It has been a while but as everybody else sometimes we get caught up with life and we prioritize what to do. Writing the RIF race report unfortunately didn't make it to the top of the list until..well, Now.
As we are boarding our flight in direction to worlds in Wyoming!!!
So here is a flashback to our race back in June in the beautiful region of Ardeche, France.
We were very fortunate to have Dave Schloss from Australia joining us as our main navigator. We also had Wouter joining us a little bit at the last moment before the race.
Although it isn't ideal to race with two people we didn't know we were well decided to give the race a good shot.
Dave met James and I (Nat) in the south of France a few days prior to the race and we drove up to lac Devesset, HQ of the race where we met Wouter
The gear list was rather exhaustive, more specifically the first aid. It took us a while to gather everything. I think we could have been wounded for weeks without medical help and we would have been fine. We had enough to open a little mobile hospital.
I was a little disappointed to not have a copy of the road book in French. Being a French race I knew the translation in the English book would be missing a few nuances that would be very helpful during the race. The navigators being anglophone there was no way we would take the French version and we couldn't have both.
The gear check went pretty smooth and before we knew it the start of the race was there.
The race started at midnight with a swim run. I must admit I thought I was going to drown about a thousand times but we made it alive, got our maps at the end, looked at them semi quickly and shot off on our bikes. We started at a decent pace...we were finally racing. Unfortunately that was short lived. About 30km in the race Wouter's derailleur failed. He replaced the derailleur hanger, jumped back on the bike but another part failed resulting in many stops and Wouter having to walk all the up hills during this first leg. With not much hope to fix the derailleur and having lost a few hours our chances to make the dark zone with the lead teams later in the race became a no go.
The next leg involved a nice trek with rock hopping in the river bed followed by a paddle. We had some fun paddling. We then saw the bikes again. After some James Magic Wouter's bike was working although he had still to push occasionally uphill or to put the chain back on. We spent most of that leg in the dark with a few teams around. On one of the steep descent in the dark I managed to face plant in the gravel dislocating (again) my wrist and damaging my knee a bit. After a good scrub we finished that leg.
We ended that leg at the start of the big paddle where we slept for a couple hours. A medic tried to put the wrist in place and off we went. That was a lot of fun with some slides, Rapids (with the two other guys shouting yyyeeewwww every time they went down a rapid before hitting a rock). Lots of laugher there. My favourite part was the second part when we had to go up river for a few hours and we kept on passing teams after teams.t
The next leg was a big trek with a caving section soon after the start of it. That leg was very nice, mostly in gorges. The caving was pretty quick and not as challenging as last year in Australia :). We knew as we progressed in the trek that we would miss the dark zone and would have to stop for a while so the urgency was gone. We got 5h sleep at a CP where the dark zone was and started hiking to the rappel as soon as it was lifted. The rappel was amazing. Two length hanging from the rope that was going away from the cliff making us spin and forced us to look at the gorges from an angle you would never otherwise. It got a little too much for me and I had to close my eyes to do part of the descent as I wasn't feeling great.
The rest of the trek went well with a few river crossings.
Followed was a bike that went pretty uneventfully except for Dave going over the bars and breaking his shifters and a couple flats (not our race for biking I'm telling you)
At the end of the bike was our last short paddle. James by then had kind of managed to fix Wouter's bike but we managed to get a new derailleur then that we ended up not using.
The last paddle went well and we finished it in the dark.
The next trek went well although mostly in the dark. I was sleeping for part of it. We ended up trekking up to the end of that trek with the all male French team. For the last few legs we kept on passing each other.
The bike that followed was a lot of climbing which I kind of liked a lot. We ended up riding along the guys team the entire way. Half way was a little via ferrata that was pretty cool.
The last trek was pretty long. We took it fairly easy even indulging for ice cream in the small village.
The last bike was supposed to be a couple hours but for some reason the night demons played with Dave's mind and he thought we weren't where we were supposed to be. That little bike ended up being an 8h+ bike ride with lots of back and forth on the same road but hey at least we got our money worth.
The last leg was sailing across lake Devesset which I ended up being pretty good at :D
All up we didn't get very lucky with the bikes but we were still happy to make it to the end with lots of laughters along the way. That's ended up being more an expedition than a race for us but we made it.
The organization was really good and very helpful. Can't wait for Reunion island next year :)
