Adventure Racing race (Trekking) 28:00:00 [3] 54.0 km (31:07 / km)
shoes: Salomon Fellraiser yellow / bl
Stage 4 – Trekking 54km
The fastest expected time was going to be 17hrs for this trek but we immediately expected to take longer, setting a 20+ hour target for our food and drink planning. We made a quiet exit from transition (knowing that Team Euskat were also planning on leaving when we did) and managed to get away and to the first checkpoint without them being in sight. Once again we found ourselves in a position of only having a few hours of daylight left, and a tough section of navigation ahead of us. We thus tried to go at as fast a pace as possible, but this had to be tempered by the hot conditions that were exacerbated by the sandstone rock surroundings. We ended up crossing rivers on numerous occasions and made full use of these by immersing ourselves in them to bring our core body temperatures down.
We approached CP26 with the setting sun and the knowledge that CPs 26, 27 and 28 were going to be extremely challenging from a navigational point of view. All of these were in mixed terrain with sandstone outcrops surrounded by dense forest, some of it thorny, with only a handful of small footpaths / animal tracks shown on the map. With some careful navigation, we ticked off CP26 with no time loss and quickly moved onto CP27, successfully finding the indistinct path leading down to a small waterfall. We climbed out of there onto higher ground and used the last available light to see what the terrain looked like to CP28, which would be located on another small indistinct track going between two rock pinnacles. Although this was only 1km away, getting across the terrain proved difficult in the dark, whilst accessing the forest area around the checkpoint proved even harder. We first tried to find the small path from the north side, but were unable to find it in the dense forest. We then tried going in direct from the east, but the sandstone pinnacles and rocky landscape meant that there were big 50m cliffs between us and where we needed to be. After a short 1 hour sleep due to tiredness and the heat still radiating off the rocks even at night, we finally were able to find the indistinct track and access the checkpoint from the south side. We checked it sometime before 10pm but had an immediate feeling that our 1 hour of time loss looking for this CP could well be very acceptable compared to other teams trying to find this CP28 at night.
After CP28, the navigation got a bit easier, relative to CP28 at least. The high number of checkpoints on this leg meant that the navigators had to maintain high levels of concentration throughout, but Cyanosis pulled it off, with both the moderately difficult CPs 31 and 32 being located with no time loss. After that there were some longer stretches between CPs and the team found themselves approaching CP34 at sunrise. CP34 was on top of a mountain and required some decent rock climbing skills, but it was also only the first of 3 summit checkpoints before the next transition. With all three hills having dense forest covering their sides, progress was slow and the conditions tough with the combination of high humidity under the forest and the ever increasing temperatures. The second climb had only a very indistinct track whilst the final climb was straight up through the forest. It took the team another 7-8 hours to cover the final 10km into the transition for a final leg time of close to 27 hours! Definitely a trekking leg to remember.
After the tough trek we took a good rest in the transition. We arrived at 3pm, with slightly more than 3 hours of sunlight left. On this occasion however, we were content to hit the MTB at night as we could move a little quicker and we could do with the recovery period. We had a slight inkling that the gap behind us to 2nd place was quite big, as none of the media crews we had bumped into on the mountain tops had any interest in staying in place for the next team, instead choosing to follow us on the leg. Given how long it would have taken and the effort expended by them to get to some of these points, their reluctance to stay in place was notable.