So Saturday saw us competing in the Gravity 12 hour, hurling ourselves round a 13km mountain bike course – single-track, firetrail, and swathes of mud.
Three teams of us competed, I was in a team of three that became a team of two after losing Nick to injury. Lap times, all around an hour. Final laps completed in the dark, complete with bikes covered in red LEDs and tinsel.
In short, it was muddy, and lots of fun.
An early morning drive out to Wombat State Forest. There, we find Alicia (third team member), and Katya (who is competing with her Mountain Designs team, and who is back in Australia after two years in Canada/USA), and set Shaggy free to go and be event photographer. Bikes are reassembled, and we head to the start area, all systems go. We tie ourselves together for a four legged race, and go collect a plastic donkey from a bin. A slight incident with some slippery mud has as all crashing to the ground, and breaking our ankle ties, but we recover, find the other team with a plastic donkey, and make our way to the official to get checked before grabbing our bikes, and setting off on the rest of the course.
The obstacles are the most amusing part of the race, although mountain biking through the mud is ridiculously fun. Even when you do hit a mud bank in a deep puddle and fall over (drenching yourself completely, except for you left arm). We carry buckets of water through obstacle courses, get a blindfolded team member to worship a monkey god, completele crosswords on pop trivia, and collect a checkpoint hung over the middle of a dam (it’s alright, it was a small dam).
Covered with mud, we cycle through the finish line. We came 22nd of 52. No prizes, not even a lucky door prize. But lots of fun. And mud (did I mention the mud?)
the teva adventure race is possibly the most fun i’ve ever had. well, that may be an exaggeration, but it was pretty fun. and although the ropes course over the dam, and the muddy pool of water under the net looked pretty unappealing when seeing them at 7.30 on a damp and foggy morning, they actually weren’t that bad after running and cycling round for kilometres on end.
highlights: diving onto the slip and slide to go through the finish line, and beating the other female team by 2 seconds or so after a last minute sprint; building a billykart (and having it not fall apart as it was pulled around the course, despite some structural integrity problems); flying round the ropes course over the dam in a tractor tyre inner-tube; cruising down the steep and muddy hills after checkpoint 16; finding out jacki and i were the second female team home, and winning treasure; katya and heidi winning spot-prize treasure; still being able to walk afterwards; beating the boys
lowlights: cycling a few kilometres uphill to checkpoint 16; not being able to find one of the checkpoints on the first leg and having everyone overtake us (it wasn’t that bad, we just went exploring a little, and found lots of moss covered rocks) … and that was probably it… getting soaking wet and covered in mud were all fun :)
