Adventure Junkie

Adventure racing looks exciting and, as its name suggests, it is more of an adventure rather, than a race. It is truly relevant to the sprint events as well as expedition race. 

"The very first race I registered for was about 50 km long. Based on the normal perception of 42.2 km being a standard marathon, to say I was slightly nervous would have been an understatement. 12-hour events came up quickly and less than a year later I was into the real expedition stuff." - Maria, event director.

Upper Murray Challenge is one of the toughest multisport events in the Australian racing calendar. It consists of three legs: 28 km mountain bike ride, 27 km downriver paddle and 23,5 km trail run, with each of them being challenging enough to race alone. Each year only the toughest racers attempt to finish the full course Solo, and not everyone succeeds. Training for the race like Upper Murray  Challenge is not an easy task, here are a brief outlines of what needs to be done in order to complete the event.

Read more at UpperMurrayChallenge.com.au >>

The field was extremely competitive with the winner in the Classic course determined during the final advanced mountain bike leg, with 7 teams racing head to head going into the last leg. 

Greg Ley and Adrian McGregor of team Marshans showed off their outstanding riding abilities and came in first to the finish line.  Family team, Rob and Felix Davis - Tandoori Chickens, dominated in the Novice category. Full results available here>> 

Race HQ greeted teams with ideal racing conditions, with a temperature of 15 degrees and blue skies over scenic Lysterfield Park.

The first Adventure Cup winners are officially Maria Plyashechko and James Pretto in female and male ranking accordingly. They both managed to accumulate the biggest amount of points based on results in three brutal multisport events:  Upper Murray Challenge, East Gippsland Challenge, and Grampians Challenge. 

The full ranking is here>> and we would like to congratulate all participants that took part in the inaugural edition of this unique Series. We hope you have achieved your goals whether it was to finish one leg of a single event, beat your best mate or get on the podium of all three challenges.

PacKraft is proud to have had a relationship with the AR community over the last 2 years. With experience providing lightweight and durable packrafts for adventure races such as X-Marathon, and GODZone, the team at PacKraft have continued re-designing and refining their packraft range based on feedback from members of the AR community.

The newest version of the Duo ADV2 (2-person model) includes a range of improvements over previous models and designs.

The latest ‘Superlight’ material provides stronger and lighter packrafts.  This means you carry less weight, and the packraft also takes up less space due to the more flexible material, while providing a higher tear strength than ever before.

Sorcha had a great season of racing establishing herself as one of the strongest Australian multisport and adventure racing female athletes with convincing victory in the Grampians Challenge.  This is what she said after her race: 

“I have found myself going to the Grampians quite frequently for training because it’s close to where I’m living at the moment, it’s a beautiful place to go to on my days off and has the only hills of any degree I can get to within 2 hrs drive! So I was pretty excited when I found out AJ host a race there. 

The race started with the run and I looked around at the start line and thought, “it’s going to be a hard day!” The field was strong. My vague race intention was to try to get a bit of a gap in the run, try not to lose too much time in the paddle and then go all out in the bike, as it’s my strength.