Max24hr - Kangroo Valley (Aug '05)

Adventure racing Aussie Style

Team: Next Horizon

Jerry Argyio – formally team Scarpa

Kerensa Argyio – formally team Scarpa

Shaun Wright – formally team Linden Cycles

Tim Sindle – formally Terramanzi

As a bunch of South African Adventure Racers living in Sydney, we got together through the sleep monsters AR forum and entered a 24hr race here all in preparation for the 10 day XPD (www.xpd.com.au) in Tasmania early next year.

In one of the most novel starts to an adventure race, the Max Adventure 24hr Race in the Kangaroo Valley started off not with bang but with a bus ride, from the briefing to the start. The Kangaroo Valley is in the Burgonia area of the Southern highlands 200km south of Sydney, the main feature of the area is the Shoalhaven river cutting its way through a 500 meter deep spectacular river gorge.

The people powered part of the race started with a short 50 minute run, after some hasty plotting on the bus. We soon arrived at the kayak drop off point. This was where we got to meet our beloved inflatable Seylor K79 kayaks. In the class of Kayaks if a K 1 is the fastest…then it would be fair to say the K79 lives up to its name being 79 times slower. A quick inflate, and it was down, way down, to the river for a little bit of a paddle.

Unfortunately the river safety briefing, the compulsory helmets, life jackets, and throw ropes were a little of an overkill as Australia is suffering a serious drought. Although there were a couple of semi-decent rapids, there were many flat pools, but even they were a pleasure compared to the numerous boulder-field portages, and rock scrapages.

First 6km paddle done, time for an up-down kloofing leg. Now this is where the rules get interesting, the rule for this leg was “no running”. Apparently the fun police at the national parks only agreed to us using the land if we abide by this rule. So power walking it was. Luckily not much running was possible as this leg comprised of crawling through and over massive boulders, shrouded by sheer rock cliffs on either side - breathtaking. From there it was a vertical hike back to the highlands to meet up with one of our support boxes. A brief refuel and then again into the valley to meet up with our beloved boats.

Our abuse of the boats over the exposed rocks finally caught up with us as we holed one of them. Trusty duct-tape stemmed the flow but we were forever stopping, emptying the boat and giving it a quick pomp!

This leg really started to drag on with slow boats, and low-river. Lots of portaging and boulder fields to content with. Finally after over 3 hours we reached the end of the paddling leg (it was only about 12km!), to be greeted by a marshal with some good news. We were only 1.5km from the bike transition, the bad news…its all uphill 500 vertical meters, with inflated boats.

Over an hour later we reached our bikes and boxes, and received our new points to plot for the bike leg. We were given grid reference points to plot on our map, but the majority of the roads were shown only on a separate map that took a bit of careful map collating.

Onto the bikes as light was fading, and the mist and rain were rolling in. The bike leg was a polaris type leg with 9 check points “hidden” in the forest. We elected to get the further out ones first. Craftily hidden in the middle of the leg was an abseil and rope climb. After all the safety apparent in the race so far, I was quite surprised that we did the midnight abseil with only a figure of eight and a single rope! The rope climb was a little of a strain after the day of portaging.

From there it was back on the bikes to farm the last three pc’s. Just past the last PC on the way home we met up with another mixed team, who only had that one pc to collect. Now the race was on! From our tired weary state we were soon pumped with adrenalin as we paced along the tar road back to the finish in a tight slip stream formation that Lance would have been proud of! 10 k’s of “abloc” riding brought us back into the sleeping town of Talong and to the finish where we finished at 1:44AM after 18:44 of racing. The chasing team a futher 4 minutes down. Sleep good..

We awoke to the smell of a couple of snags on the barby, and the post race breakfast and awards. In the end we were placed 4^th / 11 mixed teams and 16^th / 44 teams overall. And no, there aren’t any kangaroos in the kangaroo valley!