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Adventureteam.dk at the World Championships

Bjørn Axelsen / 25.11.2009

Going to the world championships of adventure racing is the most important competition for an adventure racer, and knowing that the distance to cover would be around 900 km did not make the project any less frightening, at least not to me.

Though we raced as AdventureTeam.dk, only Peter was in fact a member of this team. The rest of us come from other teams and joined in because two members of AdventureTeam.dk had to stay at home due to illness.

So this was our first long race together and you never really know what to expect from others in a long race. Some people prove to be really strong, even after many days of hard racing and too little sleep, others tend to go downhill and turn into slow zombies, not able to keep up a reasonable pace.

<b>Our Team</b>

<b>Peter:</b> Father of three kids, engineer, age: 37. Head of the team, but leaving navigation to Per and Bjørn. From Hjallerup, Denmark
<b>Pernilla:</b> Deputy head of a school, age: 36. From Uppsala, Sweden
<b>Per:</b> Police trainee, age: 27 years (normally Team Skandia Pension). From: Roskilde, Denmark
<b>Bjørn:</b> Web consultant, age 35 (normally Roadrunners Adventureteam). From: Copenhagen, Denmark

Also, we had two great supporters, Thomas and Johanna without whom we could never have performed as well as we did.

<b>Prologue</b>

We started with a prologue in Cascais 30 km west of Lisbon, by the Atlantic Ocean. The prologue had a time limit of 8.5 hours and was more correctly described as the first stage of the race.

The beginning was a little bit of short, funny games within the city, for instance crossbow shooting. Next a little inline skating. This was the first time I had to be towed on the line, partly because my inline poles were damaged. Next, we changed to trekking. We are moving well forward and not too far from the first teams.

Trekking proved to be pretty rough-going but in a beautiful landscape by the coast.

Next we moved on to our first mountain biking section. This was supposed to be a quick downhill ride but the beginning went very bad. I was navigating and I messed up completely because I misinterpreted the scale of the map and at the same time we were moving very fast as we were going downhill. Eventually, I got it right and we got down towards Cascais to change to some simple foot navigation for the remaining few kilometres back to the finish.

Though the first stage was supposed to be a bit of warm-up fun we only had about a 25 minutes margin before hitting the time limit of the prologue.

Next, we went by bus up into the mountains, about 3 hours north of Cascais. There we had some sleep within a noisy sports centre. Why will there always be some teams that will fix bikes and arrange food just a few hours before the start of an expedition race? I'll bring ear plugs next time.

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