Words | Anja MacDonald, team leader. Photo | Ben.outside_alive, support crew
Team events are awesome. Probably something we should do more of in this monocentric mountain bike world of ours. When opportunity arose to enter the Spring Challenge, New Zealand’s premier all women adventure race, the idea was very attractive.
So we assembled a team. We did a fair amount of prep and training on our own and few adventures together - it’s difficult, as busy modern women, to get the free days on your calendar to align! We managed to squeezed in a pre-race training event. At the training event one of us discovered a new found propensity for horrendous cramp, and another one of us re-discovered an old injury. And it seems, cramp, although crippling, passes quite quickly, while old injuries don’t, and we had to substitute our team mate for a last minute recruit.
So with our new team made up of Brenda ‘Bob’ Clapp, Robin Pieper and myself we headed off to Spring Challenge North Island race headquarters in Wanganui. We gathered, highlighters in hand for briefing, to pour over maps, plot routes and discuss important decisions like whether one should wear baggies or lycra. Navigation is crucial and unavoidable in these events, it’s an excellent skill to have and Spring Challenge courses always reward efficient route choices and reprimand those who pay too little attention to their surroundings and their maps.
Spring Challenge features an obligatory raft leg but this edition also included a section where teams slipped and slithered, single file, up a narrow gorge en route to the first transition area. The flow of the event featured multiple foot-rogain-style legs, punctuated by mountain bike transitions between them. Our team’s strengths definitely lay in the mtb legs and we made short work of the steep and often very slippery terrain and vague farm tracks on our fleet of Juliana bikes - a Joplin, a Furtado and a Maverick, which all handled the pinch climbs as well as they did the rough descents.
We’d entered the 9hr category and we rolled in at a very respectable 8hrs 8 minutes after around 50km of rafting, running and riding. The inclement and changeable weather kindly settled for us as we reached the finish line and the sun broke out for a celebratory beer with our awesome support crew who had got out of bed at 4:15 am and spent the day making sure we were at the starting on time, fed, watered and happy throughout the day. Total legend!
At the end of the day, there’s nothing like rewarding a post-race hunger with a well earned meal out with friends where you can dissect the day’s activities, the highlights, lowlights and the laughs!
To find out about Spring Challenge 2020 jump onto their website www.springchallenge.co.nz