XPD Final Leg Report: We’re in the process of writing a report for the entire race, but we figured some people might be interested to know just what went wrong on our final leg. The story really begins at the end of the previous leg, the long trek to Melrose via Mt Remarkable. We were on top of the mountain at around midnight in cold, wet conditions. Max and Minh-Tam were navigating well, but Michael and Charlotte had been completely reduced to sleep deprived zombies some hours before and progress was extremely slow. It was only 6km down the mountain to Melrose, but the track was narrow, rocky and monotonous, the worst possible conditions for staying awake and minimizing pain to our very sore feet. The journey down took less than 2 hours, but it felt like days. Everyone was stumbling and micro sleeping (right next to the cliff). Minh-Tam and Charlotte were convinced that the track was doing spirals around/down the mountain and Michael was enduring a serious hallucinating episode. Somehow we made it to the TA at around 1 30, but we’d well and truly reached our limit and any attempt to continue without sleep was out of the question. We were confident we had at least a couple of hours lead over the teams behind us, so took a gamble and set our alarm for 2hrs later. The alarm woke us up, but we later realized that well over 2 hours had passed. We’re not sure how this happened, but we most likely failed to set it correctly. When we woke, there was another team (Adventure Fit) at TA. It looked like they were about to go to sleep, but Michael unintentionally made them change their plans by telling them we were just getting ready to head out. We raced to get ready and get on the bikes, which was very difficult given how sleepy we were and that Charlotte could barely walk. By the time we got moving, the other team (Adventure Fit) had a 15 minute lead. As we were leaving, Max commented, “this map really isn’t very good”, which should have been a strong indication that something wasn’t right. It turns out, it wasn’t just “not very good”, it wasn’t actually a map for the leg at all, just a map showing us how to negotiate the streets of Port Augusta. However, Max was so tired and we were in such a rush, that we didn’t even realize this. We arranged ourselves in team time trial formation and blasted out of Melrose towards Wilmington at over 30km/hr. We got there within an hour and came to an intersection. To the left was a sign saying “Port Augusta”, to the right, a sign saying “Quorn”. Max told everyone to stop and lent over the map for a while, before announcing that he wasn’t really sure which way to go. We knew that we were going to Port Augusta, but we weren’t sure of the intended route for the leg. We also knew that the highway was out of bounds, and figured the sign to Port Augusta would most likely go that way. Max looked down at the map again and said, “This shows the route from Quorn to the finish”. All of a sudden, Max had a clear memory that were supposed to go via Quorn. We added up the distances and realized that it would make a total ride of more than 100km. This was very concerning as we’d been told in transition that the ride would be around 60km. The suggestion was made that we use the mobile phone to call Craig and ask (which would have resulted in penalty), however by this stage, Max was confident and the team was too tired to come to a rational consensus. We continued pushing hard at still close to 30km/h, but were flagged down by an XPD car just outside of Quorn and they gave us the disappointing news that we had gone the wrong way. By this stage, it was shorter to continue on the detour than turning around, so we rolled into Quorn, had a milkshake and bacon/egg rolls to cheer up and then plodded into the finish. After all was said and done, we’d ridden an extra 40km and lost another place. There are so many “what if’s” in this scenario. What if we’d woken up at the right time? What if we’d waited for adventure fit to go to sleep before making the move ourselves? What if we’d actually taken the map with us? What if we had realized that the map of Quorn was actually a map of Port Augusta showing Quorn Rd? What if we’d managed to catch sight of adventure fit before the turn (it appears as though we were very close)? A lot went wrong to lead us to our first and only major nav error of the race, but at the end of the day we were just too tired to function properly or make sensible decisions. On the bright side however, our legs felt really good with the higher pace. Given that it was the last day, it’s a very promising sign for if we ever want try racing more competitively.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 08:08:29 +0000
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