Team Nike/Beaver Creek Second at 2009 Adventure Racing World Championship
After racing 5 days on less than 3 hours of sleep, Team Nike/Beaver Creek finished a highly respectable second at the 2009 Adventure Race World Championships in Portugal. Great Britain's Team Helly-Hansen ended up victorious after scoring just two more CP's (checkpoints) than Nike/Beaver Creek.
The event introduced a new racing format, which caused much confusion, even among the world's top teams. Team Nike/Beaver Creek captain Mike Kloser remarked "I would have to say that this race had the toughest international field that we've ever raced against. There were at least a dozen top teams that could've won this thing with a little help from lady luck. Our team this year was probably one of the strongest we've ever fielded, Chris Forne our navigator was incredible, I've never seen anyone navigate under pressure of time limits like Chris did in this race. George Christison, another Kiwi (new to our team this year) added to our overall paddling strength and was equally strong on his feet and on the bike. Monique Merrill, performed up to the level that most men only hope they could. We raced full throttle from the gun on day one and found that we were having to up the ante at some points in the race just to make some of the time cuts established with this year's unique format."
Most teams were not happy that this largely experimental format (at least with this level of competition) was introduced at a World Championship event. Kloser went on to say "I personally like a challenge that is both mentally and physically demanding, but it would have been nice if all the cards were laid on the table so we would have had a clear understanding of which hand to play and when. Prior to the race, we were given both written verbal statements of the importance in accumulating all the Check Points (CPs), both Compulsory and Optional Bonus CPs. By the end of day one, we were up front in the lead and had collected all the CPs to be had by this point, but along with Orion, (defending World Champs from 2008) we quickly found out it was going be virtually impossible to collect all the CPs and make the periodic race segment cutoffs. So as the race progressed, we opted to bypass some of the Optional CPs, still barely making some of the cutoffs. Needless to say, we raced hard and had a few close calls making some of the cutoffs, which left our support crew on pins and needles waiting to see if we were going to make the time cuts. We would later find out that teams could actually miss some of the cutoffs and take a short cut to the next segment, rest some and start accumulating CPs. Typically in an Adventure Race, if you miss a cut off you are taken out of the running for the win, but as we would find out late in the race, that was not the case in this race and teams could actually benefit from missing a section, resting and leapfrogging ahead of other teams who had made all the time cutoffs.
After racing all out for five days with so little sleep, we were disappointed to have come up 2 CP's short of winning. In hindsight going into the last day, had we known for sure where we stood against the other top teams with total accumulated CPs, we would have pushed on to collect a few more CPs on the 2nd to last trekking segment. As it turned out, one of our Kiwi teammates George had been battling severely blistered feet over the 2nd half of the race and we opted to take our chances on the final bike segment, verses the trekking section. So for the 2nd year in a row, we would have to settle for second place at the World Championships, a title that we had our sites set on recapturing."
The team, which has won numerous World Championships in the past was relieved to find out that next year's AR World Championship in Spain will go back to the traditional racing format.
