Adventure’s on to Tuff it out

ADVENTURE Racing action kicks into high gear this weekend as the Merrel Transkei Tuff race takes place on the Wild Coast.

The event starts tomorrow and ends on Sunday morning, with teams of two or four taking on a daunting 150km course through some unrelenting terrain.

“We are really excited and looking forward to this weekend’s race,” said event organiser Bruce Viaene.

The Wavecrest Beach Hotel and Spa on the coast just outside Centani will be the race village as well being the start and end point for the race.

“Most of the teams are starting to arrive already, now we are just waiting for this mixed weather to pass and hopefully we will have a great event on Saturday,” said Viaene.

Various challenges including mountain biking, trekking, kloofing, coasteering, orienteering, snorkling, abseiling and kayaking should make for some very interesting racing over the course.

“We have some great challenges in store for the teams, we have some big mountain bike legs, some good running legs that will make navigating quite tricky which will be a bit of a curve-ball for the teams and the abseiling will be a beautiful thing, no one has been through this gorge before, totally untouched,” explained Vieane.

The inaugural race was held last year. The response to it was enthusiastic and this year’s event has been sold out.

“We started off last year with a few teams and this year it has drawn massive national interest, so we have a packed race,” claimed Viaene.

“We were hoping to get about 20 entries into this year’s race as we believe in growing big slowly, but we have ended up allowing 26 teams to take part.”

The organisers hope the event will grow bigger and better over the coming years. “Next year we already have a waiting list of teams wanting to enter which is very exciting for us,” said Viaene.

It starts at 7am tomorrow and teams will be in action throughout the day and night, with the cut-off time set for 26 hours.