Seagate in Spain

Nathan Fa’avae / 11.05.2015

The current Adventure Racing World Champions Team Seagate are in their final preparations for round three of the Adventure Racing World Series. The team won round one at Godzone in NZ and are using Spain as their last race of the 2014/15 season.

“It feels to me like it’s been quite a long period of racing and training, we had a long build up to the 2014 World Champs in Ecuador and that took us into the NZ summer racing season. We then focused on individual events followed by Godzone. That was a hard race to recover from so our build up to this race, the Raid Gallaecia, hasn’t been ideal” says team captain Nathan Fa’avae “The race in some ways is a fun thing to do to end this block, we have already qualified for the 2015 World Champs and we’re on maximum World Ranking points until Brazil ARWC”.

The team of Fa’avae, Sophie Hart and Stuart Lynch will be joined by Spanish athlete Albert Roca. The teams primary navigator Chris Forne has work commitments and had to step out of the team for the event. Fa’avae says “We’re lucky to have Albert join us, when Chris couldn’t race we decided it’d be a nice change to race in a foreign country with a local person who can speak the language. Stu and Albert have raced together many times including winning the 2013 World Championships in Costa Rica”.

The team have been training in Spain for a week and adjusting to the climate and time zone.

There are 23-teams entered in the race, from NZ, Sweden, Belgium, France, Czech Republic, UK and Spain. Fa’avae sees the main competition to come from Swedish team Hagloffs Silva:“They are an awesome team and wonderful people, they’ve had extremely bad luck at the past two world championships but I rate them as one of the best teams in the world, their current world ranking does not reflect their ability. They are capable of winning the World Championships. I think we’ll see a lot of them during the race. We can expect some close racing from Spanish teams also, they won the World Championships in 2010 and there are many strong and experienced athletes competing."

There are 12-stages in the race involving hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, canyoneering and orienteering.

Starting in Cuntis, the teams will do an adventure racing pilgrimage to end at Santiago de Compostela.

Fa'avae explains "The course looks dynamic and engaging, no super long stages which I think makes the race more enjoyable and interesting. There are also some mixed stages where we do smaller stages within a stage. It looks like the course designers have been highly creative and put a lot of thought and energy into the race, I think we can expect a super time out of there".

Stage 1    Trekking 16km
Stage 2    Mountain Biking 54km & Orienteering 7km
Stage 3    Kayak 45km
Stage 4    Mountain Biking 68km
Stage 5    Kayak 23km
Stage 6    Canyoneering 4km
Stage 7    Trekking 20km
Mandatory Rest Time 3-hours
Stage 8    Mountain Biking 30km
Stage 9    Coasteering 52km
Stage 10    Mountain Biking 30km & Orienteering 6km & Trekking 14km
Stage 11    Mountain Biking 60km
Stage 12    Trekking 35km & Orienteering 6km

Total distance is 511km and estimated winning time is around 75-hours.         

https://tracktherace.com/raid-gallaecia-2015/live 

Team Seagate wish the thank their sponsors:
Seagate, Rocky Mountain Bicycles, GU Energy, Absolute Wilderness Freeze Dry Meals, Torpedo 7, Antichafe, Patagonia Clothing, inov-8 footwear, Northface Packs, Nordenmark, Revelate Designs, Gloworm Lighting, Tineli, Wildside Travel, Bridgedale Socks, Wind Paddle, Xinix, Railriders­

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