Discovering the world of adventure racing

Getting lost in Pretoria to collect your new teammate is not a good sign when you’re about to spend the weekend navigating your way through the countryside. Getting lost en route to the meeting point is even less encouraging. Navigation is not my thing, but Toby must have been seriously concerned when I missed the brightly lit sign for Rustenburg and did a U-turn on the highway.

And so, pushing through torrential rain and trying to make up for my orienteering disasters, we arrived at our first adventure racing camp, slightly dishevelled and a bit frenetic. Hardly the entrance of champions.

Thus came the first of many eye-opening moments over the next two nights as my ideas and expectations of outdoor sports crumbled quite dramatically.

I had first heard about adventure racing in a warm pub in Scotland, and loudly declared it a mad pursuit whose participants had clearly dropped off the clever tree. As a sport, it falls into the extreme category — you’re given a map and told to reach checkpoints in hard-to-reach places. Distances vary, but your average race will have you on the move for at least 40 to 50 hours using boats, bikes, feet and ropes.

In Scotland, this translated into paddling across frosty lochs in extreme cold, hiking up chilly Munros and abseiling across exposed rock faces. I was convinced it would be a lot warmer and less extreme in South Africa, and an AR training camp in Rustenburg outside Johannesburg was difficult to pass up.

My teammates were Jacques, Fernando and Tobias — we had never met before, and they were all worryingly normal. No outsized biceps to carry me up steep hills. No Tarzan-like skills to swing me across rivers. No steroids. No loin cloths. Clearly, adventure racers aren’t all Testosterone Tom, flexing their muscles for the cover of Iron Man Illustrated.

Then there were our mentors, Bennie, and his 15-year-old daughter Wendy, who were to accompany us on our 20-hour adventure to ensure we didn’t end up in another province. This was wonderfully reassuring. How difficult could it be if a 15-year-old and her dad could do the course?

And so, to the beat of Fernando’s heart-rate monitor, we stepped out into the pre-dawn cold on Saturday morning. It was 4.30am and we left last because my Camelbak had mysteriously started leaking — slightly crushing my sense that everything over the next hours would be a cinch.

We started climbing, initially following the lights of the teams ahead until Bennie pointed out that we needed to navigate. Fernando and Jacques unravelled maps and got into the complicated rhythm of interpretation.

Watching people plot where to go — and then actually get there in the dark — was an astonishing experience, and one I continued to marvel at throughout the race. Even when we were hopelessly lost later in the day, with no reference points and limited vision, our navigators managed to do the complex arithmetic that would lead us back to wherever it was we were meant to be.

We made it to the top of our first koppie — making up the time lost thanks to my Camelbak debacle — marked our checkpoint and enthusiastically set off to the next, easily setting the rhythm for the next 20 hours.

Somehow our team just clicked. We balanced each other in skill, fitness and temperament. Fernando and Jacques worked seamlessly as navigators, and Toby spotted all those sneaky checkpoints with eyes that I was convinced could see around corners. Bennie and Wendy kept us sane and ensured that at every point we learnt something new about reading the landscape. Mabel and her crew welcomed us at transition points with Marmite sandwiches and Jelly Tots. And the course, so carefully plotted by race organisers Clinton and Thursia Hardenberg, had us exploring every corner of the rocky Rustenburg terrain.

For 20 hours, we pedalled, hiked and paddled our way through some wonderfully rugged countryside. My highlights were walking around the bowl of the amphitheatre, looking down on to the dam and thinking that there was no way I would ever be able to paddle around it.

Then we leapt into a kayak and watched the other teams fall behind as we easily paddled from checkpoint to checkpoint, making up time and starting off the bike leg with a significant lead. En route, we had a long debate on the difference between windmills and windpumps — before deciding we didn’t really care as it was the right checkpoint anyway.

We got hopelessly lost in the middle of an old ruin of a kraal, and the team pulled together to work our way through the muddle of bushes, trees, thorns and valley. We then headed straight into the ropes section, which had me seriously questioning my sanity as I leaned over an abyss and legged it to the bottom.

As night set in, we switched on our bike lights on a seemingly deserted farm before rattling down a rocky descent we named the Asteroid Belt. We talked through the leg-numbing 18km climb in the dark about nothing in particular. We were cheered on by a group of Saturday-night revellers who came running out to see the nutters who were cycling when they could have been in the pub.

The best experience was the complete collapse of my preconceived ideas that adventure racing was about neat paths up mountainsides, convenient bridges across rivers and debris-free single track. The thought “Surely they won’t take us up there?” quickly became a guide to exactly where we were headed.

But most of all I liked discovering that my teammates didn’t have to be Testosterone Tom or wildly insane to be excellent adventure racers. And, of course, never to assume that if a teenager can do it, it’s easy.