SAFRA AVventura 2010
Late last year, I decided to take part in another Adventure Race. The memory of pain from the previous race in Penang had diminished, so I signed myself up for another round of torture in January earlier this year.
The SAFRA AVventura is an adventure race consisting of multiple disciplines ranging from trail biking, running, kayaking, rope ascend, abseiling, navigation and mystery tests all rolled into one exhilarating race to fully challenge those with a passion for adventure.
Taken from the SAFRA website
This year, my race buddy was Andrew (ickle’s hubby), who is an adventure racing veteran and possibly 10X fitter than me. And without his help and motivation, I probably wouldn’t have completed it. Again, I jumped into another race without training and survived. Was stoked that I finished it, although we had to miss the abseil because there were just too many people in the queue. Nonetheless, chuffed.
I love my mummy. She left this message in the kitchen table so I’d see it in the morning on race day.
For this year’s SAFRA AVventura, Some 274 adventure racers took part, which was a larger group than I had expected. We were told that the total distance would be approximately 51km. In hopes to keep things competitive, we weren’t given information on the combination of activities. We had no idea how far we had to run or how long we had to ride.
Post event reports say we had run 17km, cycled 26km, kayaked 4km and finished off with a biathlon of 4km. And besides physical endurance, they also threw in few mental challenges at several points in the race.
If I remember correctly, we had to solve a word puzzle after a bike leg, thank goodness it wasn’t Sudoku. Second obstacle after another bike leg was to inflate and deflate bike tyres. Andrew was pro at that and got us in and out of that challenge in good time. And the last one was to move a potato across 20 metres by striking it using another potato hung by a string tied around your waist.
Other obstacles included crossing a swinging bridge, monkey bars, Jacob’s ladder and army crawls. All this in unbearable morning and mid-afternoon sun, heat exhaustion would have definitely been the #1 cause of casualties.
On the last run leg of the race, our race support crew Janice and Chris were waiting by the road with ice lollies from 7-11!!! When you’ve been racing for 8hours, anything and everything tastes so good.
It’s really a test of your mental and physical endurance. By the end of the race I was broken, and so were my adidas trail shoes. Looking forward to doing another adventure race soon.
