The Rough with the Smooth: Team Costa Daurada of Spain mountain bikes its way across the flats of Murchison House Station (Mark Watson)
Racers assembled in the early morning gloom on the X-Adventure's second and final day for a 42-mile mountain-bike ride circumnavigating Murchison House Station, one of the oldest and largest pastoral stations in Western Australia.
The stunning panorama revealed at sunrise must have inspired the swift pace set by my teammates, at least for the first 30 miles. However, as the floral splendor of the plain yielded once again to the rock-strewn contours of the river canyon, fate was to deal us one third and final blow.
Prior to the race, the organizers warned that the terrain for the MTB section was particularly "prickly." Puncture-proof tires and/or numerous spare tubes were recommended to survive this segment with bikes intact. In retrospect it feels unpardonable, but just assembling a team for a race in Western Australia with a few days notice involved an enormous logistical undertaking, and in the rush, no one thought to bring "Outback-proof" tires and tubes.
The result: an astonishing 12 flat tires over a three-mile stretch of the gorge. Having long since exhausted their supply of spare tubes, Don, Dimitri, and Michelle plodded through three tortuous hours of repeated stops to patch and re-patch punctures. Don later recounted that "it was a nightmare of wasted time and effort, made worse as we helplessly watched team after team pass us by." As a final symbolic affront, Don suffered punctures to both tires simultaneously while walking his bike over a stretch of sharp rocks.
With only a single inflated tire between them, the trio dismounted for keeps, resigned to "hike-a-bike" over largely non-existent trails for the final five miles back to Murchison Camp. Team Qantas/Washington Adventure Racing took nearly ten hours to complete a section that took the fastest team just under five to complete. As a result, we incurred an even costlier time penalty for failing to meet the cutoff for the ensuing canoe section. For all extensive purposes, our race was over.
Having missed the canoe leg that carried the teams the last 8.5 miles of the Murchison River to its mouth at the Indian Ocean, we drove to the start of the penultimate section, a five-mile inline skate down Kalbarri's Coastal Highway. Now sporting a comically swollen ankle, the race medic advised me to sit out the closing stages, so Michelle, despite being badly dehydrated herself, gamely assumed my place in the skate.
However, eschewing the medic's advice, I opted to join Don and Dimitri for the last four-mile run along Red Bluff Beach to the finish line (though not without the aid of trekking poles). Despite our disappointing showing in Australia, we ultimately placed a tantalizing seventh in the Americas zone, just two places shy of qualification for the Argentina Raid. We'd given our all in a "courageous effort," as one member of the media quipped, but it was an effort that suffered from "one race too few" in the final reckoning. Still, as the breaking surf crashed on the distant shore, we cruised toward the finish line lamenting the fact that our high-octane excursion to this remote corner of the world was nearing its end.
The finals of the 2004 Raid World Championship, to be held in Argentina, will be broadcast on NBC on December 19 at 3 p.m. (EST). Albany, Western Australia, will host the opening stage of the 2005 X-Adventure Raid Series in late April.
