The best adventure races in Australia

I have even managed to sleep in on the morning of my 3rd ever adventure race due to a very civilised registration time of 8am. This time, I was racing as part of all female team Galloping Turtles at Jetts Adventure Race in Adelaide along with Julie, for whom this race was her first taste of AR.
The weather forecast has been low to mid 20-ies and some cloud, great for racing! But on the way to the start it’s starting to rain – that wasn’t forecasted! Ohh well, I guess that’s what this sport is about, - go out there and face all the challenges, be it created and organised by humans or by the Mother Nature. One challenge which I didn’t expect to be facing that morning however was the lack of places to get my pre-race coffee! Seems like everything but McDonalds is shut in Noarlunga at 7:45am on Sunday morning!

Julie was already at the HQ and excited to go. So, we quickly re-assembled our bikes and off to the Bike TA to rack them and get registered as one of the first teams in line. One thing I’ve learned so far, the sooner you register, the sooner you get your race pack, the longer you have for things like fixing your race numbers to bikes and most importantly to prepare maps.

The course seemed to be straight forward, except that one CP that has cheekily been left off the map but had to be picked up while on the run leg... Just as well that we read that course description twice; otherwise we would have missed that part!
Race was being run in a clover format, - with MTB TA being set up at the same spot as HQ with a paddle TA just across the bridge from HQ.
After the prologue, every team was allowed to choose their own order of the next disciplines Run/MTB or Paddle. The 10 fastest teams were going to be allowed on to advanced leg if they came in before the cut off time. Julie and I have agreed that our order of disciplines shall be Prologue/Run/Paddle/MTB. That way we get a chance to warm up and get used to the map on the run leg, then into paddle and MTB as last.

Since this was Julie’s first ever adventure race and she isn’t that experienced in either MTB or paddling, we have agreed that we will go out there, do our best on the day and see where that will place us at the end.
However, seems like “take it easy” part got very quickly forgotten once the start signal was given at 9am. We raced off on to the prologue leg which included grabbing envelope off the line about 200m away from the start and then putting a map puzzle together to find out where the first 3 CPs are located.
Nice touch from the organisers, they have included a piece of contact in the envelope to make it easier to actually keep the map together!

On the run leg there were total of 5 CPs to be collected 4 of them marked and one hidden somewhere along the river bank.
We started off very well. Julie did a great job navigating through the dune paths. However, about 1.5km into the run she is almost doubled from abdominal pain…
We tried to move forward slowly and see if it resolves itself, since one possible cause for this was the adrenalin. But we agreed that if it isn’t better by the time we get through next couple of CPs, we will pull the pin.
Luckily,- after about 15 minutes of walk through the dunes her stomach settled and we were back running again. We picked up rest of the CPs on the running leg and headed for the kayak transition area.

Quick transition into kayak and we were off paddling, with me shouting right/left/right/left, which kept us in synch (at least some of the time…). Paddling down the river turned out to be real pleasure with this huge outgoing tide (the tidal difference that morning was about 2.4 metres). We grabbed the first CP and headed for the second one, located close to the river mouth. On the way we’ve seen another team dragging their kayak up the river! The thought in my head at that moment,- NOOO, we will not need to do that! We will just stick to the plan, stick close to the river banks and we will be alright!
Mother Nature has proven me very wrong very quickly! We turned around, started paddling and found ourselves paddling at pretty much the same speed as the river was flowing out… So, jumped out of the kayak and followed the example of dragging it up the stream! At least this way we were moving forward!
The river current seemed to be weaker once we came around the bend. So, back into kayak and paddle up the river at full steam... Only if this kayak would be going straight instead of resembling a drunken sailor…
After some further battle with the kayak and the current we’re out of the water and headed to the MTB transition. Where we jump on the bikes and head straight out…

On the MTB leg there were 6 CP to be collected. All looked pretty straight forward when looking at the map but not so much once on the trail… we have encountered our first challenge pretty soon after leaving the transition area. The unusually high tide in the morning has actually flooded one of the trails and although water has receded by the time we were passing through it, we were riding through the mud. Needless to say that our bikes came out just a little bit dirty out of that ordeal!
Very soon after that Julie has mentioned that her seat is constantly sliding back,- turned out that she has tried to adjust something the day before and hasn’t tied the screws well enough. Unfortunately, neither I nor the guys in a car we’ve met close to CP51 had a spanner. So, Julie had to try and ride with the sliding seat… a very uncomfortable position to be in! But she endured it like a champion until we reached CP55 and a found a whole group of people gathered there and helping two girls after they had a flat tyre.
Lucky for Julie, one of the guys there had a spanner and was able to fix her seat. Lucky for the girls, guys from team #39 were super friendly and trying to patch their tube although facing challenges themselves, since their pump didn’t seem to work properly. So, my Lazyne came in very handy. Unfortunately very quickly it became evident that the patch didn’t work, since all the air oozed out of the tyre… so, one of the two tubes from my backpack ended up being used…
Since by then we were out of contention for advanced leg, we took it easy and have spent about 15 minutes chatting to the girls and guys. But there are only that many people needed for changing the tube. So, I’ve grabbed the “bad” pump leaving mine behind (& praying that I don’t need to use this one) and we headed off to collect remainder of the CPs which turned out to be quite easy navigation. With Adventure Junkie team having done great job and placing all of the CPs exactly where they were marked to be!
All CPs collected we headed back to the HQ. And only one thing standing between us and the finish was one short but steep hill. Conquering it came with its own challenges of sliding and falling (all of which got very well documented by Fedor. BTW, thanks for all those awesome photos you took on the course) it was a straight ride back to HQ.

Thanks a lot to Adventure Junkie and Jetts for putting on this great event! You have done an awesome job in creating course that is achievable by novices and still interesting and challenging enough to those with some experience.

Kristina Meskauskaite, team Galloping Turtles