If you’re remotely adventurous, and enjoy a bit of a challenge, you should try the Spring Challenge. There’s just one requirement. You have to be a girl.
You also need some running shoes, a mountain bike, and two friends with two X chromosomes. It’s preferable if at least one of those friends can drive a map and compass.
Our team captain, Susie Wood had all those things, but just a few weeks out from the race, her two team mates had to pull out, leaving her a few Xs short. That’s when I got a message from Susie, asking if I, along with Eloise Cottee, a friend and fellow mountain biker from years back, would join her in a 9 hour team for The Golden Bay Spring Challenge. I didn’t know Susie at the time, but I didn’t see that being a problem. You get to know a person quite well after 9 hours of reasonably hard racing. The one small concern was the size of the boots we were being asked to fill. Susie usually races with Fleur Pawsey and Sophie Hart, legends in their own right, and she’d racked up 4 Spring Challenge wins. No pressure!
Above: Susie navigating seamlessly on the ‘trek’ leg, while I desperately try to figure out where the heck we are…
The Spring Challenge pretty much caters for every taste, level of experience and fitness, with 3, 6 and 9 hour options. Golden Bay hosted the 2016 event, and although the Nelson region’s legendary weather didn’t turn it on for us, it was still a great choice of location. The course design was kept compact, but was very well thought out, offering some challenging navigation, without being extreme, and plenty of good vistas, especially on the raft leg down the beautiful Aorere river.
We were keen to stretch ourselves and Eloise and I felt obliged to at least try to keep Susie’s track record clean. By the end of the main mountain bike leg, we’d managed to establish a bit of a lead, but we were about to discover how quickly that can dissolve when you make a suboptimal navigational decision. We took a gamble that didn’t pay off, taking the shortest route between two checkpoints. It turned out to take significantly longer than we anticipated and as we squeezed through thickets of Manuka, hedges of gorse and a swamp, we took guesses at how many teams had passed us.
Above: To get from 9 to 10, we took shortcut, which didn’t turn out to be the fastest route.
It came down to a slow sprint on a sandy beach in the last kilometre of the race. As we got into an inflatable canoe to cross an estuary, we spotted another 9 hour team just getting out of their canoe on the other shore and stared chasing. As soon as our feet hit the sand we started to run the team down. However, we could see another three pink bibs way up ahead, that we could never catch, and assumed that we were racing for second place. It was a slow sort of sprint in heavy sand to pass the team we had our sights on, and at the end of nearly nine hours of racing it took all the energy we had left.
We crossed the finish line knowing we’d raced as hard as we could. But moments after celebrating our second place, we were told we had actually won, and the team of pink bibs in the distance had in fact been a 6 hour team. I think my face in this photo shows the relief and elation we all felt!
Above: The moment we were told we had in fact won.
Thanks to my team mates, Susie and Eloise, for a great day racing, to our support crew, Santa Cruz Bicycles and to T7 for sponsoring our team and being a supportive sponsor to me for so long. Special thanks has to go to Nathan Fa’avae and the Spring Challenge crew for an awesome event, especially the volunteers who really had a long day out in pretty miserable conditions.
This event is now one of the largest adventure races in the world with over 1300 entrants, and is so popular it sells out within minutes. 2017’s event will be in Geraldine so start your planning now!
