Wiki Factory Racing

To complete my racing for the season I decided to head down to Wanaka for the Motatapu Multisport race. This was the second year this event was run, with last year being a test event with only a few selected people invited to race. The race begins with a 15km kayak down the Matukituki River, a 53km mountain bike over a ridge and through the Motatapu bike course and then a 15km run over the Miners Trail run. 46 people lined up to race this year with many top Coast to Coasters (both 1 day and 2 day) and Multisport Legend Steve Gurney. The 15km kayak started with a hectic mass start on the river with everyone was lined up on the bank waiting in their kayaks for the start. I had a pretty bad start, with several people around me getting a push off the bank in front of me. Because the Matukituki River was fairly shallow and narrow in places it took me awhile to work my way through the field and pass the slower paddlers (my dad included) that had got in front of me at the start. I ...

To finish off the weekends events I decided to enter the Mountain Bike race on Sunday morning. I was expecting a relatively small race, with pretty much only the same competitors as the previous day in the multisport race. So I was pretty excited to see a lot of the local nelson boys had come through to race. The race was 2 laps of the track from the previous day so I knew I would be fairly capable of keeping up in the single track as I knew the course fairly well. in total the race would be 40km with almost 1000m of climbing on sealed road, 4wd track and plenty of single track. I had a good start and was positioned in the leading bunch up the road and up the sealed section of the climb. As soon as we hit the dirt though the pace picked up and I couldnt respond after racing the day before. I held my position for the rest of the lap feeling stronger as the lap went on. Heading in to the second lap I could a couple of riders in the distance and thought I would be able to ...

This year I finally made the trip up to Kaiteriteri for the Kaiteriteri Beach Adventure Race (KBAR) which doubles as the national multisport champs. KBAR is a well organised series of races over 2 days with multisport racing, a duathlon, a mountain bike race and a surf ski race to finish the weekend. The first event I raced in was the National Multisport Champs. I went into the event fairly confident I would have a good race after the training I had put in for the Coast to Coast and having a relative strength in mountain biking which was a major discipline in this event. The first run was a 2.5km sprint around an estuary and over a small hill with around a 100m of vertical climbing, followed by a relatively technical descent to the beach. After the descent it was then into the 8km kayak leg, 2x 4km laps of Kaiteriteri Beach to Ngaio Island. I had decided before the event I would use a surf ski as it would save me time in the transitions as I wouldn't have to use a spray dec...