Your body is tired and your legs keep cramping. Youve got a headache and youre feeling fuzzy…
Its Sunday morning 6 o’clock. You need
to keep racing until 12. Your teammates
can’t finish the race without you.
Endurance is the ability to sustain over time, to call from
ourselves renewed commitment and effort when we are confronted with challenges
or hardship. Endurance often requires tolerating discomfort, and may call on us
to reach for resources and stamina we are not certain we possess. Endurance
means that we remain steadfast even through criticism and discouraging odds.
The 24hr Oakvalley Challenge was a bumpy ride, but with warm success. Ultimately it was much more than just about
racing, it was about the experience.
Early Saturday morning Team Paul Roos set up camp. The team was made up of 4 riders (Edward
Best, Jannes Buijs, Stephan Senekal and Matthew Lombardi) ,who had to
mountainbike for 24 hours continually, in relay form. The route?
The route was a 11 km lap with a diverse combination of sand, woods,
open fields and gravelroad, and ups and downs.
In addition, the race takes place on singletrack, forcing participants
to deal with sometimes dangerous sections.
The start was at 12:00 and the winning team, the team that did the most
laps by 12:00 the next day. There were
approxametly 300 competitors and 200 supporters at this annual and fast growing
event. This race requires planning, balance, and strength of will. Pacing determines a teams ability to
sustain. By midnight PRG was in overall
2nd place and done 23 laps in total. The
hours of nightracing was cooler but technically very challenging.
The Sunday morning and last few hours of racing brough
challenges of its own. Time passes
really fast when youre off the bike but when you’ve been racing all through the
night with little sleep, time on the bike passes really slow.
There is no specified amount of laps to finish and also no
spesific rest periods for food and sleep (sleep was optional). The clock runs
continuously from start to finish as in a Time Trial. By sunrise Stephan Senekal was able to pull
off consecutive 27 minute laps which helped the team tremendously. It was also at this stage that some of the
older participants and racing teams probably couldn’t believe the constant lap
times and queried our first place! This
just again confirms the advantages of being young! No bills and wrinkeld skin, being energetic,
lively and carefree, having tons of energy to keep going all day and night!
Drained, very tired and with legs a bit worn, PRG
triuphantly won the overall 1st place with a total of 46 laps. The team that came second finished with 41
laps. Our team was fortunate not to have
any problems with their bikes. All in all it was a very good race and it was
great winning the race for the 2nd year in a row.
A big thanks to the parents for your incredible support.
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