Nielsen Thomas, Gordon Thomas, Nielsen Lasse, Hansen Mogens
We are team Delta from Denmark and normally the races there are three persons races. So normally Thomas, Mogens and me are racing together, but over here we have to be two persons or four and we’ve asked Lasse to join us. We had done a couple of races with him in Denmark.


Nielsen Thomas

Nielsen Lasse
To be a team of four you had to have a girl in it. So you preferred to come here as two teams?
Yes, exactly. We preferred to be two teams because we couldn’t find a girl who would be strong enough. There aren’t that many Danish adventure races girls and right now one of them is racing in Africa, another one will go to Alaska soon… So there are four or five good girls and we’re already taken.
We discussed before the race that we’d go as two teams but we’d gonna follow each other and help as much as it possible. And if something happens and one team falls down, we’ll split up. And that’s what has happened because one of your teammates had problems with his back because of the kayak. It was a kayak model which was new for us and I think he started sitting a little bit wrong and kept on going. And it was also a really long stage. But we only do this for fun, and it was a good experience.

Which long races did you do before?
We were in Turkey last year for the European championship; it was also a three days race. Then we went to Ireland, it was a 40-hours race. And this is out third race outside Denmark.


Nielsen Thomas

Gordon Thomas
And what is different here?
That’s a lot of mosquitoes here; I really hate them. I think, in comparison with the race in Turkey, this one is harder. There are much more paths in Turkey. Of course there was a big mountain in Turkey which was also hard, but this… It’s really hard for your feet.
Lasse’s navigated, he does it a lot in Denmark, so he was running really fast in the race. He put up the pace and we took off our brains and just followed him.

As for communication, was all clear for you on the stages?
It was OK. Everywhere was somebody who was speaking English so there was no problem.


Gordon Thomas
Do you like the Race? What are your impressions after it?
Well, it’s a really good race because there are a lot of changes. You start with a little bit kayaking and then you get on your bike and then there is a little bit trekking… so you never get really tired of one stage. Yes, they were long, they supposed to be long, but that’s normal. We were talking about it on the trekking: “Ah, we really hate trekking now!” Then we’ve been going to the kayak and after ten hours of it was: “Ah, we hate the kayaking! We’d like to go back on the track”. And then we got back and after five or six hours thought: “Now we’re tired of the trekking, we’d love to come back to kayak…” So it’s really, really good. It’s all inside your brain, and it’s the mental effort to keep on going.

We’ve really liked the concept of the race, there are a lot of mandatory and then some bonus CPs. That’s really nice. We’ve only missed one thing: normally when we do races like this that’s not usual that you could reach all the points. We thought that only top three could take everything and the rest would have to skip something. So we skipped four kayak’s points because we thought that we had no time for them and then we finished after 60 hours. We could take everything, but… Yeah, we learned that for next years. I think most of the teams could take all the points out here. But we didn’t expect to be in top five.

It is a really good race and I would recommend it further to other teams.