After a fallow year for adventure racing in 2020, event organisers are gearing up for 2021. And as a look forward to Adventure Race Croatia in May we asked Nicola MacLeod to recall her experience of ARC 2019. Nicola is an extremely accomplished racer (25 multi-day adventure races including wins at AR World Champs 2009 in Portugal and two wins at Patagonia Expedition Race), though she had a few fallow years herself due to work and child-care. But in 2019 she felt it was time to get out there again, so when she received a call from a team needing a stand-in for ARC 2019, even with just two weeks’ notice, there was no question. Here she tells of the gnarly scrapes and sublime scapes of the Dalmatian coast in a race that she loved but found exceptionally hard.
Adventure Race Croatia will take place on 16-23rd May 2021 in the Kvarner and Gorski Kotar region of the country. It will be a 550km race for mixed teams of four over about 4 days. Starting on the island of Krk, the course will include approx 300km of MTB, sections of run/hike in the mountains, paddling, rope-work and of course, fearsome navigation. Adventure Race Croatia is a qualifier in the Adventure Race World Series.
Why ARC 2019 Croatia?
Nicola MacLeod: High on the wind of a superb journey at the ITERA in Scotland in August 2019, I felt it was the right time to get back to proper racing again. I had been lucky enough to spend six weeks with work in the beautiful mountains of Croatia earlier in the year. What a place! And then ten days out, the chance came up to take on AR Croatia with Polish team, Gymcity. Impossible to resist….
ARC 2019 was my second race back from a long gap, and it was hard. Work and childcare had got in the way of training – all the usual excuses - and the terrain in Croatia is unforgiving. On the (less than) solid foundation of a few extra kilos of 'non-lean’ mass; a sliver of hill training; a flirt with some bike prep; an extravagant shop for Belgian cheese and sausages; a quick house, country and job move, and a twenty-two hour drive through the most ridiculous lightening I have ever experienced, I finally met my teammates in the Pine Beach Resort in Pakostane just a few hours before the event.
Maciek, Mateusz, Irek and I share race experience and aspirations. What we didn't share was fluency in each other's language. And nor did I match their fitness. I could see it would take experience, tenacity, superb teammates and a few paracetamol to crack this one...
I know the team were disappointed not to be at the very front from the start; they had the pace and the will to win. Maciek, in particular, is a machine. He is phenomenally quick on the bike and shoved me up some long slogs. It was a lesson in humility as a few years back I'd have held my own in most stages. In adventure racing it can be hard to find a four that works consistently but apart from the pace this was a good partnership. I'm calling back in when my times are down and quads are in shape so that we can race together again.
What was ARC 2019 like?
ARCroatia is a furiously beautiful race. All the time. View after view. There’s an impeccable mixture of coast, mountains, ropes, technical biking, superb organisation and beauty. In ambient night-time temperatures of 20 degrees, a good deal higher than any I'd seen that year, we set off on Igor Dorotic's lovingly created route along the coastlines and skylines of stunning Croatia.
That first mountain up from the sea in beating high temperatures was nails. The roads are slick and the paths are rocky. The biking was long and steep in parts, and the downhills needed quads of steel. The tracks veered between gnarly, rocky single-track and dusty precipitous paths made all the more exciting by the overgrown bush – simultaneously it prevented you from seeing the trail ahead and hit you in the eyes. I called it 'riding by guess'...
Croatian hiking is rough going. The jagged rocks ate our shoe rubber and those spiky bushes put themselves everywhere our shins wanted to be - a reminder to wear long socks or tights for the next race.
How did it go?
After the usual formalities and kit chaos at Pakostane, and hours of reducing the weight of boxes to meet the limit… no to Coca Cola, no to rice pudding.... we headed out to the island of pag and started with a run from the town square to the beach at Posika and then jumped into the double sit-on kayaks to paddle along that beautiful Dalmatian coastline. We started well, cruising ourselves into the top few teams. We may not have had the language, but I did learn a word in Polish – “faster” “Idź szybciej”. To be fair it wasn't a word I'd need much after that... but it felt good to show willing.
From the boats we went into the mountains - straight up, 4000 feet, in 40 degrees - into the Velebit range and its famous ‘Stone Gallery’. Has to be experienced to be believed, with stacks of sharks’ teeth rock formations poking out of the bush, gullies and gorges, and huge cavities eroded into the limestone. We hiked up and down on knife-edges of rock, even abseiled down to one of the checkpoints, in a huge cavern in the limestone formation.
Places lost on that leg took days to pick back up. I felt guilty that my pace couldn't match theirs – and vowed to be fit for the sharp end again soon. The GymCity lads are strong, fast, accurate and ultra-determined - Irek and Maciek's navigation partnership is powerful. Apparently arguments are organised chaos, helping them to hone in on the checkpoint... one minor advantage of the language barrier was that it washed over me.
That first hike led us into the vertical canyon of the Paklenica gorge and a bike transition, riding on through the night. The next day’s trek included a refreshing swim to cross the Zrmanja river - stripping down and splashing across the pristine water with our gear stuffed into dry bags surprised a few couples out walking. After a second beautiful kayak leg there was another 20k trek with what you might call… er… ‘challenging’ navigation (the winning team took 7 hours to cover the 20km and the slowest team 20 hours). We lost a couple of hours to a nav error aswell. Mistakes are almost certain in expedition racing, so the most important thing is being able to continue slickly after sorting them.
By Day 3 we were catching teams and overtaking the teams that had left us behind. Experience, endurance pace and the mind-set of being able to continue started to pay off. Muscles were less trashed than on Day 2 on the big mountain stages. We crept into the top ten, racing amongst some good teams, and we were pleased. This felt lucky and tactical, rather than founded on brute speed.
We biked through the night again… but in the middle of the ride we were rewarded with a checkpoint with a swim in a small karst lake (see Best Bits below). Refreshing by day; Baltic by night, and marred by full visibility of all the leeches in our lights. We arrived at the via ferrata in the red Cikola Gorge at dawn and felt glad of that - the canyon was at boiling-to-searing by 8am when we emerged.
And then more biking… to the paddle to the finish line, which was across the night sea in crashing waves – we were soaked to the skin and ferry gliding against the wind. We cruised into the finish in 9th. Not the win that this team are ready for – that is yet to come.
The Best Bits…
On the bike, scrambling down to jump in a quarry pool in the dead of night. We could see the pond life and leeches because they were spot-lit in our bike lights. A toad calmly sat and watched us swim in to the checkpoint and reach up to stamp our card – and takes pride of place in the obligatory photo.
Abandoned houses in these hamlets and fields in the high mountains - stark in their emptiness and their hard memories.
Irek the forager reaching into trees for all the figs and plums and grapes and blackberries that were growing sweet, wild and cultivated around us; disappearing only to reappear with grapes. Magic.
So what did we take away... ?
Hills give you hard hill legs – and you need those in Croatia.
Babybel cheese, in those red skins - while excellent AR food, in temperatures over 40 degrees they dissolve, turning into a homogenous waxy gremlin. This is still edible, wax and all, but weird, and it leaves red bits between your teeth for hours.
After an hour of searching, finding a ruined cottage on a mountainside scattered with ruins and trying not to alert the other 10 teams looking – ruthless tactics.
Running long distances in bike shorts is a bad idea - in a raw sort of a way - particularly when followed by a few hundred km of biking along rocky paths. I'd somehow forgotten this rule. Relearned the hard way.
