Lots of news for you after speaking to Karyn (with Roy in the background) on the phone …
Main piece of news was obviously that Orionhealth.com made it to the transition area after the long mountain bike with about an hour and a half to go before they had to be out of the transition area for the midnight cut off. They were quote "completely knackered" and crawled straight into the support crew van to try to get some sleep out of the drizzle that had started falling. Karyn and Roy raced around while they rested packing up their gear and getting things organised for them … "waking them" 20 minutes before cut off.
The team departed at 11.55 which was when Nike ARRIVED into transition! Needless to say there was complete pandemonium as they performed the most rapid transition ever … hustling out of the TA carrying sleeping bags and mats amongst all the other gear they thought they'd need just in the nick of time to keep their race alive! Nike will need to carry all of the things that they took with them out of TA so this could be a bit of a nuisance for them. Apparently and understandably they were looking pretty tired once the adrenalin of getting out of TA reduced a bit.
Lundhags were not able to make the cut off so they can probably be considered out of the running for the top places now.
Orion headed off in the direction of a marquee (about 500m away from TA) where they may choose to stop out of the deteriorating weather for a bit more sleep. The transition had been really noisy with teams rushing around in various states of panic trying to get sorted before the cut off so Karyn wasn't sure how much of the hour the team were lying in the van was actually spent sleeping.
There are numerous cut offs remaining on the course so there is still lots of thinking that needs doing. Apparently Wayne has been on "trying to figure out the logistics and plan" duty so hopefully he's still "with it" enough to get it right!
It seems that they are really going to be struggling to make at least one of the cut offs which would result in them missing 4 CPs … this will be significant in the overall scheme of things so hopefully they will manage to avoid this even though it sounds like it has an almost unavoidable feel about it now.
The remaining cut offs are as follows (local time … add 13 hours on for NZ time):
1400 start of mountain bike after final kayak (which is after the trek that they have just left transition to start).
1400 start of trek after mountain bike above.
We can really ignore the first cut off above - since they are at the same time the one that counts is the 1400 cut off for the trek. If they miss this they will have to bike right through to the final trek stage (missing those 4 CPs I mentioned).
There is another cut off right at the end of the race for the teams to do the "rope line" to the finish which is on an island. They need to be there to rappel to the island by 10am on the 14th of November.
Making the trek cut off will be difficult - they have a long (50km) kayak leg to do which apparently starts with a 2km portage of the boats across terrain that will not suit using portage trolleys … 2km carrying heavy plastic kayaks and all the gear will be very difficult. There is complex navigation too which will mostly be at night so it could be a big ask for them to get this and the next 45 km mountain bike done in 12 hours.
Although the team were considering getting some more sleep immediately out of transition they may choose to continue on through the first part of the trek as there is a ropes section to be done quite early on. There is a cut off (again!) for this at 2am so they might try to push on through this and then get some more sleep.
The team have only had about 4 hours sleep in the race so far so at some point in the next few stages they are going to need to rest. Word from transition was that Brent was particularly keen for "everyone" to get some sleep and Anna was apparently fighting off some pretty serious sleep monsters on that last mountain bike.
The team are (like most) struggling a bit with the logistics and the mental shift of "selecting" CPs so extensively but they are enjoying the challenge. The first half of the race in particular was extremely physical with lots of hills … but the stunning terrain has been good compensation for that. The food has apparently also been really excellent with the locals in the areas the race has gone through going out of their way to share their local produce and delicacies with the teams.
Karyn informs me that 7 teams have pulled out of the race completely from the original 65 starters and that 44 teams made the midnight cut off. [Added Note: there were actually only 59 starters]
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