Dominating the Xtrain Media Multi Sport Challenge

MANILA, Philippines - With the car industry enjoying record growth in recent years, manufacturers are now faced with the challenge of how to creatively market their products to be able to stand out from their competitors. This is no easy task, of course, as just about every original idea seems to have been exhausted. Just ask the folks from Volvo who came out with a video competition for their S60 only to find out that a competitor would run the exact same competition concurrently with their own.

Let’s face it, as cars get better and better, the gap between them will be determined by clever positioning and marketing. It seemed like only a couple of years ago when a ride and drive with a raffle at the end was enough to get some decent ink on your product, but today’s manufacturer needs to dig a lot deeper if they want separate themselves from the sea of products that are flooding the local market. And this is exactly what Nissan Motor Philippines had in mind when they launched the first ever XTrain Media Multi Sport Challenge.

No, it’s not a typo. It really is Xtrain. I’m not sure why, but that’s what the banners and tarpaulins said and it was probably too late to get a reprint so they stuck with it. Whatever it was, one of the most dangerous countries for a journalist to work in these days, just got more dangerous as unsuspecting members of the motoring beat got roped into grueling triathlete type competitions in a place where nobody could hear your screams. Or at least nobody that cares.

Organized by Elite Multisport Resources (EMR), in the cruel hands of The Philippine STAR’s very own Andy Leuterio, bike guru Edmund Mangaser and Raul Ylanan, the trio tortured, err, sorry, asked us to compete in a mountain bike race, a bike gymkhana as well as a 200 meter dash through soft sand along the beachfront of the very picturesque Acuatico Resort in San Juan, Batangas.

Four teams of four were set up and asked to complete specific tasks. The driving portion was conservative, as they asked teams to travel from Nissan Westgate until Acuatico Resort in San Juan Batangas in the pre prescribed time of 2.5 hours. This would have been recklessly irresponsible a couple of years ago, but with the opening of the new SLEX extension to the STAR Tollway, plus new exits on the STAR that avoid the congested city of Lipa, not a single team received a penalty and all were driven within the road rules.

Next up was a classroom portion that taught us about heart rates and training zones. It was the kind of stuff that could induce a coma, as it seemed to do with some members of the press who dozed off, but the ones who stayed awake were rewarded with a bonus five points for computing ideal heart rates in the exam that followed. Then came the hard part.

The X skills course threw together a bunch of challenging exercises designed to improve your bike handling skills. Everything from bunny hops to slaloms to super slow balancing exercises, these were skills that we would need in the 8.5 kilometer trails that followed.

My team’s mountain biking passion paid off quickly and we took the lead in both the bike handling course and the trail, coming in with very few demerits. The river bed posed the greatest challenge off all as riders needed to maintain momentum and balance through shallow water and soft sand. Some riders came off their bikes, but no injuries aside from pride were recorded.

It wasn’t until the final portion, however, when we all learned curse words, that had until then, never even been invented. Taken from a triathletes training manual, journalists were asked to drop on a mat and do ten full push ups, ten sit ups, ten weird looking exercises on your back that resembled the final minutes of a dying cockroach, a 30 second “plank” position that forces you to take your body weight on your elbows, and finished off with a two hundred meter sprint through soft sand with a life saving raft of some sort in one hand. Its the kind of stuff that Amnesty International would be interested in looking into.

Several punishing hours on, and Team D, made up of yours truly, Ira Panganiban of Business Mirror, Ferman Lao of Top Gear Philippines and Kit Joaquin of Auto Review came out on top with first place in all but the beach sprint, but enough points to scoop up the championship as well as those lovely Suunto heart rate monitors. 

Nissan took a pretty brave step here hosting an event that had little to do with their XTrail CVT in the way of driving etc, but as car companies continue to push the envelope to develop the lifestyle around their products, we will probably end up with more and more events that begin where the road ends.