Danish team Roadrunners Adventure set off in their kayaks to start a long paddle down the Chilean fjords in the 2011 Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race. (Photographer: Francisco Labra)
On the sixth day of the 2011 Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race – a short distance from PC10 - Danish team, Roadrunners Adventure, along with East Wind (Japan) and Perdido en el Turbal (US, UK), made the tough decision to make a rescue call. The weather conditions had left them wet, freezing and close to hypothermia and the persistent rain had made sections of the route impassable.
At PC10, facing temperatures of -2 degrees Celcius, Roadrunners Adventure was forced to retire from the 'last wild race'. Speaking from the Puerto Natales, where the racers were recuperating since their rescue, the team reveal their story and reasons for returning.
Tobias Bering, Team Captain
"The race has been quite good, really beautiful. It´s just that the last two nights it was very windy and there was a lot of rain. We were walking through these bushes and you get all the cold water from the bushes on you. We were heading to PC10 but together with the two other teams (East Wind, and Perdido en el Turbal) we decided to stop. We could never have made it in daylight and walking two or three hours in the night wouldn´t have been good. We stopped and stayed one night but our tent and sleeping bags were soaked so we were freezing. The day after that we got picked up (by helicopter) and taken to PC10, where we stayed one more night."
Christa Molberg Nielsen
"I finally feel warm after being cold for so long but I can barely walk to the toilet alone because of my cut and swollen feet. I mean why do people do this adventure racing? Haha, I´m sure in a few months when I´m all healed I´ll think, if I have better equipment I can do it again.
"Being rescued was really, really nice but it just took so long. I was getting really, really cold. Tobias, my team captain, stopped us and said we´re not going any further. I´m really glad he did that. We slept overnight in a tent then the next morning called it - it took a day for the helicopter to come. It finally came and then we waited at PC10 for a night. I was really, really cold for a really long time. I actually got clothes from the Japanese team.” Emil Rye "We were so cold and wet, freezing and shaking. It was around 9pm and we still had two and a half hours until PC10 - to go up the mountain was too dangerous. We thought we would sleep and then call for help in the morning if Christa wasn´t any better - she was shaking and couldn´t stop.”
Emil Rye
"Racing at night was always a little bit stressful because we were always trying to get to some point while it was still light and normally we didn´t make it so we continued as long as we could, powering along to get to the point where we could sleep. We normally stopped at 1am.”
Niels Torp
"(The Patagonian Expedition Race) is cool because it’s a real adventure and the consequences of our decisions are real. For example, if we had waited for 10 more minutes we would have received our equipment but we decided to go without them so first I didn’t have my gloves and when I did get them my hands wouldn’t fit because they were too big (swollen) but hey, that’s adventure racing!"
"Overall it was great. They promised us the real wild race. We really liked the challenges. It’s good when you can make a race where nature is the challenge."
It’s my first time in Patagonia. It’s a beautiful country. I like the landscape and the few people we’ve met here are all super people, really nice and helpful."
"To meet icebergs when you’re paddling along is amazing. You put your hand in the water and feel the ice lying there. It’s actually quite sharp so you have to be quite careful. We could hit the icebergs with our paddles, so we were playing Titanic with them at one stage, so it was fun."
"We still want to come back because we want to see the whale. We would like to come back because now we know what the challenge is and we know we can do it better than what we did here. So we’ll see if we can make a team. We know what kind of talent we need to be able to do it well."
"We had a very good start of the race, but then we came a little bit too much into survival so we would like to do this as a real race all the way though. It’s learning by doing."
