This is almost amounting to pure insanity. For two weeks in a row, I’m making myself wake up at an ungodly hour of 4am. It’s not the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon, thankfully. This time around, it’s the Safra Avventura Race. Something new this time. My first time taking part in an adventure race.

Was supposed to be smooth sailing. However, it wasn’t meant to be so. Well, I suppose crap happens, and I too don’t know how in the world it could have turned out that way. Suffice to say, out team, Got Milk? almost didn’t even get to start the race. Thank goodness for a kind soul out there.

Frankly speaking, it wasn’t a very good first time effort. Then again, it depends on how you look at it. Firstly, I didn’t really train for it at all. Secondly, I appeared to be short of one of the mandatory item. Oops, guess I should state it here, less someone from the organising committee stumbles into here and discovers my little secret! On the other hand, I asked my team mate “Do you want to win, or do you want to enjoy the race?” Enjoy it was. But for myself, all I wanted to do was to complete the race within the allocated time. In my mind, it can be better to go for the race without sufficient training and aim for a finish, irregardless of the time. At least for future race, self motivation can come in the form of “Hey, if I can even complete the race without training, imagine what I can achieve with proper training”. Compare this to having proper training, and end up not being able to complete for whatever reason.

The one thing I dislike but cannot be avoided are the wet elements. They make you, your attire and equipment wet. Which isn’t a good thing since their side effects are that icky yucky feeling of wet clothes stuck to your body, abraisons and blisters. these are the things which remove the enjoyment from the race too. I even brought home a big blister on the arch of my left foot. No idea how am I going to walk properly, but I guess I’ll have to find a way to do so.

Heck, even without the blister, I doubt if I could have slow jogged for the remainder of the race.

The rope elements were fun, especially the absailing! My team mate elected to do the climb, so I had to do the rope ascend. In my mind, I played back the different possiblilities of different sling lengths and methods of ascending using minimal strength. For the first half, I think I used too much brute strength. Sure I went up fast, but by then, I was quite tired and had to rest. As I went up, I somehow figured out how to keep my body straight, but it was a little bit too late. Still, I managed to overtake another team during the rope ascend.

Like I said, the absailing was the most enjoyable part of it all, even though it was the shortest. From the top, the rope was noticably heavy and I had difficulty lowering myself down. It think I had probably passed one third of the wall when it got easier. I pushed off from the wall, brought my locking arm up above the descending device and just flew down. I think it was probably 2 m/s or something around that area. Sadly, even before I could feel the adrenaline rush, I hit the floor! I want to do it again!

From there, we made a final effort and slow jogged to the finish line. We clocked a total time of 7 hours and 31 minutes. The cut-off time was technically 7 hours, but since we had a 1 hour waiting time due to the bottleneck at the rope ascending station, it worked out to under 6 hours. Great!

On a final note, you may be wondering why such a … weird team name? Well, I wanted a team name which was funny. Got Milk? sure sounded funny to me. In the end, it served it’s purpose. The girls at the registration were amused by our team name. In fact, most of the volunteers were pretty amused by it. Heck, when I complete the absailing station, the station master even asked us “why Got Milk?“, to which I replied “We forgot to have our glass of milk this morning”. She had the guts to even reply “well, some of the other girls say that they have … !” Erm … ok, this was getting a little bit out of hand already!

I think I shall carry on using this team name in future! It’s funny and hilarious! Yeah!