Training Log Archive: Georgia

And a sleepy kayak to finish naming babies.

Kayak to Glenorchy.

Nothing to note.

MTB to halfwaybay

Made good progress through the road section after a café stop. The pie and frittata were awesome. Continued making good progress all the way to Walter Peak.

We made the decision as a group to try going round the lake shore from Walter Peak. There were a number of reasons why we decided to do this.
- It looked like a feasible route on the map and that the maps had been set up to offer the route choice given the marking of out of bounds areas etc
- We figured there was likely to be some sort of way to join the two dead end tracks together
- We felt we were not going to beat the other two teams on speed alone and had to do something different. There was little opportunity for this in this race so we took the only option.
- We figured it would make us of break us. It turned out it did neither.

Unfortunately we stuck to the lake shore and tried to traverse around the beaches rather than hunting for animal tracks up high through the scrub. It had looked like the lake option would have worked everywhere from Glenorchy until where we got stuck so that's why we tried it. We ended up stuck with deep water and cliffs and turned around. We tried briefly bashing up to find a track that a passing boat had mentioned but I think we had all lost heart by this stage and didn't want to waste more time. On reflection we probably should have left the bikes and bashed around for a bit. Instead we turned around, had a wee cry and went over the pass.

Luckily our lead was big enough that T7 and the weasels hadn't caught us and we were able to put a bit of time into them through their misfortune before transition. Left transition before they arrived much to our pleasure.

We rode pretty well for this whole ride. I was feeling quite happy and really enjoyed the bit from the saddle to transition. Finally felt like the work I had done on the bike prerace was paying off a bit.

Last trek Eyre mountains.

Brent and Stu did an ace job on the nav and we wasted little time. We took "warrens route" which might not have been the quickest but hard to resist a recommended route. 1hr sleep on lambing saddle. Freezing cold.

Got sore feet coming down the hill at the end but otherwise ok. I got a bit depressed thinking that we must have been passed while we slept which is a bit funny on reflection. It just didn't feel like we were moving that fast and surely Greig would be faster.

Race restart. The quite short race was now even shorter. Not really my favorite style of race. I meed to go overseas and do something more epic. This was feeling like a two day multisport race at this stage.

Upper Shotover paddling with Stu. This was a nice change to previous years canoeing with it all being in nice control and efficient. A fun section of river to paddle.

Despite maybe 8-9 teams coming in over night things seemed to fairly quickly sort themselves out into the order we had arrived in. Jo and Greig tried to keep up for awhile but had to stop and wait.

After the river there was bit of pointless abseiling to be done. We got through that pretty efficiently despite leaving our clipcard at the boats. I was a bit nervous the night before when we walked over the bridge and looked at the abseil but it all went pretty smoothly. My harness was a bit annoying to put on with cold hands and wet straps.

C • Negative Nancy 5

The wetsuit walk with the freaks for most of it. It turns out we had been quite cunning with what gear we took on this trek compared to other teams but they guys still had pretty heavy packs. It seemed like we were pretty smart having everyone with their own little pack and not trying to fit everything into big drybags. Just using our own little ones in the rafting was smart. A fairly uneventful walk although things got hot towards the end and there seemed to be a lot of hill climbing going on.

Commercial raft in the lower shotover. I think we were all feeling a bit wasted from the wetsuit walk so just took it easy down the river. I don't really remember much of this but I guess it was fun.

Moonlight track - Moke lake - Golddigger - 7mile

A return to the tracks I rode over summer with Em. I was a bit unco and useless to begin with but seemed to come right by the bike park. We overshot the control on golddigger by quite a bit and probably lost 10min, but then must have ridden well through the bike park as we seemed to catch up to Yealands again and meet them in transition. The bike park felt a bit pointless being a non-navigator. I can understand why people don't like orienteering in adventure racers. If you don't have a map it just feels like you are going round and round and round in circles. I think we actually were this time.

Mt Crichton

Fairly cleanly through the sneaky controls after overshooting the first "track". Sounds like everyone did. Then a pretty uneventful climb up and over Mt Crichton and down to the lake again. 2hrs sleep in transition in some bushes after this stage. I didn't really sleep very well. Was freezing cold and felt like I was awake the whole time. Heard Yealands and tiki tour transitioning about 30min after we went to sleep which probably didn't help me sleeping. I think I get too wound up in the race and that stops me sleeping very well. Maybe best not to sleep in transition. Also need warmer something to sleep in.