Inside Cheech’s mind

Decided that I would need some practise navigating for my future adventure races. So I was told to try the Sydney Summer Series. So I ventured out into the unknown on wednesday at Lindfield.

Went with to experienced heads in Luke and Tsalina. Thought I would be in capable hands, even tho its a individual thing. Anyway the basic concept is that you get a map with 30 checkpoints that you have to go to as many as you can in 45minutes. SIMPLE!

However, thing started well for me didn’t they, besides the fact I have a Ganglion Cyst in my foot (will post something about this later) I had no idea how to register and anything at all. As the 2 pros who were to guide me thru had already registered got the maps and were deciding which way to go.

As for me. I stood in front of the guy at registration with my $20 note stuck out in front of me (you have to pay $8 for the race), and was greeted with a blank face. "Uh, you have to fill in a form" oh.. ok.. where do I get one from. He duly points me over to a desk and I fill it in, not knowing what to really right down, but i filled in my form and dropped it off to rego, drop my pencil off, and now to study the maps

Looked very familar the map, to some of the ones from the TEVA and AROC races so I was fairly confident. So therefore I thought all you had to do was get to a checkpoint and clip the form. Asked Luke "So All you do is get to CP and clip the thing right" promptly answered YES! cools..

Then out of no where I hear "NOOOOOOOOOO, you don’t do that silly, u gotta write down the 2 letters on a pot?" Thanks for that Tsalina, cause I was ready to run off waiting to clip things. But the omen was there, for Luke cause he got LOST!! the expert team navigator.

Anyway the race was pretty good, enjoyed running around and looking like i knew where i was going! Managed to collect 13 checkpoints which I thought was awesome as my goal was only 10. However I did run pass 2 points without bothering to look hard for it as I didn’t want to be late. I was still 5 minutes late.

But i found my navigation was good and spot on but just the fitness (or lack of) was my downfall. Also decided to take a short cut home, which lead to me climbing fences, jumping off rocks, and meeting couple of stray dogs just to save me what a negative 5 mins. DAMN IT!

Oh well i had soo much fun, I will be back for the rest of the year. big thanks to Luke and Tsalina for there help, and i’m so glad i didn’t get lost and need to get help and a ride from a stranger

Deep Sea Fishing. No I’m not the next Rex Hunt, far from that, especially if you ask the boyz about the burly I put into the sea.  But it was an experience that I’m glad I went through. We organised a Deep Sea Fishing adventure for one of my mates from back in High School days

Few things here that aren’t good for the soul are:

1. Wake up at 4:30am, that’s right AM! On a Saturday morning to go fish.. That’s just totally wrong. Also the fact I didn’t get to bed til like 12:30am didn’t help.

2. I don’t like fishing, and never caught a fish before.

However, that didn’t stop us all going out. So off we went chugging along on the boat out past the heads and out into the open sea towards some point out near Dee Why beach. I spose this is where the adventure begins.

Since I had to get up so early and drive to the wharf so early, I skimped on breakfast (2 pieces of toast) I was feeling pretty damn hungry when I got to the wharf, so thanks to Doc, I started eating some sandwiches prepared by him, followed by chips, snacks, and coke. Anyway, for me that was a recipe for disaster. After about 5.5 hours of rocking and rolling on the water, the churning of the above mentioned ingredients decided that they didn’t want to stay where they were and thus forced there way out. Out at sea there was only one way out, and that’s through where they came. And now you have BURLY!

What does Burly bring?? Fish and burly was in abundance not because of mine, but 3 others who were out pretty bad. See some of the pictures. But 3 of the boyz were gone pretty bad, 2 didn’t even touch a fishing rod, and Dave. Dave is a legend, he was probably hucking the loudest, but after one suck episode he managed to get to his line, and reel in the biggest fish of the day. Kudos my friend.

To cut things short, I did however catch my first fish ever, and if you ask me it was HUGE! Also caught my 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th and even 5^th fish.  The bunch of us caught about 45 fish all up, some were pretty damn small and some where huge, we kept 20 all up to take home and eat.

But my view on Deep Sea Fishing is this. Boring, not very smooth ride, exciting when you’re catching something, boring when you spend 10 mins reeling in your line to find your bait is gone. Also I managed to get a snag on some rocks, beats me how that happened, I thought we were out deep sea fishing. Also Kwells do help (sea sick tablets) but in the end the best sea sick medicine is to stand under a tree.

I’m glad I went, not only cause of the bucks day, but also to experience something new. Anyway, after this was the rest of the nights activities of the bucks night and then sleep at midnight to get ready for my first ever TEVA adventure race…

Stay tuned.

Some Photos Kindly supplied by John http://jlbao.multiply.com/photos/album/6

Belanglo State Forrest.

Search it up in Google and one of the first results is not very enticing news for someone wanting to go there for adventure racing. Imagine if you get lost, and needed to get a ride out.. hmmm.. lets hope we don’t get lost hey. Well after a huge bucks day where I had to get up at 4:30am the Saturday, and then stay out til around about 11pm, you think its not the best preparation for an Adventure race is it, especially since we had to wake up at like 5:00am again just to make the start of the race.

Well my first TEVA race, some how the challenge of the day didn’t’ seem that bad compared to actually getting to the race. As a result of the bucks night being the day before we didn’t put a team in til after the early entry closed. therefore, it was not only hard to find a extra teammate, was hard to find 2! As everyone didn’t want to try it or thought they weren’t fit enough or just couldn’t make it. Eventually, convinced my lovely baby karina to do it, but who else. Could we get? We Tsalina and I tried everyone and there dogs, but who would have thought our team mate would be found where we found her. At Tsalina’s Office female toilet. Big thanks to Tsalina and her new found friend.

So now our team has been formed and all travel arrangements to the race site organised. Team Dekiru Yo is back in the race. The stress of forming the team was pretty high. But our spirits were quite high as well now. However, as we woke up in the morning the dark clouds and light rain put some doubts as to why some of us are doing this on a Sunday morning, but in my mind, it was MUD BATH waiting to happen, and I was happy as when I was 7 and played footy in the mud! Woooohoo.

Arriving nice and early at Belanglo State Forrest at the carpark, we prepared our bikes and got our race packs and the excitement grew. What was to come I don’t think I could picture but I was excited. As for the gals.. hmm maybe a little scared or apprehensive, especially when we all took our bikes to the transition area. What was there was a Big massive Pool of Muddy water and Buckets, the look on their faces was not of joy I can tell you. Well the course as we got it, was a lot of running and a lot of mountain biking. The obstacles seemed to be a fair number of them so that made it even more exciting. So we all started together, and after seeing the amount of mountain biking, I was spewing I didn’t build my mapboard yet! But we were now off and racing.

First challenge: Throwing 2 eggs into a bucket of water without breaking or else it’s a penalty run. First egg breaks, and mine goes swish straight in no breakage, but the penalty run it was. After this was another obstacle, where we had to blow up balloons and stack them up without popping. Finished this and off on the bikes.

We were doing pretty well at this stage. Ahead of most people which was good. We got to check point 5 now and it’s a simple knot tying obstacle. However this was a little more complicated one for our team. One of our team members got a punctured tyre. Which is no problem, cause I brought the puncture kit. BUTTTTTTTTTT!! I didn’t bring the pump did I!! Usually that helps. On this occasion, I managed to patch up the massive hole in the tube, and also get it back in the wheel in no time, but now we had a major problem with the valve. As Karina tried to tie the knots in the rope, Sonja and I tried to fix the valve and borrow a bike pump. Since the valve was broken, ppl needed the pump back as they had finished the task and was heading to the next check point.

So after coming into the check point with maybe the top 25 to 30 teams, we saw endless streams of teams fall out and leave us behind. Eventually it came down to 2 teams. We both had problems and all teams had gone about 10-15 minutes. Our heads were hung, and we knew we were goners. But I was sure we could catch teams and finish the race. So we kept plowing away and eventually we managed to squeeze air and life into that tube. A whole 45 mins later we left the check points that far behind. But at least we could move now. Which was awesome.

From here, it was all catch up. But if I was to go on and on, don’t think anyone will make the end of this blog. But I’ll cut things short and give some highlights.

- The first major obstacle was to fit 3 bikes and 3 people into a Ford telstar. It was tough but we managed to do it and do it twice.

- We caught up to a team in 2 checkpoints after the bike issues, so our spirits were lifted, also the all female team had decided to go for a toilet break right next to the checkpoints so I got to see some naked girls asses.

- Came to the Obstacle of navigation whilst carrying and Egg, we kinda got lost on the final checkpoint and lost about 15 mins but eventually completed that after I stepped on a huge rock and it flipped onto my leg. Have got 2 new scars to prove it.

- Managed to catch up to a fair part of the field so was happy.

- Rode around in the mud and rain was so fun, saw a large puddle so I decided to ride through it, only to find out why everyone was riding around it, as half my bike went into the water and some how I managed to come out the other side.

- We got to the navigational challenge and seeing the two girls in the team run around the puddles and me just plowing through the ankle to knee deep water was awesome.

- The 2 most fun challenges was the art masterpiece and the three wise monkeys. Both required team work which was great.

- Worse moment was when my alarm went off for the 6hr cut off and we still had 2 check points to collect.

- Running past other teams and seeing everyone’s faces caked in mud and a huge smile on their faces.

- Reaching our last obstacle which was a simple basketball one, which we completed in 1 min, we also met the same volunteer who helped us with our tyre fiasco and he remembered us, and congratulated us on our determination.

- Finally after 6hrs 28 mins, we had reached the finish line to see hardly anyone there, but we got a huge cheer from the organisers! Big thanks to them, I’d dreaded coming last, so managed to trudge my way upto the finish line. However, found out we didn’t come last but 75th overall. But it was real good to see the finish line.

- Another highlight was to eat a nice hot Lentil burger which tasted so good.

So now with further memories added to the brain, and many more stories to tell to our grand children, we trudged how with the biggest smiles on our mud caked faces. I was definitely satisfied we completed the race and now the only thing left to do was to clean our bikes  all 3 of them! Damn IT!! So now home to the nice hot shower…. DEKIRU YO!