Tour d'Afrique - Cairo to Cape Town by Bike - Pictures

Photo Credit: Crish Owen Halper http://www.AdventureArt.ca

Team adidas Canada travelled to Timmins, Ontario to push through the three stage race (15 hour, one night's sleep, 3-day continuous, one night's sleep, 7 hour) took place up in Timmins and though a teammate's difficulty with the extreme heat forced us to go unranked, we ended up with an aggregate time that would have put us in 4th place.

The sprint race on day 1 was intense with fast riding, punishing white water and thirsty insects that even the locals were speaking of how they had never seen them that bad. After having some trouble in the white water, we recovered to cross the line in 5th place in the country's strongest field.

The second stage started with an epic 40+km off-trail trek that took teams 24-48 hours to complete. We managed to survive the heat and impending insanity from dense clouds of black flies to contine into the paddle in 4th place. The next paddle took over 24 hours, but was entertaining in its variety of flat and white water. A 50km ride brought us to another trek where the sleep monsters awaited us. We stumbled to the other side and rode into the morning where I broke a chain only 3km from the finish. We scootered and towed in with some happy faces to have completed a course that most teams could not.

The final stage was more of an epilogue, but still had its challenges since we were working with an aerial photo for a map. We saw some great local Timmins scenes and descended into a gold mine to grab some check points. Better timing this time - I broke a pedal as I was crossing the finish line. I didn't even notice since our support crew was waiting for us with a six-pack and very tall strawberry ice cream sundaes!

Adventure racing to this degree would not be possible without good team work. What a great feeling it was to have used our strong team bond to persist through some pretty tough times. Great work guys!