New Plymouth Continues Domination Of The Ultimate Secondary School Adventure Race

The New Plymouth Boys and Girls High Schools adventure race team have battled their way to victory in the Genesis Energy Secondary Schools Hillary Challenge for the sixth time in nine years.

The annual event, held in the third week of May, saw 96 top secondary school adventure racers representing schools from across New Zealand converge on the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, on the North Islands Central Plateau. They were there to give everything they had in the 5 day long challenge that takes the teams on an amazing journey, incorporating many of the elements of a traditional expedition length adventure race, with a strong emphasis on teamwork throughout.

The format for the week has teams taking on twelve 60min long challenges on the first two days, involving a wide range of outdoor skills in a problem solving scenario context. On the third and fourth day the teams head into the wild on a two day (18hour) rogaine expedition which will see the best cover over 60km of tricky navigation. The final day of the competition is a multisport race, involving kayaking, mountain biking and cross terrain running with a winning time of between 4-5 hours. All 8 team members participate in everything throughout the week supporting each other through the challenges to try and accumulate the highest score they can. The winning team takes away a prize consisting of an outdoor equipment package for their school, valued at over $8000, sponsored by Bivouac Outdoors.

"There is no question about it this is the toughest, most demanding sporting event that you can do at secondary school in New Zealand, possibly even the world. It is a complete physical, mental and emotional challenge for the participants" says Darren Ashmore the OPC Events Manager. "The 12 teams that are lucky enough to get through the qualifying rounds spend months training their outdoor skills, building fitness and developing themselves into a high performing adventure team".

After the first two days of this year's event the competition was very tight with New Plymouth holding a slim lead over the combined St Cuthberts/Auckland Grammar team with Opunake High School a close third. With the rogaine expedition starting the following morning the event was wide open with three days to go and many teams including Middleton Grange, Thames High School and Whangarei Boys and Girls High School were getting ready to pounce on the leaders.

The Middleton Grange team was already at a disadvantage having lost a team member when she accidently slipped on a step, breaking her arm, on Monday morning before the Day 1 briefing. The event rules state that a team will lose 1/8th of its score on each day for each team member missing due to illness or injury. As the accident happened before the competition had started the team had the option to fly up a replacement team member from Christchurch. Such is the commitment and strength of this team they decided however that they would stick with their original line up, that had been training hard together since August, take the daily penalty and strive to do the best they could. This was a brave and admirable decision that shows their incredible team spirit.

The rogaine expedition this year started in the small village of Raurimu and traversed across the Tongariro Forest Conservation area and Landcorp farm blocks over two days. Teams had 120 optional checkpoints to find spread across four maps at four different scales ranging from the 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 main maps to a 1:10,000 orienteering map of the Taurewa Landcorp farm and even a 1:250 scale map of the Okupata cave system.

Strategy, expert navigation and timekeeping would be vital if teams were to score highly in this phase of the competition. Several teams had strong navigators, with top national junior orienteers in two of teams and many others that had been frequenting orienteering and rogaine events for many months in preparation for this moment. The teams were accompanied by an OPC instructor, there only to monitor the safety and wellbeing of the team and unable to assist with any decision making that may affect the competition. There was a compulsory dark zone, between 5pm and 7am on Wednesday night, so teams set off loaded up with food, clothing and equipment for two nights in the wilderness.

Wednesday night had solid snowfall down to 650m completely covering the camping teams and the landscape they were about to traverse the following day. This only added to the excitement and again demonstrated the toughness of the competitors getting up in sub-zero temperatures at 5.30am to break camp and prepare for day 4.

The next day was spent crunching through the snow under perfect blue skies trying to get back to the OPC base to make the 5pm time cutoff with as many points in the bag as possible. Unfortunately for the teams from Mercury Bay and Opunake their time keeping let them down and a late arrival across the line saw them lose most of their points for the day.

Again the teams braved a cold night under tent flys before the early start of the multisport race on Friday. The route started with a 6km paddling stage across Lake Otamangakau before an 8km rugged cross country run through bush tracks and untracked swampy scrubland. Arriving on the OPC access rd near S.H 47 they set of again on mountain bikes for a 25km muddy ride on 4WD tracks and roads in the Tongariro Forest Park before the final 6km run along bush tracks.

The finish line in the courtyard of the OPC Youth Development Centre on Friday afternoon was an emotional place. Family, teachers, principals and friends had driven for hours to support their teams through the final day and across the line and the feeling was the same as at the line of any Primal Quest, XPD or Southern Traverse. The students had been pushing their limits for 5 long days through challenging conditions and their sense of pride at what they had achieved was overwhelming. It has been said many times before that in an expedition length adventure race the competitors often experience a years worth of life's emotions in just a few days, this was definitely the case for these students. The type of personal growth and development that occurred over the week simply cannot be replicated in a classroom, on the rugby field, tennis court or triathlon circuit. This sort of learning only comes from adventuring in a team, overcoming challenges, obstacles and environmental conditions in the great outdoors.

Of course in every competition there will always be a winner, but as race director Ashmore points out, "adventure racing is about so much more than just winning, without the journey and effort to get to the start line, the race holds less meaning".

For the record, the New Plymouth team held off St Cuthberts and Auckland Grammar for the win and with an incredible performance over the final three days, the 7-person team from Middleton Grange, climbed into 3rd place. The teams from Whangarei and Thames rounded out the top 5, gaining the final two automatic qualifying spots for the 10th anniversary Genesis Energy sponsored challenge next year. All other teams will need to attend the qualification events in February at OPC Tongariro and hopefully the new South Island qualifier in Christchurch.

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