Tag: Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge

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Extreme weather

It was a bit chilly when I headed out the front door this morning. Like -6 degrees chilly. At 9:20, so the air had already had time to warm up from -18 last night. Still, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do when his soccer game is scheduled for 10:00. (Thankfully, my car started after such a cold night, which also allowed me to do what I hadta do.)

Yep, it was game #2 of the season and I was ready to play the first half again. I’ll probably wait a few more weeks before playing a full game since I want to work my way back slowly. A full game minus time for substitutions, of course. Even if I was at full-strength, I ain’t that crazy.

So I was back on the field, felt another weird tweak or two when I moved the wrong way, but I felt better running around this time. I also felt better after the game—a few hours later, I could walk up and down the stairs without a severe limp. I think I had the right idea last week. My left quad hurt a lot; so did my right knee. The patellar tendon is connected to the quadriceps, so instead of having a sore right quad, the pressure ended up over the front of my kneecap instead. Regardless, they both feel better than last week, so that probably means my body is getting used to playing again.

[As a side-note, the game was tied 0-0 at halftime and we ended up losing 2-1. Obviously, I was the difference-maker. Obviously.]

This afternoon, I watched NBC’s World of Adventure Sports. Fortunately, the segment on the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge ran first. (Not surprisingly, that portion of the show was sponsored in part by the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority.) Not so fortunately, Justin’s TV time was minimal at best. Damn.

It focused on each section of the race, brutal conditions on the course (aside from all the heat and sand, one day on the kayaks was cancelled due to winds over 30 knots), the winning team from Australia and a former Olympian who was racing with one of the other U.S. teams. The winning team, well, they finished first in every section of the race for their fourth consecutive overall victory of the Adventure Challenge, so you can’t really blame NBC for showing a lot of footage of them. As for the Olympian, she seemed cool, but she wasn’t racing with us, so meh…

Toward the end of the segment, it showed a quick flash of WEDALI signing out at the finish line and then a clip of the Olympian again. As she stood there, I looked to her right and my eyes got really big: “That guy looks just like me!” Then Molly, Justin’s wife, came onscreen and gave the Olympian a hug. I’ll have to take another look, but if the guy had #13 on his team vest, it means my little brother and I look a lot more similar than I thought. If you ignore the eight inch height and big weight difference, that is.

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Exposing the media to Crazy

It seems that adventure racing is no longer a sport designated for cable access. NBC is starting up a new season of a show called “The World of Adventure Sports” this weekend and features… get ready for it… a segment on the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge (you can see a little more info here). WEDALI placed in the middle of the pack, but they were one of three teams from the U.S. and should get some screen time because of it. If they don’t… well, they should.

So set your TiVo or DVR or just tune in to your local NBC station this Sunday at 2:00 CST and hopefully get a peek at my little brother Justin, his WEDALI teammates and sand. Yeah, you’ll definitely get to see lots of sand.

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Interesting proportions

My family has trouble getting together. Lots of schedule conflicts, people running in circles… probably not that much different than other families, really, but we still like to meet at a restaurant to celebrate birthdays, although it’s usually for more than one of us at a time because of said schedule conflicts. My birthday was October 19th and my party ended up scheduled to be in November. We picked a time and place to meet and had everything all planned out. Unfortunately, the snowstorm that hit the cities that afternoon didn’t care about our plans. So much for my birthday party.

I mention all that because Justin and Molly got back from the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge last weekend and we still haven’t partied for my sake. We all met at Brent and Gail’s today to party for Santa’s sake, but not mine. However, Justin followed through with his offer to buy my birthday present while in Abu Dhabi and it’s pretty sweet.

There are two gifts and one is… I’m assuming it’s sweet, given that it’s a small bag of Arabian Delights brand “Chocodates”. Description on the front of the bag: “choco-date with almond”. My favorite part, though, is how the back of the bag lists protein, carbohydrate, fat and “energy” (in kilocalories and kilojoules).

The second gift is thoroughly awesome. It’s a polyester long sleeve “Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge” shirt (logo on the upper left part of the chest). Across the back reads “Abu Dhabi” and the right shoulder has “Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority” printed on it in both English and Arabic. I started wearing the shirt as soon as I opened up the wrapping even though the tags were still hanging down at the bottom.

I finally cut the tags off when I got home tonight and took a closer look. It’s a Salomon-brand shirt made in Cambodia and sold in Abu Dhabi, which helps explain why the little “Warranty & Glossary” booklet has two small pages of information written in 28 different languages: English starts on page 2 and a southeastern Asian language ends on 59.

There’s also a tag that lists the size, etc. Not out of the ordinary—it describes the shirt as black and made in Cambodia—but it also says “T-SHIRT (SHORT SLEEVE) L”. That’s right, short sleeve. Out of all the shirts I own, this is one of the few that can reach my wrists when my arms are fully extended, so if this is “short sleeve”, I can only imagine what a long sleeve shirt made by these people would look like.

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Crazy is seriously frickin’ crazy

Justin and WEDALI are currently in 27th place out of 49, in large part because they’ve survived so long—plenty of teams have had to drop out and/or be retrieved from the desert because they simply couldn’t keep moving. Here’s the description of today’s section according to the race’s website:

The Ruib al Kahli is no picnic on the beach. In fact, on any normal day, you wouldn’t expect to come here and do anything but lie in the shade, if you could find any… So trekking 116 km though the emptiest desert on the planet, after having completed an early morning biking section of 94km over a treacherous and unforgiving track, in daytime temperatures way above the seasonal norm while going “against the grain” of the dunes is no less than Odyssean.

In layman’s terms, the weather and racing conditions would make you sweat your balls off if you could retain any fluids in your body to produce sweat. The description continued through interviews from various racers:

Many of the teams thought so: “That’s the hardest trek we have ever done here,” said TRI-ADVENTURE (GBR). “Last year we at least had the advantage of getting a good night’s sleep before undertaking the desert stage…” they groaned. Jari KIRKLAND of NET COMPETENCE who managed 7th fastest time over the stage and are now in 5th position overall, sat pondering her own sanity: “That stage H was heinous, horrible, horrific, horrendous, hell…” pausing in her exhausted tirade only to gulp down some much needed water. Susanna SKYLV SORENSEN of Salomon Santiveri looked stunned by the measure of her accomplishment in finishing the course: “I died out there – about one kilometre from the end everything stopped…” “We ran out of water at H6+,” confessed team SILVA-GERBER, “and wondered if we would ever make it to the finish.” Salient words considering that many did not…

If anyone out there was wondering why I’ve deemed Justin “crazy” because of what he’s accomplished with his teammates… I can’t imagine myself even trying anything like that, let alone finishing. And finishing well, too. Under the circumstances, it’s approaching -10 degrees with lots of frozen moisture outside and I’m okay where I am.

So good luck and kick ass, WEDALI. Keep surviving out there.

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Crazy hopes it’s a dry heat

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.