2023 ADVENTURE RACING WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP - SOUTH AFRICA
A big race in an exciting place. The lure was obvious, and it sucked Kit, Evan, and I right in. And even though he had spent a month exploring the Arctic and defending his ice camp from polar bears, then another month squeezing himself through slot canyons in Utah, we were able to convince our newest teammate, the Saskatchewani Scott Cocks, to join us for Expedition Africa, the 2023 Adventure Racing World Championship, taking place October 15-29 in the Kouga region of South Africa.
Sixteen hours is a long time to be stuck in a middle seat, and that was just one of three flights, two buses, and one taxi ride (each way) it required to get to the Cape Saint Francis Resort in the South Africa’s Eastern Cape, the race’s host location. But AR has taught our team how to suffer gracefully, and we were more excited than destroyed upon arrival. Best of all, all our equipment arrived with us, so we were able to enjoy the atmosphere of arriving to a new place while seeing so many familiar faces, including Jose Pires, Ajita Madan and Sayeesha Kirana, who greeted us at the airport.
A good night’s sleep in our amazing beachfront condo later, we took the morning to do our shopping, finding that even in rural South Africa, we were able to purchase an amazing assortment of flavored potato chips (Greek lamb, garlic bread, smoked beef, green curry, chorizo, and my personal favorite, “Chakalaka”). We began sorting gear and food, then over the next two days, performed our registration and gear-check duties, got our TA bins (with very restrictive 25-kg weight limits that caused us all of problems both in deciding what to pack and then suffering the consequences of those decisions during the race), and received an outline of the course, which revealed a lot of very long sections.
The day before the race was the flag parade. It was fun to finally participate in one after watching so many of them over the years. After the ceremony, we received our race booklet and were able to get a better feel for the flow of the race. That night, we made a plan to sleep three hours every night after the first night, try to survive the long foot sections, and be aggressive on the bike sections, which we thought was our strength. Well, even the best plans fall apart upon first contact with the enemy…
Race morning began at 4 a.m., but we were able to grab some good coffee from the Nespresso cart and we preordered breakfast sandwiches, so it wasn’t such dire straits. The two-hour bus ride ended in a parking lot where our bike boxes were waiting. We had no idea where we were but the locals seemed excited. Turned out it was the Addo Elephant Park, which is known for its huge sand dunes on the Indian Ocean, and its elephants (though we never saw any). We built up our bikes, mapped out the first stage, and got back on the buses for the additional 1.5-hour bus ride to the start.
We reemerged from the buses into the warming glare of the African sun. Looking around, we saw the start line on an imposing-looking hill. And not much shade. It was an accurate portent of the nine days to come. We had been told to carry as much water as possible, so we were loaded up with four liters each, though we second-guessed this decision when we saw Chris Forne dumping out half his stores at the start. We walked to the start line with Marika and Simon from Greener AR, chatting about the forthcoming Arthur the King movie (Simon was on Mikael Lindnord’s Peak Performance team at ARWC 2014, where the story was born), and before we knew it, we were counting down the seconds before the drums announced the start of the toughest race of our lives.
The race began at 11 a.m. with African drummers, drones overhead, and a big screaming crowd (for AR standards). The first trek was 56 kilometers and we estimated it would take us at least 10 hours to complete. With 109 teams at the start, it was the biggest conga line I had ever participated in as we made our way through some fields and along forested tracks. It was already hot and we tried to manage our effort by maintaining a fast walk/trot without burning up. After a few hours, we found a concrete water cistern, and following Stephan’s advice, we filled up some bottles. The water was absolutely nasty tasting – I compared it to drinking hot carbonated sweat. We worried we were going to be stuck with this type of water through the rest of the race, but fortunately things got better.
Later on, we ran into the fab photographer and friend Kirstin Oliver and she got a great shot of us running along the track to a fenced gate. We squeezed through one at a time and after we were all through, Kirstin started laughing maniacally and swung the unlocked gate open and let herself through. We continued along and got pretty good at hopping or ducking fences – they lined every property along the whole course – but we didn’t realize we had hundreds left ahead of us. We traveled a bit farther and then hit a steep sand dune, with Emily and Ashley waiting at the top. The view was expansive – white dunes and the azure, white-capped Indian Ocean. Our shoes were full of sand by the time we got to the ocean, so we took five minutes to clean them out before Kit led us on a six-kph forced march trying to stay as close as possible to the ocean, where the sand was firm, but dodging waves along the way. We kept up a brisk pace, at the point of walking so fast it was almost painful, until we finally reached a river crossing (we smelled something dead and later learned a fin whale had washed up on shore there). The water was on the colder side of refreshing, but the biggest scare was nearly losing Kit to a swifter-than-expected current. Fortunately, two swarthy South Africans came to her rescue, and we made our way up onto more sand dunes on the far side of the river.
We trekked for at least an hour before we realized we had missed a CP and had to turn back. The checkpoints were 8.5x11 pieces of paper taped onto a cardboard backing, and some were not reflective, so they were very easy to miss – a nuisance for us through the entire race. We had been on the right route and if it had been an orange and white orienteering flag, we definitely would have nailed it, as we were following the elephant tracks of at least 50 teams ahead of us. But oh well, we had to backtrack. The mix-up cost us about an hour, then we made our way forward again on familiar ground until the second and final river crossing, which we hit around midnight. This crossing was a bit longer, and we later found out it featured sharks (I may have felt one brush against my leg – definitely a fish at least) but we made our way across without major problems and got into the TA ready to get into dry clothes and our bicycles ASAP.
The TA was busy (with only nine TAs in the race and so many teams, every TA was busy), and even though we had staged our bikes, at 1:07, this wasn’t our fastest transition (the leaders transitioned in 30-40 minutes). We were slow to get mapping and we indulged in a couple of pizzas. But when we finally said our goodbyes to Ashley and Emily and got going on the 181-kilometer stage, we were motivated and hungry to make up time. We got through a piece of tricky nav right out of TA and hit a dirt road, where we began hopscotching with a South African team. Around 10 kilometers down the road, we began passing them for the fifth time just as we hit a slight downhill and some big tire ruts. Riding third, Evan rode up one side of a rut, got off balance, and had no escape, as he was stuck in a 30-kph paceline with another team taking up the rest of the road. He pinballed around the rut three times and then went down on his left side and his head. Riding fourth, I was lucky to avoid running into him.
We’ve all crashed our bikes in adventure races before, and I’ve seen Evan go down harder several times, but this one took him out. Kit nearly immediately diagnosed a concussion and suspected broken collarbone, and she proved right on both counts, though even I could have diagnosed that something was wrong with Evan’s brain when he kept repeating, ad nauseum, “I don’t remember falling” at least 50 times. After confirming as a team we needed to make the call, we did, and RD Heidi Muller was kind even as I woke her up, saying she would get a medic out to us ASAP. I then called Emily and uttered those cliché word, “Everything’s OK but … “ She woke up Ashley and the two of them rendezvoused with the medic at TA 1 and headed out to pick Evan up.
While we waited – we were stopped for at least two hours, maybe three –at least 20 teams passed us, the first few at scary speeds due to the downhill until we put out some warning lights shining on a backpack up the road. Once Evan regained his composure, he got sad. We all did a bit. But for myself and I think for Kit and Scott, it was pretty matter-of-fact – Evan was too badly hurt to continue, so it was a simple decision. Scott, Kit, and I huddled to decide whether we wanted to continue. The tough thing about AR is it meant our team was officially disqualified, but Heidi said there would still be a ranking for all teams who finished, even those with a dropped teammate. We agreed to continue on to TA 2 and regroup there.
As Evan disappeared down the road in the big truck Emily had rented, we gathered our stuff and continued down the dirt road. Not more than 30 minutes after we started, it got light out. We could see we were entering an agricultural area, with greenhouses on both sides of the road that it became clear as it got light were housing thousands upon thousands of lemon trees. Slowly, the day got sunny and hotter. We did a big climb and stopped quickly for a bathroom break and water stop at a nice-looking roadside hotel that was serving what smelled like a delicious breakfast. The day got even hotter from there, especially as we did another climb, where we were greeted at the top by South Africa’s most dangerous snake, a puff adder, idling on the road. It slithered away as I tried to photograph it, perhaps scared off by Kit simultaneously yelling at me to stay the hell away.
It was misty at the top of the climb and we enjoyed the cooler temps for a bit until we dropped off and hit what felt like a desert floor – hot and mostly flat. We had to stop and press a button to open a sliding gate of a fenced-off game reserve, and we got our hopes up we might see a bunch of cool animals, but were mostly disappointed, with the exception of Scott spotting a herd of five ostriches zipping across the savannah at a remarkable pace.
We then rode through some rolling hills and a tricky checkpoint at a windmill behind a fence, where we searched a bit too early. We took a 10-minute break at a house in the shade where we got water and lay down for a few minutes, then pushed hard through a very flat section, where we pacelined at a solid 22 kph even with a gusty sidewind. We found ourselves around a lot of South African teams, and it became obvious to us they were getting help from their “media’ teams, with one team stopping in front of us under a shaded tent for a crock-pot lunch. I suggested we should stop and invite ourselves since by AR rules, they would have to share with us, but we wanted to get on with the stage and so we kept pedaling. The final 40 kilometers of the stage got very slow, even though the heat had finally broken with the setting of the sun. Kit especially seemed to be flagging here, but Scott came through with a solid tow that got us into the town of Somerset, where our pace quickened after we got an escort from some local yokels who were blasting music, taking pictures of us, and driving dangerously close to us.
We arrived at around 7:30 p.m. into the TA at a soccer stadium, and were immediately greeted by Heidi, who gave us an update on Evan, who she said was fine, just a bit too broken to race. She also let us know a big storm was coming in, scheduled to arrive around 2 a.m. We got some delicious spaghetti Bolognese and some sodas from the nice school ladies who were running the food operation, then had a chat about what we wanted to do about the rest of the race. Kit had shifted her mindset a bit from her initial thought of potentially wanting to drop, but thought it was best to take a sleep in TA. Scott and I preferred to get going to try to get a big climb done before the storm rolled in. But we deferred to Kit’s need to sleep, and so she went off to find a good spot while Scott and I finished packing everything up. A few moments later, Kit came running back to us telling us it was too loud to sleep in TA and that we should get going. So we packed our sleep stuff back up, along with our tent, which we figured we would need for the rain, and got out of TA at around 10 p.m.
The first few kilometers out of TA took us through the most urban part of the race, with a KFC and bars overflowing with people crowding in to watch the rugby world championship. We turned off into a park and wound ourselves up a maze of trails, one of which led up the mountain we needed to climb. It took us a bit, but we found the right trail and began hiking up. And up and up, steeper and steeper. Along the way, Kit began getting really loose with exhaustion. Eventually she screamed the memorable line, “I’m really angry right now but I’m not angry at you!”
At 2 a.m., we finally topped out, and we collected the semi-hidden CP before backtracking a bit to a good campsite we had spotted. We got the tent set up, snuggled up into our sleep systems, and fell asleep just as the first drops of rain hit the rainfly. We got awoken at one point during the night by a sonorous bass voice walking by our tent, and then exclaiming his pleasure at having enjoyed a lovely “bushycock,” which we surmised was the South African equivalent of a huge poop in the woods.
We got up and going by 7 a.m., and emerged into a fully rainy day. We ran into a bunch of teams on our way past the CP for the second time, including East Wind, which had spent nearly a full day in the previous TA after one of their teammates suffered heatstroke. They took off at a run soon after we saw them, and they scored one of the fastest times on this section, and ended up 15th overall, which was quite a comeback.
We made our way across some fields and through some fences to a faint depression, which, as we got closer, revealed itself to be a massive canyon with a waterfall and the site of CP 29 and a rappel down to CP 30. We jumped on the ropes without any wait and made our way down the slippery rock pitch to a lagoon, where we refilled on water and then began an extremely sketchy bouldering downclimb on river right. After the next team came down (Team Burn, which included our NIAR friend Maria Leijerstrom), the guys manning the ropes noticed where we had gone and told us to get to river left, where there was a trail that had been completely hidden to us. It cost us around 20 minutes and just a couple of near-death experiences, so we were only mildly annoyed. We found CP 30 400 meters further down the trail, which caused us some additional frustration because the small white paper with the letter we needed to identify was positioned at an angle where it could barely be seen.
We finally got out of the canyon and began a long slog of a day, moving across flat ground, then a big downhill, then a huge uphill, until we got to the trig point (hilltop/summit) at CP 34. The trails had become muddy, slidy messes and the going was tough, with the only entertainment some gigantic earthworms about three feet long and the diameter of a cigar. It was the first of our many encounters with oversized insects in the race.
At the high point, there was a punishing wind and thick fog, then we worked our way over to the tricky CP 35, down a cold and windy valley and over and under about 50 fences. On the way to 36, we trekked past several structures, all occupied by lucky teams who were able to catch a break out of the wind and rain. We began climbing and met up with three friendly Brazilian guys who had lost their fourth earlier in the race. After a long climb, Kit had the great idea of stopping for a bit to put on all our remaining clothing (for me, that consisted of my one rappel glove and my Moxie gaitors). We resumed our hiking and as we got to the summit crest, the wind picked up from stiff to take-your-breath away. I thought we would be dropping out of the wind and fog after the CP, but the route forward involved seven more kilometers of ridgeline. Scott and I, hanging back while Kit navigated, were banged into the fence on our left repeatedly by the wind. We began shivering uncontrollably and our hands became useless frozen blocks. The Brazilians looked like they were bailing off the ridge, but saw where we were going and reversed course to catch us back up. Worried we were getting into a dangerous situation, Scott and I implored Kit to get us off the ridge. We hooked a hard left and descended quickly, but the wind still had a piercing cold steadiness to it even 1,500 feet down from the ridge. Eventually we made it into what looked like a small village on the map and sought out the nicest building in the neighborhood, a house that had barred windows, but it was locked. I checked out the garage, which appeared as if several humans had been held captive there for some time, while the Brazilians had better luck, finding an outbuilding that was semi-bombed out but serviceable as an emergency shelter. We walked around the village a bit more, finding more bombed out buildings, none suitable to sleep in. We headed back to the outbuilding with Scott urging us to crash there, but I insisted on putting up the tent, concerned about a lack of livable space in the outbuilding and playing a hunch I would sleep better in a comfortable shelter. Kit joined me in the tent and we stripped off our clothes, then set our kitchen timer for three hours and tried to spoon for warmth, but after a bit, Kit bailed and ran off to the outbuilding. I remained in the tent, and miraculously, after a cold hour or more, finally warmed up enough sleep, even with the wind blowing steadily through the tent.
The alarm went off at 5 a.m., and I went out to wake Kit and Scott up. It had mostly stopped raining, but it was still cloudy, cold, and spitting a bit. We very reluctantly left the warmth of our sleeping bags and, even more reluctantly, put our soaked clothes back on, packed up the tent, and headed down the road and away from that godforsaken place. Our pain and suffering eased over the next several hours as it warmed a bit and we even got a nice view of an expansive desert valley. We continued to head downhill until we reached what felt like the desert floor, where we got one CP in a riverbed, saw a bunch of teams that looked, as we were, in various stages of dishevelment, then proceeded grumpily uphill to nab one more CP before sidehilling to the last road into the TA, which still was around three hours away. Fortunately, we got to kill some of that time talking to the friendly VAC Ultra team, and at the last CP, once it had gotten good and hot and we were just about out of gas, Emily, Evan, Ashley and Zac, the team media from Visit Penticton, jumped out from the underbrush, giving us a wonderful surprise. There is perhaps no better sight on earth than seeing loved ones in an expedition race, and to be greeted at arguably our lowest moment of the race was a huge boost.
They followed us into the TA, which was a plush resort (or at least appeared so to us after roughly 40 hours on Stage 3) and had a kitchen serving hot food and cold drinks, and rooms for rent, which we happily took advantage of, as we arrived too late in the afternoon to think about making it through the dark zone on Leg 5, the single paddling stage in the race.
The room we rented was fantastic and we all enjoyed a shower and a solid 7-hour sleep. When the alarm went off at 1 a.m., I was surprised to feel energetic. It helped that our media crew had recruited Marika Wagner, whose Greener AR team had to abandon the race, to join us as our fourth for the kayaking. Scott and I shared some hot ramen and a Forever Fresh (so good!) for breakfast, and we all made it out the door by 2:15 a.m. Despite it being another trekking leg, it felt fresh to have Marika with us, and we largely enjoyed our trek, punctuated though it was by a 10-minute dunk through a swampy cornfield. We arrived in good spirits to TA 3 at 4:45 a.m., with a sleepy Ashley awaiting us.
There was a conga line to the water, and we got on last after about five or six teams went on in front of us. It was still quite cold out but the water was not freezing. We started with the heaviest rapid of the entire leg, and Marika and I almost dumped. Kit and Scott weren’t as lucky and they splashed in and had a long, bumpy ride downriver until they could collect themselves in an eddy. Surprisingly given her hatred of cold water, Kit remained in good spirits. There were a few more rapids to navigate at the top of the river but we got through them, and Marika and I quickly formed a good partnership in the boat that allowed me to feel like we were cruising along quickly, though the current and good conversation surely helped. The day warmed up and we passed several teams, and bunched up with others at the four portages on the stage. About two-thirds of the way through, we stopped with the Irish team Dar Dingle to help a local South African team that was struggling badly. We left them in a safer place and continued downstream, enjoying a fun paddle and the time off our legs. I won’t reveal exactly how many times Kit and Scott tipped, but it was roughly between one and three. The takeout came quicker than we expected and we made pretty good work of packing ourselves back up at TA 5 and walking the hot, shadeless three kilometers into TA 6, arriving at 2:40 p.m., greeted once again by a cheering Emily, Evan, and Ashley.
We set up in the shade of a truck, away from the yellow angry ball of death, as Scott has begun calling it. Kit immediately went inside the house to do maps and that seemed to be the best move, as this transition seemed faster than previous ones, even if we collectively forgot to fill Kit’s water bottles, which forced us to return one kilometer out from the TA after we realized our mistake. We got going with about an hour of light left and made good time, climbing up a bikeable uphill, until we were passed by a flying Visit Penticton squad. We would end up playing leapfrog with them for most of the stage. It was a beautiful sunset in the mountainous desert, and by nightfall, we were engrossed by a beautiful night sky and what looked like controlled brushfires in the mountains. At 10 p.m., I was struggling with sleepmonsters, so when we passed through a small town, we decided to stop at what looked like the only store, where around six other teams were hanging out. The shopkeeper was busy cooking up some fresh fried potatoes, which he doused in vinegar and salt, a tasty treat. We set back out, revived, and cruised for the next three hours at 20+kph in a paceline through 60 kilometers of flat desert that we were mighty glad we were crossing at night. Then Scott got sleepy, but he pushed through for another hour, until around 1:30, when we all decided we couldn’t go any further without sleep and found a wooden fence to duck behind to snooze. As we were doing so, we heard a male voice scream, but then Meridianoraid cruised by and responded to our inquiry by telling us everything was OK. So we went to sleep in our bivvies on the ground for what was supposed to be 15 minutes, but because of a muted alarm, turned into 90. I woke up in a panic and roused the team and, after a moment of getting our bearings, we were very efficient in getting back on our bikes and continuing to crank out the kilometers.
The rest of the night was cold but the sunrise in the desert was sublime. The region had gotten more rain in the previous two months than it had in the nine years before that, and the beauty that blended into the painful heat of the day was on full display in the first light of the morning. We cruised on into the morning, finding a rare gas station where we stopped for coffee and meat pies and heard from Zach, the Visit Penticton media guy, that Laval on his team had crashed overnight, explaining the sound we heard. Being a tough guy (Google him for proof), Laval was continuing on. Inspired, we pressed on ourselves, reaching a cool CP in an old church and then passing an incredible gigantic curvy rock formation. On our way into the TA, we saw a car stop in the distance, then a figure step out with a camera. As we got closer, we saw it was Kirsten Oliver. She casually dropped to one knee, nailed an awesome shot, and got back in the car, all seemingly in one motion. What a pro.
Arriving at the TA at around 1 p.m., we were once again greeted by our media team and Evan. We found some shade, got some food, TA’d, and agreed on a 3-hour snooze through the heat of the day, with a plan to race through the 65-kilometer trek, which we had heard from our friends from Hamilton – who unfortunately were back in the TA with a teammate with heatstroke when we arrived – was hot and very dry. Loaded up with water, we made our way out into the desert, working our way through a sort of gully up to a ridgeline, where we saw several teams; It never felt like we were alone in this race. There were always teams everywhere, and I didn’t love that, as I never really got that “out there” feeling I have loved in other expedition races I’ve done. But seeing other teams does raise my competitive hackles, and we tried to harness that energy in our push through the night. Going from CP 54 to 55, we decided to bushwhack instead of taking the safer, longer way around on roads, and I ruined that momentum a bit by insisting we were drifting right. That caused Scott and Kit to adjust left, which turned out to be way too far east. When we arrived at a farm, we realized we were lost. The co-navs did an amazing job of readjusting, but we probably lost 45 minutes here due to my mistake.
At CP 55, I took the passport and, lacking any secure place to secure it that was easily accessible, I hooked it to my chest strap. Soon after, I got very sleepy and drifted along in a bit of haze. Forty-five minutes later, I realized the passport was gone and panicked. We hustled back five minutes, where we had passed through a fence, and thank the gods, the passport was lying right by the fence, visible due to reflective tape on the pouch we had put it in. It was a huge relief and I joked that it gave us the bonus of a nice jolt of adrenaline, but Kit and Scott assured me they could have done without it.
Daylight began breaking for us on the way to CP 56. We lost a bit of time attacking too early, but got help from the Spanish team Itaca Aventura, who we learned had a teammate who was struggling with diarrhea. Soon after, Scott began to complain of stomach discomfort. We agreed we should keep pushing to maximize our progress in the cool of the morning, but by CP 58 at 8:30 a.m., we knew we had to take a break. As we aired out our feet, we all peeked at the map and realized there wasn’t much more left in the stage. Just one big climb and one big descent, no more than 15 kilometers, 20 tops. It gave us hope we might be able to get into the TA before anything worse happened with Scott. But not long after we got back on the trail, Scott needed a 20-minute emergency bathroom break. As we began to climb, Scott’s condition worsened – inside of two hours, he took on the visage of a zombie, not helped by the thick coating of zinc oxide smeared over his face. At the top, Scott essentially collapsed on the trail and fell asleep. But not for long, as he woke up to what I’ll just term a bowel surprise. Scott became much smellier after that. I volunteered to take his pack while Kit nursed him downhill in slow spurts (sorry…). It took us five hours to get down what should have been a two-hour descent, and there wasn’t a single tree for shade along the entire route. Just prior to the TA, we crossed a stream, and Scott stripped naked and dropped in, just as Visit Penticton walked by. If his odor or nudity wasn’t enough to dissuade them from their original idea of cooling off in the stream, watching his underpants float by definitely did the trick. All in all, Scott was a very sad sight coming into TA, and I for one was a bit relieved we had already gone unofficial so we could make an easy decision to let him get some good rest through the night.
Despite his river bath, Scott still badly needed a shower. Fortunately, the TA staff was amazing and was able to secure a towel, soap, and some comfy TA clothes for him. Kit and I set up the tent and bought some food from the local vendor. Without these local folks selling us local delectables, we would certainly have run out of food due to the severe weight limitations on the TA bins, even with being able to scavenge all of Evan’s uneaten food. While we ate, we made a plan. Scott was convinced he could continue with some help and at a slower pace. We agreed we would rather finish with Scott than without him, and we decided to let him sleep until 5 a.m. the next morning, giving him nine hours of sleep.
At 2:30 a.m., Kit and I woke up and got going on the maps, aided by instant coffee. We finished around 4:15 a.m., so we started doing everything we could to transition before waking Scott up. At 5, we woke him up, but given his state, it took him a while to get going, and we weren’t ready to leave until after 7 a.m. We bade the kind volunteers farewell and headed out on a nice doubletrack that quickly headed uphill. Thus began the climb of death, punctuated by stunning beauty as we occasionally turned around and looked at the view of the mountains behind us, and the Baviaans range all around us. It was one of the few times in the race I thought the course was truly beautiful, though the pictures I saw posted online proved that I was probably just in too much heat pain to notice much beyond my own misery. By noon, we were at CP 64, a bunkhouse with a shaded porch in a beautiful green notch in the mountains with three streams running by. We stopped to fill water and cooled off in the streams as we moved away from the refuge of the house into the now blazing heat, climbing just a bit more until we hit the spine of the Baviaans. There was a cruxy nav decision to be made here, and we saw the four other teams around us all take different routes. After some back and forth, Kit made the call to take the nicest-looking, most direct route. and it was a great call. The road was good and, best of all, it took us through a bunch of bikeable river crossings that were between shoe and hip deep, all through a steep-walled canyon. Stunning and so fun.
At the bottom, a drone popped up out of nowhere, and Scott got the idea to follow it back to its base, which was around 400 meters down the road, where a jeep with an Expedition Africa logo on it was parked in the driveway of a store. We stopped in and were greeted by a film crew and a friendly mom and pop shop selling cold sodas and a South African bread and butter plus sugar treat known as rooster koek. Scott went to lie down in the cool interior of the house in front of a fan while Kit and I did an interview where Kit incongruously compared the Baviaans to the Green Mountains of Vermont (a sign the heat was getting to her as badly as it was to me). We stayed for around 45 minutes, but got motivated to leave when we heard there was another American team coming in. We still had pride and had settled on the goal of being the second U.S. team to get to the finish line (after our elite friends at Bend Racing), even if we were unofficial.
The road out was hilly and hot, and Scott – typically strong as a bull, with a wry sense of humor and a never-say-die attitude – was struggling mightily, looking weak and forlorn. Kit and I tried our best to help him out, but Scott was a hero in getting himself through this stage, pushing through unfathomable discomfort. We forded another beautiful river and then had a good climb back up to a plateau, where we did as good of an imitation of an effective paceline as we could muster. The sunset was magnificent, especially because we noticed all the mountains were at this point behind us. As it got dark, a big truck came at us along the quiet one-lane dirt road. As it drove by, it was like the helicopter crash scene in Black Hawk Down – in an instant, we were all blown sideways and lost in a thick cloud of dust, illuminated by the truck’s red brake lights. As soon as we all realized we were alive and unharmed, we all simultaneously broke out into uncontrolled laughter, I think partially in response to the joy of still being alive and partially just due to brain malfunction due to intense overstimulation.
Down the road, Kit did some excellent navigation to another river crossing, then we got to an intersection near CP 67, where we stopped for a second to check the maps. We heard a man’s voice calling to us from a nearby trailer and saw he had a wispy beard and a haggard look. Kit and Scott looked part skeptical, part horrified. “I’ll be the sacrifice,” I told them, thinking there was a 50 percent chance this guy was a serial killer. As I walked over, glad I was too dazed from eight days of racing to care much whether I was brutally stabbed to death, I saw the guy had brand new sky blue sneakers on – the same shoes Merrell had supplied as a gift to all the volunteers. “Well,” I thought to myself, “Either this guy is affiliated with this race somehow or he has murdered a volunteer and taken his shoes.” He told me he knew we were looking for a checkpoint and pointed behind him. “It’s that way around 100 meters,” he said. I called for Kit and Scott to bike over, and because they love and trust me, they did. We began chatting with the guy, who said his name was Pizzazz. “Pizzazz?” I thought? Strange name for a guy who lives on his own in a trailer in the middle of the desert. He was wearing a windbreaker with “South African Underwater Hockey Team 1995” printed on it. Scott seemed to think that was a real thing, and it turns out, according to Pizzazz, that it was, and that he had traveled to Canada to compete in the underwater hockey world championship in 1995. Small world, Scott is from Canada! They bonded over that, and then Pizzazz said we were one of the nicer teams he had met. An Ecuadorian team had run from him for three kilometers before he caught up with them! We stifled our laughter imagining the horror those poor Ecuadorians must have experienced. Then we thanked Pizzazz profusely for his help and biked on, still half-wondering if we were about to fall into a pit of punji sticks.
Into the night we went, through a rough-cut sidehill and then up and over a hill into a chilly wind. The final few hours of the ride took us through a wind farm where we were haunted by the whir of spinning turbines, and then a final stretch of agricultural terrain before reaching the TA at around 1 a.m., greeted by the indomitable Ashley, who sacrificed a night of sleep to see us.
If we were still racing competitively, we would have considered a quick TA, but Scott was still a mess, and with Kit our sole functioning navigator, we opted to rest for a few hours. We were not the only ones – the TA tent was full of sleeping teams. Actually, I was a bit amazed that so many teams would sleep just 10 hours from the finish line. But there were rumors the section was tricky navigationally, and I think many of them followed our thinking that it would be best to tackle the section in the daytime.
We got some sandwiches from the restaurant nearby, then liberated some mattresses from a team that got up to leave and settled into a 2.5-hour sleep, planning to wake at 4:30 a.m. for a 5 a.m. departure. That turned into 5:20 a.m. due to a bit of general dishevelment, but we headed out with excitement we had made it to the final leg. The route took through a trail cut through hedgerows growing on dunes near the sea, with occasional beach walks and stunning views of the ocean hitting the coast. There had been an exodus from the TA at daybreak and we were with a bunch of teams for a while, until Scott needed another bathroom break. Soon after, Scott said he felt better, and in a burst of energy, we all took off, Kit leading the way, blazing a path right to the difficult CP 72, passing through several deep, cold pools of water. We jogged to CP 73 and 74, and were on the right track to CP 75 when Truffle Hunters, who we were traveling with, spotted it around mile out from a highpoint on a dune and kindly pointed it out to us. We nearly got tripped up by CP 76, following several other teams along the wrong trail, but Kit caught the mistake very quickly. Once we found 76, it was a straight shot along the coast to the last few CPs, including one at a picturesque lighthouse we had biked to in our pre-race ride, where we saw our media crew and walked with them the final kilometer to the finish at the Cape Saint Francis resort, just as it was getting really hot out once again – I was tempted to jump in the pool at our condo before going to the finish. We came into the finish chute behind two other teams and had to wait several minutes for our turn to cross. When we finally got our turn, we were handed country flags and a bottle of Lubanzi sparkling wine, enabling me to do my first-ever champagne shower, which I feel like I executed pretty nicely. Stepping down from the stage, we were ushered into the hotel’s restaurant for lunch – pizza, pasta, burgers, so much good food! And beer! Blessed cold beer! Absolute heaven.
Scott and Kit both seemed more keen to get to bed than to eat, and they took off pretty quickly, so I helped them out by polishing off their meals. Then tiredness overcame me as well and I staggered back to the condo with Evan and Emily, unsuccessfully tried to scrape off some of the grime created by my gobs of sunscreen mixing with desert dust, and staggered to my bed to pass out.
We went out for a fancy dinner that night and celebrated our full-course finish while commiserating our unofficial status and Evan’s injury. The next day was full of eating and packing, and the night was a fun one, with Mari Chandler and heard about her heroic come-from-behind second place finish with Vidaraid, amid the cheers of the South Africans watching the Rugby World Cup final (South Africa won). The morning was brutal, with a 3 a.m. wakeup for a 4 a.m. shuttle to the airport, but the day got better as I got to spend it with two of my AR heroes, Mari and Dan from Bend, doing a very lazy tour of Cape Town’s beaches and restaurants. Then an overnight flight home, a late morning arrival into Portland, and back to work for Monday afternoon. Almost as if the craziness of the prior two weeks had just been a desert mirage…
Post-race notes: Out of this epic race of endurance, I emerged with so much pride for our team – very solid as a group, amazing people with quirky, lovable personalities, wonderfully capable of overcoming adversity, still steadily improving. Scott was a blast to race with, so tough and well-rounded in all disciplines, and boasting an extensive repertoire of classic ‘90s jokes from Homestar Runner, Beavis and Butthead, and Kids in the Hall quotes to boot. Kit blew me away with her performance in this race, staying strong through the whole race and always making decisions that most effectively moved the team forward. Both of them navigated superbly. Poor Evan didn’t get to achieve what he set out to, but he’ll have plenty of future opportunities to get revenge.
Looking back, the 2023 season was a really good one for Strong Machine, even with our unofficial status in ARWC. We got our teams across the full courses at Expedition Canada (7th overall), Nordic Islands AR (12th overall), and ARWC (I’m counting it). We won two USARA Regional Championship races (Shenandoah Epic and The Longest Day), we placed a team top 5 at Nationals, were high up in the year-end points ranking. We got our world ranking up to #19 (yes, we know this is mostly a participation trophy. But if you think it’s so easy, why don’t you try it?).
Despite all that, I think all of us came away feeling a bit unsatisfied with this season. And that’s a good sign. It means we’re hungry for more, and with a relatively young team, I’m positive we will continue to improve both in our performances and our results in 2024 and beyond.
Sixteen hours is a long time to be stuck in a middle seat, and that was just one of three flights, two buses, and one taxi ride (each way) it required to get to the Cape Saint Francis Resort in the South Africa’s Eastern Cape, the race’s host location. But AR has taught our team how to suffer gracefully, and we were more excited than destroyed upon arrival. Best of all, all our equipment arrived with us, so we were able to enjoy the atmosphere of arriving to a new place while seeing so many familiar faces, including Jose Pires, Ajita Madan and Sayeesha Kirana, who greeted us at the airport.
A good night’s sleep in our amazing beachfront condo later, we took the morning to do our shopping, finding that even in rural South Africa, we were able to purchase an amazing assortment of flavored potato chips (Greek lamb, garlic bread, smoked beef, green curry, chorizo, and my personal favorite, “Chakalaka”). We began sorting gear and food, then over the next two days, performed our registration and gear-check duties, got our TA bins (with very restrictive 25-kg weight limits that caused us all of problems both in deciding what to pack and then suffering the consequences of those decisions during the race), and received an outline of the course, which revealed a lot of very long sections.
The day before the race was the flag parade. It was fun to finally participate in one after watching so many of them over the years. After the ceremony, we received our race booklet and were able to get a better feel for the flow of the race. That night, we made a plan to sleep three hours every night after the first night, try to survive the long foot sections, and be aggressive on the bike sections, which we thought was our strength. Well, even the best plans fall apart upon first contact with the enemy…
Race morning began at 4 a.m., but we were able to grab some good coffee from the Nespresso cart and we preordered breakfast sandwiches, so it wasn’t such dire straits. The two-hour bus ride ended in a parking lot where our bike boxes were waiting. We had no idea where we were but the locals seemed excited. Turned out it was the Addo Elephant Park, which is known for its huge sand dunes on the Indian Ocean, and its elephants (though we never saw any). We built up our bikes, mapped out the first stage, and got back on the buses for the additional 1.5-hour bus ride to the start.
We reemerged from the buses into the warming glare of the African sun. Looking around, we saw the start line on an imposing-looking hill. And not much shade. It was an accurate portent of the nine days to come. We had been told to carry as much water as possible, so we were loaded up with four liters each, though we second-guessed this decision when we saw Chris Forne dumping out half his stores at the start. We walked to the start line with Marika and Simon from Greener AR, chatting about the forthcoming Arthur the King movie (Simon was on Mikael Lindnord’s Peak Performance team at ARWC 2014, where the story was born), and before we knew it, we were counting down the seconds before the drums announced the start of the toughest race of our lives.
The race began at 11 a.m. with African drummers, drones overhead, and a big screaming crowd (for AR standards). The first trek was 56 kilometers and we estimated it would take us at least 10 hours to complete. With 109 teams at the start, it was the biggest conga line I had ever participated in as we made our way through some fields and along forested tracks. It was already hot and we tried to manage our effort by maintaining a fast walk/trot without burning up. After a few hours, we found a concrete water cistern, and following Stephan’s advice, we filled up some bottles. The water was absolutely nasty tasting – I compared it to drinking hot carbonated sweat. We worried we were going to be stuck with this type of water through the rest of the race, but fortunately things got better.
Later on, we ran into the fab photographer and friend Kirstin Oliver and she got a great shot of us running along the track to a fenced gate. We squeezed through one at a time and after we were all through, Kirstin started laughing maniacally and swung the unlocked gate open and let herself through. We continued along and got pretty good at hopping or ducking fences – they lined every property along the whole course – but we didn’t realize we had hundreds left ahead of us. We traveled a bit farther and then hit a steep sand dune, with Emily and Ashley waiting at the top. The view was expansive – white dunes and the azure, white-capped Indian Ocean. Our shoes were full of sand by the time we got to the ocean, so we took five minutes to clean them out before Kit led us on a six-kph forced march trying to stay as close as possible to the ocean, where the sand was firm, but dodging waves along the way. We kept up a brisk pace, at the point of walking so fast it was almost painful, until we finally reached a river crossing (we smelled something dead and later learned a fin whale had washed up on shore there). The water was on the colder side of refreshing, but the biggest scare was nearly losing Kit to a swifter-than-expected current. Fortunately, two swarthy South Africans came to her rescue, and we made our way up onto more sand dunes on the far side of the river.
We trekked for at least an hour before we realized we had missed a CP and had to turn back. The checkpoints were 8.5x11 pieces of paper taped onto a cardboard backing, and some were not reflective, so they were very easy to miss – a nuisance for us through the entire race. We had been on the right route and if it had been an orange and white orienteering flag, we definitely would have nailed it, as we were following the elephant tracks of at least 50 teams ahead of us. But oh well, we had to backtrack. The mix-up cost us about an hour, then we made our way forward again on familiar ground until the second and final river crossing, which we hit around midnight. This crossing was a bit longer, and we later found out it featured sharks (I may have felt one brush against my leg – definitely a fish at least) but we made our way across without major problems and got into the TA ready to get into dry clothes and our bicycles ASAP.
The TA was busy (with only nine TAs in the race and so many teams, every TA was busy), and even though we had staged our bikes, at 1:07, this wasn’t our fastest transition (the leaders transitioned in 30-40 minutes). We were slow to get mapping and we indulged in a couple of pizzas. But when we finally said our goodbyes to Ashley and Emily and got going on the 181-kilometer stage, we were motivated and hungry to make up time. We got through a piece of tricky nav right out of TA and hit a dirt road, where we began hopscotching with a South African team. Around 10 kilometers down the road, we began passing them for the fifth time just as we hit a slight downhill and some big tire ruts. Riding third, Evan rode up one side of a rut, got off balance, and had no escape, as he was stuck in a 30-kph paceline with another team taking up the rest of the road. He pinballed around the rut three times and then went down on his left side and his head. Riding fourth, I was lucky to avoid running into him.
We’ve all crashed our bikes in adventure races before, and I’ve seen Evan go down harder several times, but this one took him out. Kit nearly immediately diagnosed a concussion and suspected broken collarbone, and she proved right on both counts, though even I could have diagnosed that something was wrong with Evan’s brain when he kept repeating, ad nauseum, “I don’t remember falling” at least 50 times. After confirming as a team we needed to make the call, we did, and RD Heidi Muller was kind even as I woke her up, saying she would get a medic out to us ASAP. I then called Emily and uttered those cliché word, “Everything’s OK but … “ She woke up Ashley and the two of them rendezvoused with the medic at TA 1 and headed out to pick Evan up.
While we waited – we were stopped for at least two hours, maybe three –at least 20 teams passed us, the first few at scary speeds due to the downhill until we put out some warning lights shining on a backpack up the road. Once Evan regained his composure, he got sad. We all did a bit. But for myself and I think for Kit and Scott, it was pretty matter-of-fact – Evan was too badly hurt to continue, so it was a simple decision. Scott, Kit, and I huddled to decide whether we wanted to continue. The tough thing about AR is it meant our team was officially disqualified, but Heidi said there would still be a ranking for all teams who finished, even those with a dropped teammate. We agreed to continue on to TA 2 and regroup there.
As Evan disappeared down the road in the big truck Emily had rented, we gathered our stuff and continued down the dirt road. Not more than 30 minutes after we started, it got light out. We could see we were entering an agricultural area, with greenhouses on both sides of the road that it became clear as it got light were housing thousands upon thousands of lemon trees. Slowly, the day got sunny and hotter. We did a big climb and stopped quickly for a bathroom break and water stop at a nice-looking roadside hotel that was serving what smelled like a delicious breakfast. The day got even hotter from there, especially as we did another climb, where we were greeted at the top by South Africa’s most dangerous snake, a puff adder, idling on the road. It slithered away as I tried to photograph it, perhaps scared off by Kit simultaneously yelling at me to stay the hell away.
It was misty at the top of the climb and we enjoyed the cooler temps for a bit until we dropped off and hit what felt like a desert floor – hot and mostly flat. We had to stop and press a button to open a sliding gate of a fenced-off game reserve, and we got our hopes up we might see a bunch of cool animals, but were mostly disappointed, with the exception of Scott spotting a herd of five ostriches zipping across the savannah at a remarkable pace.
We then rode through some rolling hills and a tricky checkpoint at a windmill behind a fence, where we searched a bit too early. We took a 10-minute break at a house in the shade where we got water and lay down for a few minutes, then pushed hard through a very flat section, where we pacelined at a solid 22 kph even with a gusty sidewind. We found ourselves around a lot of South African teams, and it became obvious to us they were getting help from their “media’ teams, with one team stopping in front of us under a shaded tent for a crock-pot lunch. I suggested we should stop and invite ourselves since by AR rules, they would have to share with us, but we wanted to get on with the stage and so we kept pedaling. The final 40 kilometers of the stage got very slow, even though the heat had finally broken with the setting of the sun. Kit especially seemed to be flagging here, but Scott came through with a solid tow that got us into the town of Somerset, where our pace quickened after we got an escort from some local yokels who were blasting music, taking pictures of us, and driving dangerously close to us.
We arrived at around 7:30 p.m. into the TA at a soccer stadium, and were immediately greeted by Heidi, who gave us an update on Evan, who she said was fine, just a bit too broken to race. She also let us know a big storm was coming in, scheduled to arrive around 2 a.m. We got some delicious spaghetti Bolognese and some sodas from the nice school ladies who were running the food operation, then had a chat about what we wanted to do about the rest of the race. Kit had shifted her mindset a bit from her initial thought of potentially wanting to drop, but thought it was best to take a sleep in TA. Scott and I preferred to get going to try to get a big climb done before the storm rolled in. But we deferred to Kit’s need to sleep, and so she went off to find a good spot while Scott and I finished packing everything up. A few moments later, Kit came running back to us telling us it was too loud to sleep in TA and that we should get going. So we packed our sleep stuff back up, along with our tent, which we figured we would need for the rain, and got out of TA at around 10 p.m.
The first few kilometers out of TA took us through the most urban part of the race, with a KFC and bars overflowing with people crowding in to watch the rugby world championship. We turned off into a park and wound ourselves up a maze of trails, one of which led up the mountain we needed to climb. It took us a bit, but we found the right trail and began hiking up. And up and up, steeper and steeper. Along the way, Kit began getting really loose with exhaustion. Eventually she screamed the memorable line, “I’m really angry right now but I’m not angry at you!”
At 2 a.m., we finally topped out, and we collected the semi-hidden CP before backtracking a bit to a good campsite we had spotted. We got the tent set up, snuggled up into our sleep systems, and fell asleep just as the first drops of rain hit the rainfly. We got awoken at one point during the night by a sonorous bass voice walking by our tent, and then exclaiming his pleasure at having enjoyed a lovely “bushycock,” which we surmised was the South African equivalent of a huge poop in the woods.
We got up and going by 7 a.m., and emerged into a fully rainy day. We ran into a bunch of teams on our way past the CP for the second time, including East Wind, which had spent nearly a full day in the previous TA after one of their teammates suffered heatstroke. They took off at a run soon after we saw them, and they scored one of the fastest times on this section, and ended up 15th overall, which was quite a comeback.
We made our way across some fields and through some fences to a faint depression, which, as we got closer, revealed itself to be a massive canyon with a waterfall and the site of CP 29 and a rappel down to CP 30. We jumped on the ropes without any wait and made our way down the slippery rock pitch to a lagoon, where we refilled on water and then began an extremely sketchy bouldering downclimb on river right. After the next team came down (Team Burn, which included our NIAR friend Maria Leijerstrom), the guys manning the ropes noticed where we had gone and told us to get to river left, where there was a trail that had been completely hidden to us. It cost us around 20 minutes and just a couple of near-death experiences, so we were only mildly annoyed. We found CP 30 400 meters further down the trail, which caused us some additional frustration because the small white paper with the letter we needed to identify was positioned at an angle where it could barely be seen.
We finally got out of the canyon and began a long slog of a day, moving across flat ground, then a big downhill, then a huge uphill, until we got to the trig point (hilltop/summit) at CP 34. The trails had become muddy, slidy messes and the going was tough, with the only entertainment some gigantic earthworms about three feet long and the diameter of a cigar. It was the first of our many encounters with oversized insects in the race.
At the high point, there was a punishing wind and thick fog, then we worked our way over to the tricky CP 35, down a cold and windy valley and over and under about 50 fences. On the way to 36, we trekked past several structures, all occupied by lucky teams who were able to catch a break out of the wind and rain. We began climbing and met up with three friendly Brazilian guys who had lost their fourth earlier in the race. After a long climb, Kit had the great idea of stopping for a bit to put on all our remaining clothing (for me, that consisted of my one rappel glove and my Moxie gaitors). We resumed our hiking and as we got to the summit crest, the wind picked up from stiff to take-your-breath away. I thought we would be dropping out of the wind and fog after the CP, but the route forward involved seven more kilometers of ridgeline. Scott and I, hanging back while Kit navigated, were banged into the fence on our left repeatedly by the wind. We began shivering uncontrollably and our hands became useless frozen blocks. The Brazilians looked like they were bailing off the ridge, but saw where we were going and reversed course to catch us back up. Worried we were getting into a dangerous situation, Scott and I implored Kit to get us off the ridge. We hooked a hard left and descended quickly, but the wind still had a piercing cold steadiness to it even 1,500 feet down from the ridge. Eventually we made it into what looked like a small village on the map and sought out the nicest building in the neighborhood, a house that had barred windows, but it was locked. I checked out the garage, which appeared as if several humans had been held captive there for some time, while the Brazilians had better luck, finding an outbuilding that was semi-bombed out but serviceable as an emergency shelter. We walked around the village a bit more, finding more bombed out buildings, none suitable to sleep in. We headed back to the outbuilding with Scott urging us to crash there, but I insisted on putting up the tent, concerned about a lack of livable space in the outbuilding and playing a hunch I would sleep better in a comfortable shelter. Kit joined me in the tent and we stripped off our clothes, then set our kitchen timer for three hours and tried to spoon for warmth, but after a bit, Kit bailed and ran off to the outbuilding. I remained in the tent, and miraculously, after a cold hour or more, finally warmed up enough sleep, even with the wind blowing steadily through the tent.
The alarm went off at 5 a.m., and I went out to wake Kit and Scott up. It had mostly stopped raining, but it was still cloudy, cold, and spitting a bit. We very reluctantly left the warmth of our sleeping bags and, even more reluctantly, put our soaked clothes back on, packed up the tent, and headed down the road and away from that godforsaken place. Our pain and suffering eased over the next several hours as it warmed a bit and we even got a nice view of an expansive desert valley. We continued to head downhill until we reached what felt like the desert floor, where we got one CP in a riverbed, saw a bunch of teams that looked, as we were, in various stages of dishevelment, then proceeded grumpily uphill to nab one more CP before sidehilling to the last road into the TA, which still was around three hours away. Fortunately, we got to kill some of that time talking to the friendly VAC Ultra team, and at the last CP, once it had gotten good and hot and we were just about out of gas, Emily, Evan, Ashley and Zac, the team media from Visit Penticton, jumped out from the underbrush, giving us a wonderful surprise. There is perhaps no better sight on earth than seeing loved ones in an expedition race, and to be greeted at arguably our lowest moment of the race was a huge boost.
They followed us into the TA, which was a plush resort (or at least appeared so to us after roughly 40 hours on Stage 3) and had a kitchen serving hot food and cold drinks, and rooms for rent, which we happily took advantage of, as we arrived too late in the afternoon to think about making it through the dark zone on Leg 5, the single paddling stage in the race.
The room we rented was fantastic and we all enjoyed a shower and a solid 7-hour sleep. When the alarm went off at 1 a.m., I was surprised to feel energetic. It helped that our media crew had recruited Marika Wagner, whose Greener AR team had to abandon the race, to join us as our fourth for the kayaking. Scott and I shared some hot ramen and a Forever Fresh (so good!) for breakfast, and we all made it out the door by 2:15 a.m. Despite it being another trekking leg, it felt fresh to have Marika with us, and we largely enjoyed our trek, punctuated though it was by a 10-minute dunk through a swampy cornfield. We arrived in good spirits to TA 3 at 4:45 a.m., with a sleepy Ashley awaiting us.
There was a conga line to the water, and we got on last after about five or six teams went on in front of us. It was still quite cold out but the water was not freezing. We started with the heaviest rapid of the entire leg, and Marika and I almost dumped. Kit and Scott weren’t as lucky and they splashed in and had a long, bumpy ride downriver until they could collect themselves in an eddy. Surprisingly given her hatred of cold water, Kit remained in good spirits. There were a few more rapids to navigate at the top of the river but we got through them, and Marika and I quickly formed a good partnership in the boat that allowed me to feel like we were cruising along quickly, though the current and good conversation surely helped. The day warmed up and we passed several teams, and bunched up with others at the four portages on the stage. About two-thirds of the way through, we stopped with the Irish team Dar Dingle to help a local South African team that was struggling badly. We left them in a safer place and continued downstream, enjoying a fun paddle and the time off our legs. I won’t reveal exactly how many times Kit and Scott tipped, but it was roughly between one and three. The takeout came quicker than we expected and we made pretty good work of packing ourselves back up at TA 5 and walking the hot, shadeless three kilometers into TA 6, arriving at 2:40 p.m., greeted once again by a cheering Emily, Evan, and Ashley.
We set up in the shade of a truck, away from the yellow angry ball of death, as Scott has begun calling it. Kit immediately went inside the house to do maps and that seemed to be the best move, as this transition seemed faster than previous ones, even if we collectively forgot to fill Kit’s water bottles, which forced us to return one kilometer out from the TA after we realized our mistake. We got going with about an hour of light left and made good time, climbing up a bikeable uphill, until we were passed by a flying Visit Penticton squad. We would end up playing leapfrog with them for most of the stage. It was a beautiful sunset in the mountainous desert, and by nightfall, we were engrossed by a beautiful night sky and what looked like controlled brushfires in the mountains. At 10 p.m., I was struggling with sleepmonsters, so when we passed through a small town, we decided to stop at what looked like the only store, where around six other teams were hanging out. The shopkeeper was busy cooking up some fresh fried potatoes, which he doused in vinegar and salt, a tasty treat. We set back out, revived, and cruised for the next three hours at 20+kph in a paceline through 60 kilometers of flat desert that we were mighty glad we were crossing at night. Then Scott got sleepy, but he pushed through for another hour, until around 1:30, when we all decided we couldn’t go any further without sleep and found a wooden fence to duck behind to snooze. As we were doing so, we heard a male voice scream, but then Meridianoraid cruised by and responded to our inquiry by telling us everything was OK. So we went to sleep in our bivvies on the ground for what was supposed to be 15 minutes, but because of a muted alarm, turned into 90. I woke up in a panic and roused the team and, after a moment of getting our bearings, we were very efficient in getting back on our bikes and continuing to crank out the kilometers.
The rest of the night was cold but the sunrise in the desert was sublime. The region had gotten more rain in the previous two months than it had in the nine years before that, and the beauty that blended into the painful heat of the day was on full display in the first light of the morning. We cruised on into the morning, finding a rare gas station where we stopped for coffee and meat pies and heard from Zach, the Visit Penticton media guy, that Laval on his team had crashed overnight, explaining the sound we heard. Being a tough guy (Google him for proof), Laval was continuing on. Inspired, we pressed on ourselves, reaching a cool CP in an old church and then passing an incredible gigantic curvy rock formation. On our way into the TA, we saw a car stop in the distance, then a figure step out with a camera. As we got closer, we saw it was Kirsten Oliver. She casually dropped to one knee, nailed an awesome shot, and got back in the car, all seemingly in one motion. What a pro.
Arriving at the TA at around 1 p.m., we were once again greeted by our media team and Evan. We found some shade, got some food, TA’d, and agreed on a 3-hour snooze through the heat of the day, with a plan to race through the 65-kilometer trek, which we had heard from our friends from Hamilton – who unfortunately were back in the TA with a teammate with heatstroke when we arrived – was hot and very dry. Loaded up with water, we made our way out into the desert, working our way through a sort of gully up to a ridgeline, where we saw several teams; It never felt like we were alone in this race. There were always teams everywhere, and I didn’t love that, as I never really got that “out there” feeling I have loved in other expedition races I’ve done. But seeing other teams does raise my competitive hackles, and we tried to harness that energy in our push through the night. Going from CP 54 to 55, we decided to bushwhack instead of taking the safer, longer way around on roads, and I ruined that momentum a bit by insisting we were drifting right. That caused Scott and Kit to adjust left, which turned out to be way too far east. When we arrived at a farm, we realized we were lost. The co-navs did an amazing job of readjusting, but we probably lost 45 minutes here due to my mistake.
At CP 55, I took the passport and, lacking any secure place to secure it that was easily accessible, I hooked it to my chest strap. Soon after, I got very sleepy and drifted along in a bit of haze. Forty-five minutes later, I realized the passport was gone and panicked. We hustled back five minutes, where we had passed through a fence, and thank the gods, the passport was lying right by the fence, visible due to reflective tape on the pouch we had put it in. It was a huge relief and I joked that it gave us the bonus of a nice jolt of adrenaline, but Kit and Scott assured me they could have done without it.
Daylight began breaking for us on the way to CP 56. We lost a bit of time attacking too early, but got help from the Spanish team Itaca Aventura, who we learned had a teammate who was struggling with diarrhea. Soon after, Scott began to complain of stomach discomfort. We agreed we should keep pushing to maximize our progress in the cool of the morning, but by CP 58 at 8:30 a.m., we knew we had to take a break. As we aired out our feet, we all peeked at the map and realized there wasn’t much more left in the stage. Just one big climb and one big descent, no more than 15 kilometers, 20 tops. It gave us hope we might be able to get into the TA before anything worse happened with Scott. But not long after we got back on the trail, Scott needed a 20-minute emergency bathroom break. As we began to climb, Scott’s condition worsened – inside of two hours, he took on the visage of a zombie, not helped by the thick coating of zinc oxide smeared over his face. At the top, Scott essentially collapsed on the trail and fell asleep. But not for long, as he woke up to what I’ll just term a bowel surprise. Scott became much smellier after that. I volunteered to take his pack while Kit nursed him downhill in slow spurts (sorry…). It took us five hours to get down what should have been a two-hour descent, and there wasn’t a single tree for shade along the entire route. Just prior to the TA, we crossed a stream, and Scott stripped naked and dropped in, just as Visit Penticton walked by. If his odor or nudity wasn’t enough to dissuade them from their original idea of cooling off in the stream, watching his underpants float by definitely did the trick. All in all, Scott was a very sad sight coming into TA, and I for one was a bit relieved we had already gone unofficial so we could make an easy decision to let him get some good rest through the night.
Despite his river bath, Scott still badly needed a shower. Fortunately, the TA staff was amazing and was able to secure a towel, soap, and some comfy TA clothes for him. Kit and I set up the tent and bought some food from the local vendor. Without these local folks selling us local delectables, we would certainly have run out of food due to the severe weight limitations on the TA bins, even with being able to scavenge all of Evan’s uneaten food. While we ate, we made a plan. Scott was convinced he could continue with some help and at a slower pace. We agreed we would rather finish with Scott than without him, and we decided to let him sleep until 5 a.m. the next morning, giving him nine hours of sleep.
At 2:30 a.m., Kit and I woke up and got going on the maps, aided by instant coffee. We finished around 4:15 a.m., so we started doing everything we could to transition before waking Scott up. At 5, we woke him up, but given his state, it took him a while to get going, and we weren’t ready to leave until after 7 a.m. We bade the kind volunteers farewell and headed out on a nice doubletrack that quickly headed uphill. Thus began the climb of death, punctuated by stunning beauty as we occasionally turned around and looked at the view of the mountains behind us, and the Baviaans range all around us. It was one of the few times in the race I thought the course was truly beautiful, though the pictures I saw posted online proved that I was probably just in too much heat pain to notice much beyond my own misery. By noon, we were at CP 64, a bunkhouse with a shaded porch in a beautiful green notch in the mountains with three streams running by. We stopped to fill water and cooled off in the streams as we moved away from the refuge of the house into the now blazing heat, climbing just a bit more until we hit the spine of the Baviaans. There was a cruxy nav decision to be made here, and we saw the four other teams around us all take different routes. After some back and forth, Kit made the call to take the nicest-looking, most direct route. and it was a great call. The road was good and, best of all, it took us through a bunch of bikeable river crossings that were between shoe and hip deep, all through a steep-walled canyon. Stunning and so fun.
At the bottom, a drone popped up out of nowhere, and Scott got the idea to follow it back to its base, which was around 400 meters down the road, where a jeep with an Expedition Africa logo on it was parked in the driveway of a store. We stopped in and were greeted by a film crew and a friendly mom and pop shop selling cold sodas and a South African bread and butter plus sugar treat known as rooster koek. Scott went to lie down in the cool interior of the house in front of a fan while Kit and I did an interview where Kit incongruously compared the Baviaans to the Green Mountains of Vermont (a sign the heat was getting to her as badly as it was to me). We stayed for around 45 minutes, but got motivated to leave when we heard there was another American team coming in. We still had pride and had settled on the goal of being the second U.S. team to get to the finish line (after our elite friends at Bend Racing), even if we were unofficial.
The road out was hilly and hot, and Scott – typically strong as a bull, with a wry sense of humor and a never-say-die attitude – was struggling mightily, looking weak and forlorn. Kit and I tried our best to help him out, but Scott was a hero in getting himself through this stage, pushing through unfathomable discomfort. We forded another beautiful river and then had a good climb back up to a plateau, where we did as good of an imitation of an effective paceline as we could muster. The sunset was magnificent, especially because we noticed all the mountains were at this point behind us. As it got dark, a big truck came at us along the quiet one-lane dirt road. As it drove by, it was like the helicopter crash scene in Black Hawk Down – in an instant, we were all blown sideways and lost in a thick cloud of dust, illuminated by the truck’s red brake lights. As soon as we all realized we were alive and unharmed, we all simultaneously broke out into uncontrolled laughter, I think partially in response to the joy of still being alive and partially just due to brain malfunction due to intense overstimulation.
Down the road, Kit did some excellent navigation to another river crossing, then we got to an intersection near CP 67, where we stopped for a second to check the maps. We heard a man’s voice calling to us from a nearby trailer and saw he had a wispy beard and a haggard look. Kit and Scott looked part skeptical, part horrified. “I’ll be the sacrifice,” I told them, thinking there was a 50 percent chance this guy was a serial killer. As I walked over, glad I was too dazed from eight days of racing to care much whether I was brutally stabbed to death, I saw the guy had brand new sky blue sneakers on – the same shoes Merrell had supplied as a gift to all the volunteers. “Well,” I thought to myself, “Either this guy is affiliated with this race somehow or he has murdered a volunteer and taken his shoes.” He told me he knew we were looking for a checkpoint and pointed behind him. “It’s that way around 100 meters,” he said. I called for Kit and Scott to bike over, and because they love and trust me, they did. We began chatting with the guy, who said his name was Pizzazz. “Pizzazz?” I thought? Strange name for a guy who lives on his own in a trailer in the middle of the desert. He was wearing a windbreaker with “South African Underwater Hockey Team 1995” printed on it. Scott seemed to think that was a real thing, and it turns out, according to Pizzazz, that it was, and that he had traveled to Canada to compete in the underwater hockey world championship in 1995. Small world, Scott is from Canada! They bonded over that, and then Pizzazz said we were one of the nicer teams he had met. An Ecuadorian team had run from him for three kilometers before he caught up with them! We stifled our laughter imagining the horror those poor Ecuadorians must have experienced. Then we thanked Pizzazz profusely for his help and biked on, still half-wondering if we were about to fall into a pit of punji sticks.
Into the night we went, through a rough-cut sidehill and then up and over a hill into a chilly wind. The final few hours of the ride took us through a wind farm where we were haunted by the whir of spinning turbines, and then a final stretch of agricultural terrain before reaching the TA at around 1 a.m., greeted by the indomitable Ashley, who sacrificed a night of sleep to see us.
If we were still racing competitively, we would have considered a quick TA, but Scott was still a mess, and with Kit our sole functioning navigator, we opted to rest for a few hours. We were not the only ones – the TA tent was full of sleeping teams. Actually, I was a bit amazed that so many teams would sleep just 10 hours from the finish line. But there were rumors the section was tricky navigationally, and I think many of them followed our thinking that it would be best to tackle the section in the daytime.
We got some sandwiches from the restaurant nearby, then liberated some mattresses from a team that got up to leave and settled into a 2.5-hour sleep, planning to wake at 4:30 a.m. for a 5 a.m. departure. That turned into 5:20 a.m. due to a bit of general dishevelment, but we headed out with excitement we had made it to the final leg. The route took through a trail cut through hedgerows growing on dunes near the sea, with occasional beach walks and stunning views of the ocean hitting the coast. There had been an exodus from the TA at daybreak and we were with a bunch of teams for a while, until Scott needed another bathroom break. Soon after, Scott said he felt better, and in a burst of energy, we all took off, Kit leading the way, blazing a path right to the difficult CP 72, passing through several deep, cold pools of water. We jogged to CP 73 and 74, and were on the right track to CP 75 when Truffle Hunters, who we were traveling with, spotted it around mile out from a highpoint on a dune and kindly pointed it out to us. We nearly got tripped up by CP 76, following several other teams along the wrong trail, but Kit caught the mistake very quickly. Once we found 76, it was a straight shot along the coast to the last few CPs, including one at a picturesque lighthouse we had biked to in our pre-race ride, where we saw our media crew and walked with them the final kilometer to the finish at the Cape Saint Francis resort, just as it was getting really hot out once again – I was tempted to jump in the pool at our condo before going to the finish. We came into the finish chute behind two other teams and had to wait several minutes for our turn to cross. When we finally got our turn, we were handed country flags and a bottle of Lubanzi sparkling wine, enabling me to do my first-ever champagne shower, which I feel like I executed pretty nicely. Stepping down from the stage, we were ushered into the hotel’s restaurant for lunch – pizza, pasta, burgers, so much good food! And beer! Blessed cold beer! Absolute heaven.
Scott and Kit both seemed more keen to get to bed than to eat, and they took off pretty quickly, so I helped them out by polishing off their meals. Then tiredness overcame me as well and I staggered back to the condo with Evan and Emily, unsuccessfully tried to scrape off some of the grime created by my gobs of sunscreen mixing with desert dust, and staggered to my bed to pass out.
We went out for a fancy dinner that night and celebrated our full-course finish while commiserating our unofficial status and Evan’s injury. The next day was full of eating and packing, and the night was a fun one, with Mari Chandler and heard about her heroic come-from-behind second place finish with Vidaraid, amid the cheers of the South Africans watching the Rugby World Cup final (South Africa won). The morning was brutal, with a 3 a.m. wakeup for a 4 a.m. shuttle to the airport, but the day got better as I got to spend it with two of my AR heroes, Mari and Dan from Bend, doing a very lazy tour of Cape Town’s beaches and restaurants. Then an overnight flight home, a late morning arrival into Portland, and back to work for Monday afternoon. Almost as if the craziness of the prior two weeks had just been a desert mirage…
Post-race notes: Out of this epic race of endurance, I emerged with so much pride for our team – very solid as a group, amazing people with quirky, lovable personalities, wonderfully capable of overcoming adversity, still steadily improving. Scott was a blast to race with, so tough and well-rounded in all disciplines, and boasting an extensive repertoire of classic ‘90s jokes from Homestar Runner, Beavis and Butthead, and Kids in the Hall quotes to boot. Kit blew me away with her performance in this race, staying strong through the whole race and always making decisions that most effectively moved the team forward. Both of them navigated superbly. Poor Evan didn’t get to achieve what he set out to, but he’ll have plenty of future opportunities to get revenge.
Looking back, the 2023 season was a really good one for Strong Machine, even with our unofficial status in ARWC. We got our teams across the full courses at Expedition Canada (7th overall), Nordic Islands AR (12th overall), and ARWC (I’m counting it). We won two USARA Regional Championship races (Shenandoah Epic and The Longest Day), we placed a team top 5 at Nationals, were high up in the year-end points ranking. We got our world ranking up to #19 (yes, we know this is mostly a participation trophy. But if you think it’s so easy, why don’t you try it?).
Despite all that, I think all of us came away feeling a bit unsatisfied with this season. And that’s a good sign. It means we’re hungry for more, and with a relatively young team, I’m positive we will continue to improve both in our performances and our results in 2024 and beyond.
