Whakatane, New Zealand
16 May, 2009
With the scars (physical and emotional) still healing from the Keen it was time for another race. The famous Whakatane 24 hour has a reputation for being a tough race, with long rough legs and this year was no different. With Wayne recovering from injury and assisting with support crew duties we recruited Carl Bevins for this race and also had core members Stu Lynch, Anna Berthelsen and myself (Brent Edwards). Carl used to race with the team a number of years ago, so we knew he would fit in well.
The race HQ was at Tarawera outlet, and began with a 2.5 hour paddle on Lake Tarawera, with a short run to Lake Rotomahana and back. This went without a hitch (I train on Lake Tarawera on a regular basis this lake so knew it pretty well). With dead flat conditions on the lake there wasn’t much separation between the top teams. After the paddle there was a short Rogaine around the Tarawera Outlet camp, then onto a 3.5 hour trek / run in the hills, and bluffs behind the lake. Also some difficult bush navigation. We made a nav mistake early on (20 mins or so), and allowed a couple of teams to get ahead, but soon passed them again in the bush somewhere.
At one point on a nice piece of downhill track Anna took the lead, and had the boys sprinting along behind trying to keep up with her (man can she go quick down hill). This set the pace for the rest of this leg and we pushed really hard to the end (I thought it was hard anyway).
Next leg was a MTB taking us almost 5 hours. We made a wrong turn early on and did a bit of bike bush bashing (not recommended) to the correct track. We also found that we had forgotten our descriptions and a pencil. Lucky for us we caught up some short course teams and managed get a look at their descriptions and commit them to memory, also Carls watch has some fancy function that allowed him to store the CP letters, so we didn’t have to memorise them as well (except for the last few when it ran out of memory). The rest of the bike went ok, Carl fell off at one stage and skinned his knee, lots of blood, but I think it was not as bad as it looked (he didn’t moan about it much anyway). We were also a bit lucky with finishing this leg just before dark, as we didn’t expect to take quite this long and had opted for lightweight head torches which are not really suitable for riding.
The final leg was another trek that took almost 9 hours in the Rotomas a spectacular piece of bush and new terrain for us all. The navigation looked hard on the map, but some nice person had been through laying down fern every few metres, so it was really just a matter of follow the fern which really stood out in the torch light. The last 10 km or so was a bit painful with flat forestry road, and a track we had already been on. We thought we had a bit of lead by then, so just walked. It took a while, but wasn’t so hard on our tired legs.
We finished back at the Tarawera Outlet with a total time of just over 19 hours. There were lots of people to welcome us in and some yummy steak sandwiches and hot chocolate.
Overall a great race, one of the best 24 hour races I have ever raced in. It was also great to win by a reasonable margin, after our sad defeat in the same race last year.
Thanks to the race organisers, our support crew, and as always our generous sponsors.