Next up we drove through the night thinking we could arrive early at the event hotel and get a room. We were so wrong and instead ended up having to sleep a few hours in the car before heading into town to get some food and have a look around.
We did a little tour of the town, took in some of the sights that we would later race around and settled in for some lunch before we would meet our new team mate who was flying in from the UK to join us in her first adventure race. We were a full team of newbies.
After Steph arrived with all the other teams on the airport transfer, we were given rooms at the hotel and we were able to settle in and start discussing as a team some of the packing, the shared gear we had and talk through strategies. As we were all new to this, we made many little mistakes and went over things many times trying to work out how we wanted to proceed with the race. Later we went for a team meal still getting to know Steph and trying not to put her off too much before we got started.
It was this afternoon that we also got to talk with some of the other more experienced teams to get as many tips as we could. And the biggest one we took away was the need to eat and the amounts of calories that we would need to consume each day. We were told that we really needed to aim to be eating at least every hour and a total of about 10,000 calories for the day. This meant we needed more foods.
Off to the shop to get some more. Rainer and I went to the little local corner shop around the corner where we bought most of the biscuits, nuts they had and I had to laugh when trying to tell the young lad behind the counter that I didn’t just want one mars bar, I wanted the whole box. New food items added to our transition boxes and our bags, it was time to get some food at the food hall the organisers arranged for the event (it was a horrible meal, and we swore not to eat there the next night) and think some more about the race ahead.
Tuesday 22nd, we got up and headed for breakfast. Still thinking about the race, we made our way with our gear to the check-in place in the town square. We got to see what all the other teams were doing. The organisation was not the best, boxes we had ordered were missing and as a new team we felt that there was not really enough explanation to help us work out what we were doing. Thankfully we muddled through it, got our bikes set up, the boxes packed, the mandatory gear checked and that was it. We were just now waiting for the opening ceremony and a team dinner at Pizza Hut to get some much needed calories in before the race.
The opening ceremony was very long and almost entirely in Portuguese. We did however get to see all the other teams that would be competing and got a nice cheer for ourselves as well when we were introduced. It was nice to see all the people we would be racing against.
Last night’s sleep in a bed before the race.
Race day arrived and all the teams were sitting around waiting for the race briefing, which was delayed. The race briefing again was very much geared towards experienced teams. We got as much information as we could from it, writing on our course notes and trying not to be too scared by the race ahead.
Start line, we found our place, put our helmets and gloves on as we were told we needed them for the repelling section, and prepared to see the first of our maps.
The race started and we turned over our maps, worked out the route we wanted to follow to get all the locations and headed off. We set off at a good pace and in the same general direction as most of the other teams. We were going well and then we made a small mistake that ended up costing us about 5 mins but that put us behind many of the teams. We learned some small lessons from the run around the town that not all the things will be in the places they put them on the map, this became even more true later in the race. We made what felt like good time to the rappel section but we were one of the last teams there and so we had to wait for all the other groups to go down, and this was slow, it meant we were now even further behind the rest of the teams.
We finally made it into the first transition and started to get our bikes and packs fully stocked and ready for a gruelling 59km bike ride in the sun. We were the last team to leave the transition and had to make up some time, but again a lesson was learned the hard way, the little “tracks” that were marked on the map and that in Switzerland would have been well defined trails to follow were anything but. This led us down a little valley full of prickly rocks, terraces and not really easy riding. We decided to make the hard climb with the bikes up the terraces to the road.
Once finally back on the road we feel like we made pretty good time and that our navigation from here was good. We all had moments of doing great and then moments where the heat or the ride was getting to us, and we might not have been eating properly. The team were all looking out for each other, so we were reminding everyone to eat and drink often and adjusting speeds as we needed. Steph had a handy timer that went off on the hour to remind us all to eat.
But again, it was on the bike that we lost another half hour or more looking for a checkpoint that was not there. Later we were told they will not all have a marker, and we just need take a photo of the location, thanks for telling us this in advance.
We were last again into the final transition, all the other teams had arrived and already left by the time we even got there.
Thankfully, due to the organisers still not having sorted our bike boxes we didn’t have to break our bikes down so this saved us one little chore for transition. We got some hot water from a local vendor to make some hot meals, got some bacon sandwiches and a few cokes and set to changing our gear from cycling to running/trekking. We got the next maps and sat down to make sure we had a plan set for our route so we were not having to make too many decisions in the night and storm that we could both see and hear coming.
The run/trekking leg started with a section in town with some locations we needed to pass before heading out on the main trek. We did ok with these and then headed out for the main trek into the night and would be about 50km to the next transition.
The main trek started by heading down the mountain which was a good way to transition into the trek from biking. During this long downhill the rain started, we all stopped to get our rain gear on and then the rain really settled in, and it would be with us for the rest of the night. Navigation in the dark and rain was going to be a challenge for the night, but the team all worked really well together with Michael doing most of the navigation, Rainer being the second set of eyes to all his decision and Steph checking our compass decisions. We were not moving fast but we were not making mistakes which we later found out many of the teams had made during the night, due to the weather but also a number or sections of the map essentially being wrong. We could tell from the tracks on the ground where teams before us had gone wrong and at points during the night we could tell that we were even catching other teams based on the tracks on the ground.
There were some really nice places that we walked through that it would have been nice to have gone through during the day. Mountain tops, old villages well away from civilisation and we stopped at a really nice stream with a mill for a while. We also had some encounters with many large dogs, none of them chained or behind fences and all of them making our own dogs at home look small (we have a Greater Swiss Mountain Dog and a Husky between us at home). They were quite intimidating at night, but we kept on walking and doing plenty of chatting as we moved. A trek like this certainly meant that we all felt like we knew Steph pretty well at the end of the hike.
It was at about this time when we felt like we were doing well and catching other teams that the race took a different turn for us. Although we had been trying to make sure we were all eating properly and enough of the team was starting to suffer. We all slowed down and really tried to get different foods into a team member to help him come right. If we could just limp into the next transition, we could get some sleep and a proper meal and try to get him good again. Unfortunately, while he was struggling to get enough food for energy the storm was getting worse and worse, and the temperature was dropping pretty quickly. By about midnight we knew that things were very bad for our team member and we were unlikely to make it to transition and first we desperately needed some shelter.
Guiding him down the mountain in the storm and at the end, supporting him as we looked for shelter, we looked everywhere for somewhere out of the storm. Looking for abandoned buildings, open barns, anything with shelter. We eventually found a small church that was not locked so we went in, got him out of his wet clothes into something dry, into one of the space blankets we all were carrying and into a sleeping bag. He was by this time in a really bad way, and we agreed to let him try and sleep and recover for 2 hours while we also tried to get some sleep and re-evaluate the situation then.
The alarm went off and we had all gotten some sleep, but when we raised our team mate to see if he had improved, we realised that he was no better than when we had got him into the sleeping bag. We had a quick discussion as a team and decided it was time to push the emergency button on our tracker and to arrange for help. Unfortunately, this was again one of the things that was not properly explained in the briefing, we were under the impression that by pushing the button the organisers would be made aware and that they would make arrangements to come and get us. But this didn’t happen, to make it worse, while all this was going on some locals arrived who were not at all happy that we were in their church and there was no English spoken amongst them and we couldn’t speak any Portuguese. In the end they realised we needed help and they arranged for aid to be sent for us.
We waited a little longer and an ambulance arrived. Our teammate was bundled up and the nurse was now looking out for him. Of the other members, one was also recommended to sit in the ambulance under the heater right away due to his level of cold and the other two got all the rest of the gear packed up and loaded into a second vehicle that would follow the ambulance to the hospital.
It was a long day dealing with the hospital in a language unknown to us and during covid times when we could not go into the hospital room and see our team mate and for the most part had to sit outside. Thankfully, by this time the rain had stopped, and it was now a pleasant day outside. We had plenty of time to talk about the race to that point, laugh about a few more things now knowing that our teammate was being looked after and would be ok and to think about what was next.
Ultimately, the three of us who came together decided that we would not continue and that we would head home to our worried other halves and so we set about making plans with the organisers to get our gear off the course and head home after our teammate was out of hospital. Steph decided to join another team who had people pull out as well after the hard night; we were not the only team to suffer through the night.
We are glad that we did the race, sad that we didn’t make it to the finish. Really happy that Steph did make it to the finish and that we found such a great and compatible racer for future races.
Lessons learned will be another post.
Written by Larissa Knight on Apr 27th, 2022 11:06 am #1