An insider’s account of the September 2004 X-Adventure race in Kalbarri, Western Australia
Razor's Edge: Kiwi Team Merrel/Zanfel chase Argentina's Team AXN during the via ferrata section of the Kalbarri X-Adventure (Mark Watson)
With the sun backlighting the Indian Ocean's predawn surf, 24 teams from four continents readied their mountain bikes for action. The inspiration for this gathering: the final stage of the 2004 X-Adventure Raid Series, a 130-mile endurance race across the rolling sand plains, river gorges, and pristine beaches of Western Australia's Kalbarri National Park.
The X-Adventure (reads "cross adventure") Raid Series is the nearest approximation to a professional tour enjoyed by the burgeoning sport of adventure racing. This competition has steadily expanded from a Euro-centric circuit to a true world cup, and now comprises four races on four continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and Australia). The X-Adventure events also serve as the qualifiers for the annual Raid World Championship, a 400-mile expedition race that's the pinnacle of the adventure-racing game. The teams twitching in the early morning Kalbarri light were preparing for their last chance at qualification for the 2004 Raids in Argentina at the end of November.
Adventure racing is a sport that rewards cohesion and teamwork; the X-Adventure's format builds off this ethos by allowing only three athletes in each four-person team to race in any given stage. The fourth athlete, along with a team's support crew, follows along and will sub in for the ensuing section. It's a format that increases the pace of the contest—running anywhere from a total of 20 to 35 hours to complete—while also requiring teams to match personnel to disciplines according to their respective strengths.
This "cohesion" component presented our first challenge, as I met my team for the first time at the Los Angeles airport en route to Perth, Australia. This level of adventure racing being an expensive undertaking, I don’t usually assemble my team until a sponsorship is signed. Luckily, a last-minute sponsorship from Qantas Airways afforded me the opportunity to race in Australia, but unless I could join a team that had competed in at least one of the prior races (and so "inherit" its points from those earlier stages), the deficit to qualify for the Raid World Championship would be insurmountable. Worse still, my regular teammate, Debra McInally, had broken her foot two weeks prior to the Kalbarri race, so I was left hunting for some new running mates at the 11th hour.
With barely a week remaining before the race, Dimitri Kieffer, an athlete against whom I had raced in Vietnam two years earlier, suggested I join his team. He, along with fellow Seattle racers Michelle Maislen and Don Wahl, had ranked high enough in the June 2004 leg of the X-Adventure in Bend, Oregon, to merit a slim chance at qualification for the Raid Worlds—provided they too could find their way to Australia. They needed a sponsor; I needed a team. So despite being virtual strangers, we joined forces for an unlikely gambit to the Australian Outback as Team Qantas/Washington Adventure Racing.
About the author: Brad Pennington, captain of Team Qantas, has competed in more stages of the X-Adventure Raid Series than any other American athlete since its inception in 2002. He also captained a team in the 2002 Raid Gauloises (predecessor to the Raid World Championship), a 620-mile expedition race in northern Vietnam.
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