Racing season starts!

Well the adventure racing season started and this time I teamed up with Luke and Tsalina in Team "Just Trippin" The race was held in Umina at Pearl Beach and the weather that we got was perfect, couldn't ask for better weather. Blue skies, 22 degs, not windy at all just a slight breeze.

The pace of the race wasn’t going to be that fast as Luke was sick, Tsalina had a late boozer, and I’m just way off the pace of those 2. This could be seen by the start which involved a 500m beach run which turned out to be a light jog for us. Our boat was then stolen right in front of us and then our strongest leg to start us off, kayaking.

As normal we struggled with the kayaking straight away, hitting about 2-3 other kayaks on the way out. Eventually we made it to the shore of the next beach, even managed to over take a few teams. Then it was time for me to go for a swim to get a clue and for Luke and Tsalina to load the kayaks.

We finished this and now time to go for a run, which was then followed by a mountain bike up hills which sucks. We were probably stuck in the top 25 for most of the time and now it was riding uphill. Which slowed me down heaps, have to train on this one. But going up hill meant that we got to run back down hill. Which was good but we kinda walked a bit.

The slow downhill might have cost us a top 20 finish, because there was a split in the field for the top 20 places if we could get there in time and we saw the last 2 kayaks filled which meant we would be out of the top 20. We continued on tho, and the pace for me was pretty good, but a bit fast on the uphill sections.

We had now completed most of the CP around this area now back to our bikes parked all the way back up that hill. Damn! Back up the hill back on the bike, and what else do we get, the dreaded “HIKE A BIKE”. Tahts right you read it right. We had to go hiking and rock climbing with our bikes. But once we got to the top it was all downhill and back home. Finally we saw the end in sight with a last bike ride down the beach and run to the finish line. We finished in 3hrs 44mins and 57 secs. Very slow I guess but good way to start the season. We managed to see the winners come over the finish line too. If your wondering why its cause they had to do an Extra 1 hr bonus leg, that we missed out on.

This race had a different little twist in it where we could answer trivia questions and you could win a prize for it. We had no idea for the first few CP where the trivia questions were but eventually we found them and managed to answer a few.

We ended up winning this prize which was a shock to us all, but really funny. Cause the three of us were sitting down watching the presentation when Alina announced that the teams that won the prize was teams 127 and 128. Luke thoughts were “wow those numbers are close together”, followed by my thoughts of”ohhhh sick those numbers are consecutive” and of course the brains (Tsalina) in the team was jumping around saying hey that’s us, which saw both Luke and I turn to Tsalina and give her a strange look, only to realize that hey! We are team 127!! So now I’m a proud owner of a new bike pump to replace the one I lost.

Overall this was a great race to start off with, taught me a few things too. These are:
- I’m so unfit its not funny.
- So much slower than those 2 on the uphills.
- Damn those 2 are fit
- I managed to finish the whole race with the Green Xbox Goggles on.
So I guess for future races I’m goin to work extra hard on uphills both on the bike and foot. Can’t wait to the next race too. Thanks Luke & Tsalina for a great race.