to a beach. As the swell had picked up over night, the checkpoint was changed, apparently, according to race organiser Tom Landon-Smith, to Alina jumping up and down naked! - Kris and Lex’s eye’s lit up at this prospect and in an adrenaline fueled maelstrom of clashing paddles, squawking bodies and big yellow tubs….we were off!! …and then we were stopped - wedged between a couple of other boats and then we were off again…this time for real!

Kris was steering at the back with myself in the middle and Lex up front, Lex maintains that I clocked him on the head about 20 times during this leg, but I can’t recall bouncing my blade of his noggin once. I think his excitement must have been making him hallucinate. I was, perhaps, a little excited too at this point and paddling a bit like the energizer bunny on speed, Kris called out to me to slow down and I took a breath, focused and got in time with Lex. Paddling in the surf was great fun and definitely cleaned out Lex’s sinuses! - although the boats seemed to have the maneuverability of a bulldozer, we collected the first checkpoint (Alina was fully clothes much to the boy’s disappointment) and headed to the run transition. We were one of the first 5 boats to arrive and took the option of a line up a gully to the crest of a hill. Many other teams took a track which contoured around to the top but we thought if we could get a good line straight up it would be faster. However doing this meant we lost all sight of our competitors and had no idea where we lay in the field when we popped out at the top.

The following run continued as a stunning coastal traverse which we cruised around taking in the vista. Our second transition was onto the bikes and started by banging down a luge style track – Lex was having a ball yodeling and getting air of every possible twig or pebble – it was brilliant fun, apart from the bit where I lost the bite valve on my bladder and emptied my entire sticky drink down my pants. Then, we hit the uphill, and I felt my body come to a grinding halt – up until then I had been feeling pretty good and in fact I’d even go so far as to say I was feeling slightly invincible …ho hummm I had a sneaky suspicion it was something to do with a combination of being souped up to the eyeballs with nervous excitement and those squeezy gel things I’d bolted in quick succession …but the truth of the matter was coming to head – I wasn’t real fit!!

The boys saw me struggling (I was so puffed out I couldn’t even talk to tell them to slow down) but once my unintelligible grunts got through, they popped me on tow. This was fantastic and I actually got quite fond of my new found uphill cruising speed!! and we were once again catching our opponents, a few more checkpoints later and we rocked up to the next transition to be given a short orienteering course.
With Kris in the lead we jogged off down the road, I was feeling okay again until Kris took a sudden left hand turn and plunged us into deepest darkest Peruvian jungle right there in the outer burbs of Copacabana (?at the copa…copacobana!!! ?)...we had caught up with team Area51 and together we clawed our way through the dense undergrowth, this stuff was incredible, the most uncivilized weed I have ever come across, it ripped our legs and arms, pulled at our helmets and clothes and left trails of blood running down my legs. I kept a keen eye out for tigers and pits with lined with pythons and sharp pointy sticks and wished for a machete and a pith helmet….when the cannibal drums started I thought we were for it.....but thankfully, we popped back out in the burbs and headed off on a far more scenic coasteering route. This was again stunning, and incorporated one of my favorite pastimes, rock hopping and running through rockpools….my inner marine biologist was itching to stop and have a good look at the slime growing in the pools, but I decided at this stage perhaps my team mates wouldn’t appreciate a lesson in algal taxonomy and anyway we had managed to catch the leading mens team!

We got to the transition and I dipped our timing stick – this small green device clipped around my wrist had been my constant focus of the race – I had been put in charge of dipping at each transition and was terrified of loosing the damn thing (especially after I had experienced the wroth of Kris after loosing ‘the pencil’ at our last rogaining attempt – this was incidentally, the first time we had raced together since that fateful day about 4 years ago and nearly divorced!!).

Anyway, I dipped the stick and we jumped back on the bikes and I made a mental note to teach my self how to clip my left peddle first and swing my right leg over the seat like the boys did, this seemed to be much faster then my approach of jumping on the seat and then scrabbling around trying to clip in and besides it looked way cooler!!
It was on this leg where I realised how superhuman Kris really is as he navigated, towed me and had a hand on Lex’s arse pushing him along – I don’t know really if he was actually pushing Lex or if having Kris’s hand up his bum was enough motivation to try to move faster! Either way we got a good pace going up the hills and collected a few more checkpoints.

It was about then that I suddenly realised our position, we were coming 2nd overall and 1st in the mixed category, we only had to hold off teams Area 51 and Ultimax Stingers and we’d win this race. From somewhere deep inside that I hadn’t looked before – possibly just left of my appendix – I found a new lease of energy, I didn’t need towing any more and felt the excitement of racing – we flew down a technical rocky track and burst out onto the streets with team Tronk in sight. We banged through a few more checkpoints and then peddled back to the kayaks for our last stages. After a short paddle across the bay we secured our kayak to a buoy and waded into the coast. We were catching the guys team when I fell into a slightly bad place…. I have never had cramps in my life but I sure as hell knew what they were as they hit, my hamstrings, calves and some weird muscle near my knee I didn’t know I had, started grabbing as we headed around the last coasteering leg. It was almost comical as I tried a variety of gaits to try to prevent cramping – I reckon I could have added a whole new dimension to the ministry of silly walks!

Finally we got there, jumped back in the boats for the last time and headed for the finish, we hauled the boat up the beach and onto the trailer and ran through to the finish line after collecting our 23rd and last checkpoint.

I couldn’t believe it – we had won – I still couldn’t believe it, but asked a few people and it indeed appeared to be the truth!.. I was pretty damn excited at this point – what I really wanted to do was take my top off, run round whirling it like the soccer player and chuck in a few cartwheels, but it didn’t seam quite appropriate - even after a can of redbull!… at least I could now wear my arocshop.com.au t-shirt without feeling like I’d stolen it!!

Kris took it all in in his usual laid back manner, and as for Lex – it was the first thing he’d won since his grade 6 sack race at Chigwell Primary school so he was pretty damn chuffed.

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The AROC season Finale - Ettalong 8 April 2006

Imogen Pearce - Team arocshop.com.au

The AROC season Finale - Ettalong
8 April 2006