This weekend James and I took part in our first Dirt Duathlon.
It was hard!
Having never done anything like this before, we weren’t really sure of what to expect (or how to do an adventure race at all really…), and it was very hard, but we made it through (well mostly).
What is a Dirt Duathlon?!
With the Dirt Duathlon series you have teams of 2, 3 or 4 people and you navigate to markers over three legs. This one was just outside Levin, and, like all of the Dirt Duathlon series it is navigation on foot, on mountain bike, and then on foot again.
It’s set in a clover leaf style, so each leg has you locating markers that you check into. After each leg of the race you come back to a Hub where you check in and set off for the next leg.
As you can see from the photos it was cold, muddy and wet! Fun times.
We learnt a few things…mostly that neither of us are very good at the orienteering part…so we’ll need to upskill there. And that we didn’t bring enough food or energy shots. We learnt that there is usually an easy way and a hard way to get to the markers; the first marker was right by the hub and we thought that the map showed a nice grassy clean path to it. This was not the case, and we now know what swampy muddy streams look like on a map (its a little wiggly green line if you wanted to know). We learnt that actually we’re reasonably patient with each other. And we learnt that these are easily the most fun way to pass a Sunday.
Technically, we didn’t finish because we missed the last four markers…but that is okay with me. We did our best and had a blast…this is all the matters.
Powered By Fondant Fancy 