I’ve really enjoyed reading Luc Mehl and Roman’s accounts of their adventures involving hiking, rafting, biking, and whatever else. I’d absolutely love to be able to do similar sorts of things here in Australia, but we just don’t seem to have the terrain and certainly no organised events. I’m keen change the latter restriction by finding some of the former.
So a few months ago, I thought I would see how I would go using a packraft in a “normal” multisport race. I’d sort of mimic a backcountry trip by carrying the raft with me throughout the riding and running legs. The race was the Marysville to Melbourne, distances were 19km hilly run, 90km hilly ride, 14km flat run and 33km flat paddle. There was a cutoff time midway through the paddle, and it was set at 11.5 hours after the start, which was around the time that I thought I could get there.
The pack, with raft, vest, paddle, etc, and all bike gear, some water and gels weighed in at 8kgs.
The race itself went exactly as I thought it would. The running was no sweat with the pack and I was happy to stay at around 6min/km throughout both runs in varying terrain, but the ride with the pack on my back was pretty uncomfy. I had planned to ride my touring bike and strap it to a rack, but its a fair bit longer than the rack and it looked a bit iffy. I rode my road bike instead and I think overall it was a better option. I could probably spread the kit out among some panniers on a touring bike, and if it was a really long ride I probably would, but the time taken to do that in a shorter race outweighed the discomfort. I had a couple of vertebra that felt quite bruised for 3 or 4 days afterwards, but nothing too bad.
The paddle was really, really slow. Luckily I’d read here that (above 5kph or so) the speed of rafts is really determined by the hull, rather than the paddling force. So I just settled in and paddled, kept around 5kph (water flow was varying, but I’d say somewhere between 0 and 0.5kph, judging by movement when I stopped for snacks). I reached the 6pm cutoff checkpoint with an hour to spare. Portaged a small weir there, said hi to my family, and then paddled on another 4 or so hours to the end. It was about 4 times longer than any paddle I had done before, and pretty boring at that speed. My legs were starting to freeze with the water and night air, so I used the inflation bag as a bit of a skirt over them… worked a treat!
I ended up last by a long way, the second last person paddling past me at at least twice my speed at about 7pm.
Anyway, 14hrs15mins and it was done. 6hrs 40mins of paddling was kind of pushing my patience, though.
A pic of the kit is here http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnopower/7147763129/in/photostream
and some pics of me carrying/paddling it are here http://www.rapidascent.com.au/Photos/Photos.aspx?e=&mode=3&bib=29&offset=26&y=2012&ev=24&loc=-1
I don’t really know what the point of this post is… maybe something along the lines of “it doesn’t matter what your surrounding landscape is, you can still have an adventure in it” but thats probably not true. I had a good day out.
