The Arrow International 24 Hour Adventure Race Series started its New Zealand leg of the 5 round Australasian series in Auckland during May.

Just over 80 adventure hungry athletes lined up on Army Bay beach Whangaparaoa north of Auckland for the first leg of the six leg race that would set teams off on a journey to Stanmore Bay, Waiwera, Riverhead, Muriwai, Piha, and Waitakeres then into the urban leg of the adventure through New Lynn & Te Atatu.

It took just forty-two minutes for the two person mixed team Phil White & Anne Mortimer of Team Canoe & Kayak to reach the first check point (CP) at Stanmore Bay closely followed by Team The Professionals Havard Daniels & Darren Gosse. Two hundred metres back was OrionHealth.com followed by a large gap to the chasing field. OrionHealth - Wayne Oxenham, Alysha Blackwell, Wayne Hodgetts and Marcel Hagener recently won the ARC24hr, Whakatane 24hr and placing 8th at the Primal Quest - USA and had regrouped for the Arrow Auckland enlisting the support of 2005 AR World Champion and Mild Sevens winner Hagener for the Arrow event.

It was Canoe & Kayak that grabbed the lead again, slipping through transition and onto the mountain bikes a minute quicker than OrionHealth, with The Professionals two minutes further back. Within the next ten minutes eight teams raced through transition with a steady procession of bikes heading west in search of Muriwai with two CP’s and around 60kms ahead.

A few kilometres into the mountain bike OrionHealth had overtaken Canoe & Kayak and set off to create a buffer thanks to good team work & Hagener's slipstream. Things were going to plan for OrionHealth until they missed the turn off to a CP and had to backtrack losing valuable minutes. By the transition on top of the cliffs above Muriwai Beach, OrionHealth held an eighteen minute lead over Canoe & Kayak into the trek, followed just nine minutes by the biggest movers Team Crash Bandicoot’s Michael White, Jo Donnelly & Darren Donnelly who had now jumped four places to third. All teams were in sight of each other as they raced the rolling windswept cliff tops of the rugged West Coast to Bethells Beach before heading into the Waitakere bush on route to Piha Beach, for hot food and homely comforts of the transition.

The race was now into its seventh hour, 3:30pm in the afternoon with the urgency of the race changing. As the sun started to descend towards the horizon, teams were not only racing each other, but also precious daylight minutes as they hoped to make the Waitakere bush bash section during the day to move quicker and navigate through the notoriously dense foliage.

OrionHealth were the first to climb out of Piha with mountain bikes on their backs to the cliff tops above, before riding Anawhata & Piha roads to the high point of the race, a café car park close to the Waiatarua radio mast.

Teams’ endurance and strength were now being truly tested mid race as they climbed from sea level to the top of the Waitakere ranges and it showed in the results. OrionHealth extended their lead to twenty seven minutes from Canoe & Kayak.

The first two teams started the bush bash down the Waitakeres to New Lynn in daylight, with Bikesmith and the trailing field entering the trek section in the dark. With no tracks and three kilometres of dense bush to navigate through, the top teams were expected to travel about 1 kilometre per hour taking 2-3 hours before finding a track at the foothills of the ranges to locate the final CP before the urban leg through New Lynn to the kayak.

It may have only been ten kilometres as the crow flies to the Whau River – New Lynn, but the 3km bush-bash & urban descent took OrionHealth three hour thirty five minutes. Canoe & Kayak had pulled back eleven minutes on OrionHealth and now only trailed by sixteen minutes. A very quick transition reduced this to just over five minutes.

The lead support crews stood on the finish line peering down Henderson Creek for any sign of the leaders – would it be Canoe & Kayak, or OrionHealth? Word then broke that Canoe & Kayak were in fact portaging the kayak 5km across the peninsula to the fascination of locals and police who were patrolling the area. No sooner had the gathering crowd debated the merits of each route choice than Canoe & Kayak answered their question, running at speed with kayak on wheels down the road to an erupting crowd on the finish line.

Phil & Anne were elated, they had led the race early on through the paddle and first few kilometres of the MTB, until OrionHealth streamed past, they regained minutes in the technical bush bash and outwitted the opposition in the last paddle knowing from the maps that low tide would favour a portage.

OrionHealth crossed the line thirty-four minutes later, followed by Bikesmith AR, then in third place Crash Bandicoot, OPC fourth and Fergs Capital Stamina (Liam Drew, Barry Stevens, Shane Ross & Suzette Nicholson) fifth.

The next event in the Arrow Series will be contested in Wellington on September 16 and the grand finale this year being a 48 hour race in Canterbury over Labour weekend 21-23 October. For more info go to www.24houradventurerace.com Images provided by