2019 | Primal Quest China Invitational
October 26, 2019
Bones: Charles Triponez, Mari Chandler, Justin Bakken and Brian Reiss
After competing in Eco Challenge Fiji in September, Charles and I decided that we needed one more race to wrap up the 2019 season. Roy was unable to join us so we invited Brian Reiss from Team Rootstock Racing of Pennsylvania and Justin Bakken from Team WEDALI of Minnesota to join us for a ‘quick’ trip to China to race in the inaugural Primal Quest China 24 hr Invitational in the Province of Tianjin. AXC Sports of China is trying to build adventure racing in China and teamed up with Maria Burton the race director of Primal Quest to put on this amazing event.
The race headquarters was once an old military fort connected to the Huangyaguan Pass portion of The Great Wall. Now it is a historical landmark complete with museums, gardens, and a small hotel within. It is a maze of buildings and tall brick walls with gates, stairs, and iron doors which made for fun pre-race exploring. We were given the maps at 7pm only to discover that they had almost zero detail and we were told that we would be allowed to use the GPS on our phones throughout the race to reach the checkpoints. What?? One of the best things about adventure racing is that it is old school map and compass, choose your own route and go, no Google maps allowed. However, after looking at the provided maps, we were ok with being allowed to use GPS to help us sort out our route and definitely used it during the race.
The race started at 2 a.m. Saturday morning with a quick run within the fort to grab 1 checkpoint in the middle of an Eight-Trigram Maze. The narrow passageways of the maze are waist high and when the correct route is chosen, lead to the center of the maze which is in the shape of an octagon. The 8 sides represent the 8 forces of nature (earth, water, wind, fire, lakes, mountains, thunder & heaven) with the Yin and Yang symbol in the middle forming the balance of life. I’ll admit, in our pre-race exploring fun, we happened to come across this maze and of course had to find our way to the middle, so when we received our instructions on the start line, we were quite excited.
After our little warm-up, we hopped on our bikes for a 40 km ride which we either spent carrying our bikes up an old trail, carrying our bikes up and down steep sections of The Great Wall or freezing our butts off on fast downhills on surprisingly good roads. We spent the majority of the ride swapping the lead with Team Renegade which had 2 Americans and 2 Kiwis racing. By 6:45 am we arrived at beautiful Jinhai Lake for a short 19km paddle in which we did 2 laps and grabbed 8 checkpoints each lap. After the first lap, we finally warmed up from our very cold night of riding and enjoyed the morning sunshine on our faces and the amazing fall colors surrounding the lake.
After we finished the kayak section, we hopped back on our bikes for another 45 km of riding. We were just leaving the transition area when Team Renegade arrived off the paddle. This was the last time we would see them and spent the remainder of the race pushing to stay out of sight of them as a few of the checkpoints were out and back. The majority of the ride was on paved and gravel roads and had a fair bit of climbing. We passed through a few small towns and dodging the scooter “traffic” kept us on our toes.
Sometime after noon we arrived at the final transition area and swapped our bikes for our running shoes. It was now quite warm out and we prepared for a 10km trek with 3500’ of climbing which would be primarily along The Great Wall. It started out with a pretty steep climb up along an ancient portion of the wall which was basically piles of rock forming a wall. Some of it was along knife ridges that you did not dare step off the left or the right side. We were very happy to be doing this section of the race during the day as the views were incredible. It was surreal to be traveling on foot along The Wall across the insanely rugged ridges and grasp the concept of how and why it was built as well as the thousands of lives that had died either building it or protecting it.
Eventually we popped out onto the ‘tourist’ portion of the wall that was built with perfectly placed flat stones and a fortress like structure with watchtowers and an enormous number of steps. We spent the remainder of the trek dodging tourists and stopping occasionally to take pictures with them as they were excited to cross paths with us.
At this point we were no longer racing and were just enjoying the opportunity to be in such an amazing place. Just as the knees had started to ache a bit from all the downhill ‘ramps’ and steep steps, we stopped to throw on our climbing harnesses and repelled the last 60 m down to the old riverbed below. Then it was a short 400 meter run to a gigantic dragon sculpture to cross the finish line in 1stplace after only 14 hrs of racing. And yes, we traveled by plane longer than we raced, but it was totally worth it as it was one of the most interesting and unique places to race in the world and I hope we can return next year to race again.
