brought to you in association with:

supported by

Download the
XPD Preview (2mb)

What the winners had to say....

AROC / Mountain Designs Race Review

We all agree that it was the best long race that we have done through true Australian outback terrain. It felt like a real expedition with remote terrain and lots of unexpected challenges in the course and weather. It was also lots of fun and we decided that we didn’t want the race to finish and took it easier over the final stages of the race. We will now need to update our favourite race in our profiles!

The riding and paddling was slower than expected meaning that our estimated finishing time of 3 ½ days stretched out to over 5 days, the same as our time in last year’s Primal Quest. Our total sleep was about 9 hours with 1 hour the second night, 4 ½ hours at the mid-race camp, 2 ½ hours on the fourth night on the river, and 1 hour at the final TA. Our bike distance was 440km rather than the publicised 380km. 20km of this was an intended extra section to use better quality roads and 20km was unintended extra!

Some of the challenges were the rocky terrain on foot and MTB – 3 hardtail bikes meant that we felt every bounce; the soft sandy trails and corrugations for the bike sections; sharp thorns for puncturing bike tyres and filling your shoes and socks – we had 5 flats but 2 of these were due to a split tube seam that didn’t repair properly. On the paddle we faced extreme cold, strong headwinds, long portages through thick bush, steep river banks, sand banks in the river requiring short portages, and thick weed at a couple of points which clogged all progress like thick ice. The headwinds slowed our progress from 6-7 km/h to 3-4 km/h which meant that we did more portaging than originally planned. All up we carried the boats (30kg each) for about 15km on the first paddle leg and about 10km on the second leg. A final challenge was the numerous trees fallen across the river requiring narrow channels to be paddled or limbo dancing tests to go under.

Some favourite parts were the hills through the Barrier Ranges, the cross country MTBing where you took your own route across the desert through the thorns, the scenic river paddling complete with numerous emus on the banks and noisy cockatoos in the trees. The 26km direct bearing on the long trek was a record for all of us and the novel events of mining and geo-caching were great fun. We also enjoyed the mid-race camp and the pancakes served up there – thanks Steve!

Navigation using the 1:100,000 maps was fine though the missing or very faint tracks created a challenge particularly at night and meant that route choice decisions needed to be adjusted at various times. The 20m contours and subtle terrain with unmarked/missing tracks would have been quite tricky for less experienced navigators. Sleepmonsters hit us all occasionally and were fought off vigorously by Alina. Her sleepmonster kickboxing on the bike needed to be on video! Regular singing and “Name that Tune” contests also helped keep us awake. We thought that we had more than 4 people in the team at times – Alina thought that there were 7 of us taking part at one stage, including Matt Dalziel our usual team mate.

All up we had a a challenging race that was lots of fun. Thanks to Craig and Louise at Geocentric for organising a fabulous race. Also, thanks to Mountain Designs for sponsoring us and providing much of the clothing and gear we used during the race. Finally, thanks to all our supporters, especially those who stayed up the whole race with us and are now too tired to watch the Olympics!

Team AROC/Mountain Designs.