WEDALI. My little brother Justin’s adventure racing team. 5th place at Primal Quest last year. USARA National Champions this year. They didn’t do as well in the Checkpoint Tracker National Championship—apparently, there were multiple other teams complaining about how the race was set up and organized as well—but the final result was winning the overall rankings. The championship was worth 200 points, but no matter how the Checkpoint Tracker people played with the numbers, WEDALI was the only team that reached the maximum 500 points.
As a result of those 500 points, they’re currently in Abu Dhabi getting ready for the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge. Checkpoint Tracker covered the cost of their flight, hotel and race entry fee. Well, not the entire hotel fee, given that they flew out a couple days early so they could tour around a bit. How many times do you think they’ll be heading to Abu Dhabi again?
Up to this point, they’ve sprinted through the Chicago airport because their arriving flight from Minneapolis was late, rode camels, visited a falconer hospital and the Grand Mosque, and stayed in a $3,000,000,000 hotel (sure, I could have written “billion”, but all those zeros look pretty awesome). The race itself is beginning… I can’t find a specific starting time on the website, but it’s about 3:00am in Abu Dhabi right now and the race starts today, so they could be bounding through the sand dunes already.
They’re not expecting to win. Out of 50 teams, they’re one of three from the United States. And given that some team names are “Russia”, “China 1” and “China 2”, my money says some of those are professional racing teams. And then there’s “Abu Dhabi Triathlon Team”. They’re from Germany. I think that team may have been put together for a particular race somewhere in the world, but I can’t figure out which one.
WEDALI is awesome at races that last for a couple days and they’ll sleep maybe three hours, but this race is set up more like the Tour de France—teams push themselves hard during the day and sleep at night. Buncha sissies… So like I said, they’re not expecting to win. They have no idea how they’ll place amongst teams that specialize in races like this. Teams like “Abu Dhabi Triathlon Team”. But it’s an experience of a lifetime and they’re there to compete and have a good time.
All of the teams are carrying a GPS, so feel free to check out the satellite tracking system and join me in cheering them on. Cheering on their little dot as it moves around on the map. They might not be able to hear us, but I’ll go ahead and cheer anyway. Assuming that it’s not 3:00am here, where there’s a much higher potential of waking someone up who doesn’t like being woken up at that hour. If that happens, it won’t matter how many points I had at the beginning of the race—I’ll be the loser.
