The XPD expedition adventure race in Cairns Australia saw 47 teams attempt to travel 700kms, over 6 - 10 days. The disciplines they faced included; mountain biking, kayaking, hiking, rafting, snorkeling and wheelbarrow pushing all with tricky navigation. The terrain was unforgiving and remote and teams were sent through dense untracked rainforests teaming with leeches and stinging tree, rugged outback areas full of spear grass and spider webs and rivers low in water and home to fresh water crocodiles.
Twenty one of the forty seven teams made it to the finish line as a complete team including New Zealand’s all female adventure racing team Macpac Girls on Top.
Here is the race report and account of this epic adventure race from the team captain Debbie Chambers.
What an experience we have had - I am sure we were all pushed to our physical, mental and emotional limits on more than one occasion. This is one race Team Macpac Girls on Top; Debbie Chambers, Anne Lowerson, Zoe Albon and Viv Prince will never forget.
The lead up to this race is always a rather frantic one and this year was no exception as due to injury to teammate Erin Roberts six weeks out from start day, we were forced to scurry around to find a last minute replacement. Luckily adventure racing legend Viv Prince agreed to come on board and we came together in Cairns a couple of days before the race and got started on getting to know each other whilst shopping for food and other necessities for the race.
The day before race start the maps and course were revealed. Once this happened all hell broke loose. We split the team up into pairs with Anne and Viv organising the maps and planning our route and Zoe and myself working on logistics and gear. Each team has five bins and four bike boxes and these are transported around the course during the race by the organisers. In each bin you have to ensure you have enough supplies for the following leg before you meet the next bin. The trick is anticipating how much food and gear to put in each bin as you are only given distances by the race organisers, not approximate times of each leg. It is amazing how quickly time flies on this day and before you know it the boxes and bins are being loaded onto trucks only to be seen again during the race. We left the boxes with a sense of dread that we would get to a point in the race and realise we hadn’t packed the right thing.
Race day dawned and we were bussed from Cairns to Mission Beach and then ferried out to Dunk Island for the official start of the race. We were so ready to get started as it had been a stressful few days leading up to this. Leg one was a 25km trek/snorkel/raft and saw us scrambling, kayaking and snorkeling and around Dunk Island searching for checkpoints. We hit a reasonably urgent pace in this leg hoping to get as much rest as possible later on in the course due to the dark zone on the up-coming rafting section. Anne's navigation was spot on and we sailed around this leg without too many problems, although we had to use all our will not to throw up in the rough seas both in the kayak and the snorkeling. The only issue we had was that on returning from our second snorkeling leg we found that we hadn’t secured our boat properly and it had floated away. Doh! Luckily the rescue boat was one step ahead and soon delivered it back to us.
Leg two was a 100km mountain bike ride which to our extreme delight was relatively flattish and with easy navigation, and we managed to complete it in reasonable time. The highlight of this leg for us was meeting up with the Yogi Bears - a team renown for their singing - we had a good old sing along with them and passed a few teams in the process arriving in transition in time to catch three hours sleep in our cosy Macpac tent. Oh bliss (very cosy with four of us squeezed into a race regulation two person tent.)
Leg three saw us getting up at 5.00am and power walking 9 km along a gravel road to the start of the 10 km raft section for our 7.00am briefing. A rare quietness descended over the team during this walk but it wasn't due to the pace, it was due to the fact that we were all secretly packing our knickers about tipping out of the raft in the grade 4 rapids. We needn’t have worried as the raft was a blast with full on rapids one after the other, wonderful scenery, and a competent guide to ensure we didn’t flip. This was one of the highlights of the course.
Soon after getting out of the boats and stuffing our faces with creamed rice and pears we set off for the 47 km Misty Mountains trek. We expected this leg to be on nice walking tracks and to be relatively straight forward as the map supplied for this leg was a tourist walking map. Oh how wrong we were! From this point on we learnt never to assume that anything in this event would be easy. This trek was a mission and we had our first introduction to the large variety of painful Aussie plants, including the infamous “stinging tree” - which injects silica glass hairs that contain neurotoxins into your skin and “wait-a-while” - which grabs you with its vine and tears the bejesus out of you, your clothes and your pack. Whilst on this trek I commented that God must have been having a particularly bad day when he created the Aussie rainforest. Maybe that is why I got stung first! At the end of this trek Zoe and I had to get medical attention for the stinging tree hits. The treatment for stinging tree is more painful than the sting – first they douse the area in hydrochloric acid – then they cover the area in hot wax and pull. Holy ……. !! I ended up on the floor feeling a little woozy and Zoe ended up on the floor after fainting. We both ended up a little traumatized by the whole thing. Meanwhile Anne and Viv were tending to their leech bitten legs and trying to make sure there weren’t any leeches hanging out in places they shouldn’t be.
This was our welcome to the reality of racing in rain forest in Aussie. We soon learnt that due to all the nasties not only was this race going to be a physical challenge but also a mental one. We had planned to have a wee sleep at the end of this leg in transition to give Zoe’s blistered little toes a rest but as soon as we lay down a number of other teams arrived and started packing and unpacking right next to us. Our planned 2 hour sleep turned into a one hour lie down and with much frustration we bundled ourselves out of transition and onto our bikes.
The following leg was a hot and hilly 130 km bike with a 10km orienteering section in it. This section was hard but with mid-camp just around the corner we were all pretty motivated and put heads down and bums up and went for gold. The orienteering course gave us our first introduction to spear grass – nasty stuff that burrows into your shoes and into your feet. We moved reasonably well on this leg but struggled a bit with finding the last checkpoint. Perhaps our interrupted sleep at transition was coming back to haunt us.
At one point I disappeared into a hut to collect the checkpoint and yelled “yep, got it” to let my teammates know I had found it. I came out of the hut to find Zoe forgetting about her painful blisters running towards me at full pace with panic in her eyes and yelling out my name. She thought I had yelled “help” and had fallen down one of the many deep mine shafts in the area. We had a bit of a giggle over this once we had worked out what had caused the confusion. We left the orienteering course for the final bike into midcamp right on dusk. Just as we were setting off, Zoe’s mountain bike shoe cleat fell apart and she was forced to ride in her running shoes. The ride was a mix of heaven and hell. We spent some of it pushing up steep inclines, some of it skidding uncontrollably on loose rocks and some of it flying down a 4wd track at high speed hoping not to come to grief in the many soft sandy sections along the way.
Midcamp is a compulsory stop for 6 hours where the organisers feed you and provide you with a tent to sleep in. We wasted no time in packing away our bikes and heading inside for a delicious hot feed of bacon, hash browns, baked beans, tomatoes and toast. This was followed by one bucket of warm water for a team wash, and then a couple of hour’s kip. The kip passed all too soon and we were once again back into it – our next task was to load up “Warren the wheelbarrow” with two kayaks and push him 20 kms down a road to the river. We headed into the early morning mist dreading what lay ahead. We soon got into the rhythm of taking turns to push “Warren” and carry the paddles. There was something oddly therapeutic about having “Warren” to focus on. The walk was also made easy by the arrival of a camera crew which helped keep our minds off the task at hand. Much to our delight NZ Bloggers Annie and Sonja also tracked us down for an update and pumped out Michael Jackson’s “Beat it” on the car radio. We all had a bit of a sing and dance but unfortunately, this sidetracked us and we ended up having to take a detour through a dusty ditch to the next transition!!
Leg seven was a 70 km paddle along the Walsh River. We took a while in transition before getting into the boats as we knew this was going to be a mega mission. We were not wrong. The next 30 hours were spend jumping in and out of the boats pushing them over rocks and through rapids, avoiding low hanging branches and trees, searching for the right channel in the dark, emptying out our boat, portaging a scary looking rapid and trying to protect ourselves from sunburn during the day. We also spent a bit of time looking back at the red crocodile eyes watching us in the dark of night wondering just how big they were. Although we managed extremely well on the navigation on this leg it was the most physically exhausting leg and we left more than a few expletives behind us in the shallow rapids. We arrived at the next transition utterly spent and glad to be exiting the river.
Another epic leg - a 60 km trek - loomed ahead of us, and instead of heading off quickly to make the most of daylight we decided to take a two hour sleep and make sure we dried our feet out and sorted gear out before heading off into the outback. This leg was reported to be full of spear grass and long – the lead teams had apparently been going for 16 hours and still hadn’t reached halfway, so we knew we were in for a mission. Around four hours after arriving in transition we crossed the river, dried and strapped our feet, taped our shoes to stop spear grass getting in and headed out onto the trek. It was around 10pm. We set off focused on our compass bearing and our surroundings but somehow we lost concentration and ended up taking a slight detour –in retrospect perhaps we should have made the most of daylight! Anyway the slight detour took us up over a 639 meter hill where we were forced to sleep and wait for daylight before continuing on. Anne is still kicking herself for making this error. Once daylight broke we were on our way again and spent the next 40 hours or so clambering over grass covered rocks, avoiding massive spiders in their webs, navigating through hectares of untracked bush, soaking our clothing in water to cool our bodies down, and sitting around waterholes eating mashed spud and tuna and resting our feet. At one point we got to the top of a hill and realised Anne had dropped one of the maps we needed. After a bit of a panic and a bit of backtracking on our compass bearing we managed to locate it about 100 meters away. What a relief! Thank God Anne checks the map regularly or we could still be out there! For me this leg was an absolute treat – what an epic, what a challenge, and what an experience. After 48 hours on this leg we were once again ecstatic to be heading into transition.
Only 130km of biking, a 15 km paddle and a 60 km trek to go! One of the ladies in transition kept saying, “You’re nearly there guys just three more legs to go!” However, we knew better and opted simply to focus on one leg at a time. Another guy was over heard muttering, “These teams are nuts but how does that girls’ team manage out there!”
The next bike leg was a navigator’s nightmare with tracks criss-crossing in all directions and a number of route choices. We managed to find our way to the checkpoints without too much difficulty and then chose a route which had us on some single track for a few kms, then a reasonably fast 4WD track and then wham we found ourselves pushing our bikes on a track through grass twice our height. Not much fun believe me – luckily the main road wasn’t too far away and we burst out of the grass onto a potato patch with relief written all over our faces. We then made our way to the last checkpoint before TA where we decided to take a short 15 min nap, which turned into 40 mins. Oops! – The theory was that we wanted to be sharp in the next transition so we could get in and out quickly and onto the water for the kayak. A few kms further on we stopped again for a chocolate milk, burger and chips in a shop in Tolga. It was scrumptious after so many days of limited calories.
We were a little slow out of this transition due to a deflating boat, which was a bit frustrating, but the kayak across Lake Tinaroo was stunning. The lake was like a millpond and the skies were clear. Even though we had slept a few hours earlier we really struggled to stay awake on this leg and had to pull up onto the shore for a 5 minute power nap. Once on our way again we still struggled to keep focus and keep our eyes open. Luckily we managed to hit the transition without too much trouble or meandering all over the lake.
Wow the final 60 km trek leg was upon us but we weren’t letting it sink in as we knew the lead team had taken 30 hours to complete this. We headed out of transition and immediately settled in for an hour kip so we could be on the ball for the navigation for this final leg. Things started off relatively smoothly and we stormed passed a couple of teams refreshed from our sleep. Then things started to get complicated and we came across four or so other teams who had been confused by two tracks heading off in different directions with track ribbons going both ways. We made a choice to head down the left track with another team, Outward Bound Australia, away from the other teams. We weren’t always confident it was the right choice but we eventually ended up where we needed to be.
We had made it to the last section of the race and simply needed to find a ridge and head down it and we were home. Mmm, it wasn’t to be!! We made four attempts at finding the ridge on dusk but failed. On our fifth attempt in the dark we teamed up with two other teams and tried to hit the ridge on mass – unfortunately once again we missed it. Now our only course of action was to bush bash 4-5 km north through dense rainforest full of stinging tree, leeches and ‘wait a while’ until we hit a power line service road. Man this was a tough ask at the end of such a long race – we were emotionally and physically at our limits here as we scrambled up and over ridges and dived deep into ravines and gullies. From 8.30pm to 6.00am we bashed our way through the rainforest searching for the road. What a mission!! Everyone was pretty quiet, digging deep and focusing on moving forward. We stopped for three brief communal powernaps during the night but basically kept moving as we all just wanted to get out! Zoe got a leech in her eye at one point – luckily and much to her relief a guy from Team Latitude 19 knew how to get it out. There was a lot of stinging tree too just to test us even more. Fortunately for us Team Dash seemed to be taking most of the hits. Just as we had almost given up hope of finding the road in time to make the cut off at the finish line, someone shouted “power line”! You should have heard the yells of delight from the three teams that had remained together for the past 10 hours – we were so happy. The pace picked up considerably and we were on the road in no time. Now it was simply a matter of hoofing it to the finish line in Cairns.
What a feeling! Now we could start to believe we might finish this race intact. Our feet were starting to complain, Viv’s leg had started to swell from a leech bite infection but nothing was going to stop us from getting to the end. We stopped for a celebratory lemonade icy pole on our way through the streets of Cairns before crossing the finish line 9 days and 6 hours after we had set off.
We did it! We achieved our goal of finishing the race as a team of four. We had beaten the course and endured the hardship of this event.
Thanks to Macpac for supporting us and supplying us with awesome gear that made our lives so much more comfortable out on the course. We looked stylish too. Thanks also to Emily from Em's Power Cookies for the delicious bars and to Vitasport for the electrolyte replacement satchets (very easy to carry on long legs)
Next up for us is the Geo Quest 48 hour in Port Macquarie, Australia on August 21
