By Louie Burger
The Kaikōura adventure race is always an exciting event. I’d been at the last 5 editions, racing from the 6hr up to the 48hr events. But I wasn’t planning to race this year, work had been busy. I had recently moved to the North Island, and after racing the Magnificent the month prior, Kaikōura wasn’t really on the cards.
But when my old man slipped a disk in his back, my brother Chico was short of someone to race with, (I didn’t take much convincing).
The Kaikōura event is quite unique in the fact that you can race in a 2 person team. Most events I do are with three others, so it’s quite nice to mix it up. One of my favourite events I’ve ever done was the Kaikōura Adventure Race (KAR) 48h last year where I raced with Dad. The efficiency you can have over 4 people with managing stops and pushing the pace a bit more makes for fun racing.
With lots of longer events leading up to KAR, they had moved back to a 24hr format. So it was kind of a sprint-length event, no sleep strategy, just don’t get lost and move through the course as fast and efficiently as possible.
The race may have started at 5:45 on Friday, so after a good sleep in there was plenty to get done. My least favourite part of any race is the packing. The equipment explosion, having to sort food, gear systems, TA bins, maps and what goes where was for sure a shambles. But somehow by 5:30 we were rearing to go for a 5:45 start. The race started on the beach, a 1km run along the sand to our bikes and then a few hours on our bikes into the night. So as the sun set over a beautiful Kaikōura coastline, we were off.
Stage One, 35km MTB, 1 km run + 700m
I love the excitement of a fast start. In longer events my teams have really tried not to get caught up in the racing and focus on looking after each other. But this is a bit shorter and I am pretty competitive. Noticing most people were taking on the 1km run in their bike shoes, we were feeling speedy in our new La Sportivas. So we put the hammer down and rolled into the bike TA in first with teams Kaikōura Adventure Under 20, Blue Duck Packrafts and Independent Outdoors metres behind us. We were quite pleased when Adventure U20 came out of TA just ahead and we swiftly hopped on their draft. For some reason they pulled at the front for at least half the bike, so we enjoyed the free ride along with some other teams. Finishing the first bike we were feeling good, working relatively hard but it felt sustainable. We transitioned with possibly 4–5 other teams. Lots of bike lights could be seen not too far away.
Stage 2, Packraft Trek 87km + 2000m
We were moving fast and feeling good. Peeling off the track and up the first major hill, I happily handed some heavy stuff to Chico, who was looking way too fresh. We were in good spirits, only seeing a few lights in front of us. We figured we were sitting in 3rd or 4th.
It had only been a few hours, but so far, I was really enjoying racing with Chico. I have three younger brothers and, like most siblings while living at home, we did plenty of annoying each other. But so far there had been bush less irritating than usual. At just 16 he is super strong, great on the map, and having trained and raced a lot together with the Motueka High School team, we shared a very similar racing ethos, which made for quite smooth racing. While the travel and nav was easy, it was nice to pass the time catching up.
A race-defining moment
Dropping down the first hill we hit the river. We were fourth. The route choice from the river ended up being a pretty race-defining moment for us. When we planned our route to us there were a couple of obvious ways to go. The most direct-looking way was the river but the sides were steep as, 20m contours basically touching. We thought it would be a gamble; getting gouged out would cost hours. The other option was to go over the hill via the ridge and a high point called Devil’s Lookout.
In distance, the creek and hill routes were about the same, but the ridge had 300m more vert and trickier nav, but we backed our pace and skills for this to be the faster option. We were both focused on the map. I was following Chico’s lead. Getting the vert out of the way swiftly, we just had to lock in on our map and get back to the river. Trusting our compass bearings and the barometric altimeter, nav was going great, But the bush was a whole other monster.
Borderline tears
Pretty quickly we hit a wall of Matagouri and windfall. The bush was so shit, like 200m an hour kind of stuff. As we battled on time just seemed to waste away very quickly. Before we knew it, it was 2am. We knew we couldn’t have been doing that well as we were way back on the race time estimates. I was optimistic that a few other teams had followed us and were in the same boat. Progress was slow and it was really hard to see the end in sight. We were borderline tears. But the bush slowly started to open again.
Chico, who is a keen hunter, kept saying there is a deer living on this ridge. I kind of laughed at him. How would he know that? What kind of deer would want to live up here anyway? It’s f**king shit, I thought. But then came the biggest moral boost of the race. Just 30 metres ahead of us in the scrub we picked up a 14-pointer stag. Turning up our Fenix headlamps on full beam we stalked closer to it. It didn’t move. We had this epic stand-off for at least a minute, watching this pretty magnificent animal. Chico couldn’t have been more excited. “I told you Louie! There is a deer living here.”
Silly blunder
The bush was slowly getting better but hours had melted away. It was around 3am by the time we reached the creek by the checkpoint. Seeing lights we were stoked. But they were heading in the wrong direction! We found the track to the control - but there was no control, hmm. We went back and ran into team Gems Gems who had found the way. After briefly speaking to Rob and Richie we found out that we had passed the control. It was just a mandatory waypoint (MWP), so there was no physical flag to look for, very silly blunder.
We figured we were pretty far back in the field and it was time to put the bad route choice behind us and start to play catch up.
A short while later we came across another team. Curious as to where we were standing, we asked if they knew what place they were in. One of the guys replied, “Well we were in last coming off the bikes. But I think we’ve managed to pass a couple of teams!”
Shit. We had a lot of catching up to do. In the late hours of the morning we made our way up George Stream, a nice riverbed made for fast moving, possibly much like the creek we chose to bypass earlier… As the golden morning sun rose, we got a good look for the first time at where we were. It was beautiful. Even though morale was low and we were tired, I was very grateful to be able to be doing this in such an amazing place.
7 minutes well spent
I find as the first light is rising my eyes get quite sleepy. It is fine to keep going but quite hard to focus on anything. The contour lines and words in my 1:50k topo map were all a jumbled blur. Chico and I kept consistently trying to talk to each other to keep our brains engaged. Eventually, we decided to have a quick power nap to reset our eyes. Soon we were back walking and my eyes felt fresh as, 7 minutes very well spent.
From George Stream we had to climb to George Pass down to the Clarence River for a 40km packraft, another 4 -5 hour trek and then a 4–6h rogaine to finish. The finish line felt far but achievable.
The climb up to George Saddle was a highlight. The topography was very interesting, lots and lots of very small gullies too big to cross over easily but small enough to not show on a topo map. We probably would have gotten very lost if it wasn’t for the cairned route up the hill.
At 9 am we hit the saddle, the final team to make the cutoff there. We were effectively last place on the full course. Making good time down the other side, we enjoyed the scree slope and boulder hopping, reaching the packraft put-in before midday.
A second wind
The packraft was long, around 40km, not helped by average flows on the river. The Clarence is a great bit of water to paddle though, with plenty of rapids in the upper half to keep you on edge. We were about 4hrs into the 6hr paddle when we realised we may get dark-zoned. Before the race we thought we might get caught in the 7am dark zone to get on the water, now it was looking like we might not make the full paddle. We were going to be close but we had to move it.
All of a sudden we had a second wind. We were pushing hard, Chico was constantly calling out time estimates, the speed and distance to go while I was focused on not paddling into slow water or an eddy line. At 5:30, thirty minutes before the dark zone was enforced, a safety boat pulled up: “You aren’t going to make it, we reckon you should get out at the bridge and it’s good to walk from there. You have to get off the water at six.”
Almost there
We thought we were going to make it. Pushing super hard the end was effectively in sight, but before we knew it was six. We had made a few kms past the bridge but just fell short of the TA. It was annoying but only 1.5kms to walk. Not wanting to waste time properly packing our bags, we were off down the riverbed with our hands full, gripping our PFDs and paddles, beelining it for the lights of the TA.
Those welcoming TA lights turned out to be someone’s house, and the owner, who was probably wondering what a couple of people with these big packs were doing running through his front paddock at night, asked us where we were trying to go and happily pointed us in the direction of the carpark (TA).
After crossing crop paddocks, a stream and Chico taking a very amusing (and apparently quite sore) fall from the top of a deer gate, we had made it off the bloody paddle!
There were a couple of teams in that TA. They looked quite cold and some people were very happy to be rugged up by the fire eating the bacon buddies cooked by the awesome TA volunteers. While a sit down by the fire with some hot food was very tempting, we had a race to finish. We worked quickly to repack bags for the next stage. A hot bacon buddy was a bit good to turn down, though.
Adventure racing doesn’t always go to plan
We were minutes away from leaving when a race volunteer came over: “You guys have to stop here.”
He had been on the phone to the race directors and they were imposing a cutoff as they reckoned it would have not been possible for us to finish the next trek by the 10pm course cutoff. The 10pm cutoff was news to us (probably should have studied cutoff times a bit harder), but as far as we were concerned, there was no actual cutoff at this TA. I asked to speak to the race directors on the phone.
“I know it looks like we’ve been moving slow but we aren’t as tired as you probably think, we can run, we want to finish, please.”
I think Tim and Tanae felt a bit bad, but we would have to do this trek in 2.5hrs and the fastest time so far was just over three. “It just won’t happen.” Deep down we knew it too. We had been mentally preparing for a 4am finish. It was gutting not to be able to get to the finish line, but it’s adventure racing, and it doesn’t always go to plan.
What a weekend!
We got driven the 40 minutes back into town. I’ve never been pulled off a race before, it was cool to chat to the volunteers and other teams. It had been an especially tough course; only one team (Blue Duck Packrafts) fully finished. And a lot of teams had self-short-coursed or not made the George Saddle cutoff. In the end we placed 14th out of 20 teams, not what we were hoping for but clearly we weren't the only team who had had had a tough time out there.
We got dropped in Kaikōura. Mum and Dad were about an hour away from picking us up, so we got out our sleeping bags and lay on the steps of the town hall, munching on our leftover race food as pedestrians looked at us strangely. What a weekend!
Sponsor acknowledgement
A huge thanks to Mountain Adventure for supporting us for this race. They stock amazing outdoor products - perfect for this kind of stuff. Chico and I were both in La Sportiva shoes for this event, Chico in Akashas ii’s and I ran Prodigal Pros. I’ve been struggling for awhile to find a good shoe that is comfy and will hold up to racing. So far the Prodigal Pros have ticked all the boxes. I used them straight out of the box on race day and honestly couldn’t fault them at all. Fenix lighting products are all we use for racing and FIXX crampfixx in always in the first aid kit.
After doing heaps of long events in the last year, I am looking forward to doing a focused training block for a shorter, different style of race, the inaugural AR Junior World Champs in Canada mid-July.
Thanks for reading. Until the next one!
Louie
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