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07-Sep-2010 11:46:40 |
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Warren’s Bates account of winning the World 2 |
| 16-Dec-2009 11:36:00 |
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It’s not my intention to outline every stage of the race. You all know the story. We bike, we run, we
paddle, we make fools of ourselves on rollerblades in front of the watching media. We go up, we go
down, we shuffle across the landscape; sometimes with the speed of Apollo, sometimes at a snail’s pace.
The Race Director had made it clear that the first half of the race would be physical and he didn’t
disappoint. Hundreds of Kilometres of trekking interspersed with brutal bike stages – the first containing
nearly 6000m of ascent over a distance of just 100km – enough to make Lance Armstrong wet his
knickers. The pace was high and all teams at the sharp end of the wedge seemed to be of the view that
every checkpoint, bonus or otherwise, was fair game.
Oh how wrong they would be.
Into the second night we went and it was time for our first sleep. We selected a derelict building off the
track and found a tatty mattress covered in rat droppings and other unmentionables. It looked like a
crime scene from Bergerac. Within seconds of laying down his head, Nick was snoring like an asthmatic
bison. I listened miserably to the others mumbling in and out of consciousness as I lay nearby, teeth
chattering, unable to sleep. After 45 minutes I could stand it no more and roused the troops from their
slumber.
Minutes later we were on the bikes again and in no mood for messing about. A heated argument about
strategy an hour earlier had raised tensions in the team and it seemed that Tom had entered the
‘navigation zone’ to purge his anger. We flowed effortlessly from checkpoint to checkpoint, passing
stranded teams with wanton abandon who were either lost, disorientated or who were suffering the
dispiriting curse of having to stop at every junction to check where they were.
Nick and I glanced at
each other in disbelief as the kilometres went by. Tom was a genius. I’ve never seen anything quite like
it and I now realised that our most potent weapon was ready to be unleashed.
Day 3 began with the dubious pleasure of a long rollerblade along a busy road.
Cameramen just know
where to position themselves to extract maximum value from such stages. No point complaining though,
we know that rollerblading is a core competency in many international races and we should have arrived
better prepared. With our nemesis put to bed for the last time we could focus on the 54km paddle ahead
of us.
All the top teams were in close attendance but a looming cut-off made missing control points the
first major tactical decision of the race. In the end we decided to miss the farthest control which we
estimated would have taken us an additional 2hrs to get. It was tough to drop a control but it seemed the
right thing to do in the long term.
Arriving at the end of the paddle we were confronted with the hectic assisted transition point that would
set the terms of the remainder of the race. We had just over an hour to arrange kit for the next two epic
stages, to eat, to get dry and to strategise. Nicola suggested that we got kit sorted and spent 45 minutes
going over the plan. I was not convinced. I’m a time thief, constantly trying to eek out a few extra
minutes here and there over our rivals and I wanted us in and out of the transition in half that time.
Thankfully, Tom and James were going nowhere and Nic was proved right – suggesting the old maxim
that ‘time spent in reconnaissance is rarely wasted’ is a good one. As James and Tom laid out the entire
magna carta of Portugal on the grass, Nic Wiseman passed me a Macdonald’s double cheese burger and
suggested I shut my beak and relax for a few minutes.
As the team got their kit together, Tom shuffled his papers and prepared to give us his thesis on the
sections remaining. He and James had calculated that it was not possible to collect all remaining control
points. The 60km trek was linear but the 160km bike stage offered us options to cut out a lot of hilly and
technical riding. At this point I came up with my one good idea for the race. Why not miss the first run
control? It involved paddling again, getting wet, a jumar and the potential for a big queue given that so
many teams had elected to delay themselves right up to the 9pm cut off. Tom agreed and we thus set off
in the opposite direction to collect every other run checkpoint with the idea that we would drop a number
of bike controls depending on how we fared on foot.
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