Maserati BIG5 participants sprint home
The “10 Days, 5 Events and 1 Race” came to a nail-biting end on Sunday, July 16 as competitors in the Maserati BIG5 Challenge raced each other and the clock in the final event of the challenge – the Momentum Knysna Forest Half Marathon.
After completing a mountain biking, openwater swimming, trail-running and an MTB X course over 10 days, competitors were relieved to only have a 21km run between them and the title of Maserati BIG5 Challenge finisher.
In the men’s race the main duel was between Bradley Weiss and Keegan Cooke for the overall title, with Weiss taking it in an accumulative time of 07:21.05. The leaderboard in the women’s category changed multiple times during the 10 days of the competition, with Vicky van der Merwe pipping Kate Dodds at the post to claim the overall title with a cumulative time of 08:37.52.
Said Weiss, “There was such a cool vibe, this is such a unique race. I am very happy to come away with the overall win. I had the lead coming into the last race and that gave me the opportunity to run within myself. The women’s race was very exciting and I think Vicky did amazingly well to regain the time deficit that she had going into the run this morning.”
Vicky agreed, saying, “I had a very bad first day and lost a lot of time on that 80km mountain bike race and I have been chasing ever since. I had a very definite plan for today and I stuck to it. I just made sure I maintained my pace – after four events I was definitely hurting but I am happy with how it turned out.”
Make this your 2018 bucket-list, must-do multisport event and start training now for the 2018 BIG5 Challenge.