Blackheart prepared for start on Estoril Coastline

Hi again,
the team is now prepared for tomorrow's race start in the gardens of the Estoril Casino. We had 3 days in Lisbon in nice apartment near Cais do Sodre station. Lisbon is pretty small and it was easy walk to most of the sights. On Wednesday we spent most of the day riding around the outdoor shops and supermarkets looking for a few crucial pieces of missing equipment. On Thursday we were picked up by the race organisers and moved to Vila Biluca near Cascais. Casais is a holiday destination and there is some beautiful coastline and surfing destinations. The weather has been really nice so far and we are hoping it will continue, but the race is sure to head to the mountains where it will be much cooler.

We know a little about the course- there are 5 stages including a prologue stage of about 7hrs. We then move to another start location before Stage 2 start at 8am Monday. There are several bonus checkpoints that teams will need to decide whether they have time to collect and still make it to the next transition area before a defined cut-off time. Race strategy will be very important and we are hoping our experience in navigation and planning will help.


The race website looks great and there should be plenty of coverage of the race. You can follow our team on this page.

Team Blackheart arrives in Portugal for World Champs

Hello from Portugal!
Team Blackheart is back on the road again at the Adventure Racing World Championships, this year being organised by Portugal XPD. We qualified for the championships by winning the XPD Australia race (the Australian qualifier) last November in the Snowy Mountains around Thredbo.Its been a very long wait, but the race is nearly here.
We arrived in Lisbon yesterday after a long Melbourne-Sydney-Singapore-London flight schedule and have spent the last day or so doing a bit of sight-seeing and resting up. On Thursday we will head to Estoril, about 1hr west of Lisbon, to the event centre. On Saturday we have race accreditation and competencies and receive the course during the event. The race starts at 10am Sunday local time- which is 9pm AEST.

The race involves 5-6 days of non-stop adventure with over 920km of trekking, mountain biking, kayaking, inline skating and other sports. Live reports and GPS tracking of the teams will be shown on the event website http://www.arwc2009.com/en/

Thanks again to our sponsors
Blackheart.com.au
Salomon
SILVA
Carboshotz
Merida Bikes

Rob racing Primal Quest with Team Merrell/Zanfel

Hi guys,

I’ve arrived in USA to race the biggest Adventure race in the country- Primal Quest. This race has a big reputation and claimed to be the “World’s Most Challenging Endurance competition”. That’s a big claim, but this year’s race will be 600miles of trekking, mountain biking, kayaking, swimming and caving and the winning team is expected to take 5 or 6 days. The race is located in South Dakota which is famous for Mount Rushmore, and the Badlands- where temperatures exceeding 40degrees are expected.

I’ll be racing in an American team called Merrell/Zanfel. Actually we are from Canada, NZ and Australia with no US members after our captain Robyn Benincasa withdrew recently to have surgery on her injured hip. In adventure racing all four team members have to complete the course together, so good team work is essential.

The race with have extensive internet coverage, and filming will be shown on pay television following the race. Here are some websites to checkout.

The official website http://www.ecoprimalquest.com/wp-primal/. Here you will be able to follow the progress of each team through online results,

Each team has a blog page, ours is http://team2.ecoprimalquest.com/. You can read about the team and post comments etc.

http://www.spotadventures.com/user/profile?user_id=45792 and here you can watch our team move through the course with GPS tracking.

The race starts on 15^th August.