With 62 or so competitors entering into this year’s Wadi Adventure Race 2 in the Al Ain water park on Saturday the 19th of January, both myself and Oybek sat amongst the crowd to receive a briefing from Sean the dry land manager, who explained the course. For a month or so we had been training hard, from mountain biking to CrossFit, surfing to paddle boarding, running to going to the gym. We tried to prepare ourselves as much as possible for what was to come.
Going head-to-head in an individual race, the adventure challenge consisted of a lot more running this year (which was my only major setback!), and was broken down into the following:
A 1.5km run (outside of the adventure race grounds), followed by a crawl under some nets and sandbag collection weighing around 3kg and a final 1.5km to the surf pool.
A quick dip in the freezing surf pool around a buoy (30m in), followed by a run to the balance beam and a jump into the deep end of the pool from the side wall! It was freezing and pretty high, I’m not going to lie!
From there was the rope climb out of the pool. Luckily, I’d had some practise in the CrossFit gym with head coach Ben so it was a breeze and super happy that I was one of the only women that steamed up it! (I high fived a rather cute competitor on reaching the top, he seemed impressed!)
The next challenge was navigating up river through the kayaking course. The water was on mild flow, but still hard on the quads! I was trying to keep up with the others and bouncing on every step to keep moving through the water.
After reaching the top, I had some help over a wall and ran down hill to the rafting challenge.
The rafting challenge consisted of several rafts turned upside down and strung together with rope, this was a major struggle for some, but it just required a bit of technique. I managed to work out what others were doing wrong and with timing and speed, I jumped right after the raft in front had bounced back and was breezing through it! The only thing which slowed me down was that I couldn’t overtake!
After this was another run; which absolutely killed me – uphill to the bag toss, which I was incredibly bad at! I just kept missing, I guess when you are that knackered, your brain doesn’t function. (I felt sorry for the bloke on the other end having to pick them all up!) Getting three in, the next set of tasks included an obstacle course.
Overs, unders and a crawl under a jeep in sand trying hard to keep clear off the barbed wire above you with the spider’s web somewhere in between of all of that. To be honest it was a bit of a blur!
The final challenge was a 9ft wall climb, I tried once – no luck. The second time, I managed to get a hold of the wall and two burly guys helped me up, thank god I thought, this could have been embarrassing!
I crossed the finish line sandy, bruised, sweaty, but triumphant! With Oybek not so far behind me, we did fairly well against all the machines on the course!
In the end, I came 38th place overall and was the 4th woman to cross the finish line with a time of 38.53mins – super happy! Oybek came 50th with a time of 44.20mins.
The event was really great, well organised and a blast!
Well done to those who won and the guys at Wadi Adventure for running it! I’ll be at the next one for sure which is set to take place around April.
Tara
