Team AXN faces ultimate challenge

This is the ultimate in adventure racing.

Three hundred miles (500 kms) of terrain consisting of vertical rock faces, rugged sub-alpine terrain, gushing rivers and frigid meltwaters, a challenge whose very essence lies in team dynamics and the ability to solve problems under constant stress, including little sleep and limited food.

In other words, this is a race against time, pitting the forces of nature against the skill and mental toughness of the world’s top adventure athletes.

Three Filipinos and a Cebu-based Kiwi will try to push themselves to the very edge of human endurance as they compete in the Eco-Challenge, a gruelling 12-day, multi-discipline (river rafting, horseback riding and run, mountain trekking (alpine/snow), mountain biking and fixed ropes) race-to-the-finish event which fires off Oct. 21 in New Zealand.

Although they will be competing in an event of such magnitude for the very first time, Leo Oracion, Jerome Luengo, Mylene Jarina and team skipper Rob Greville are no strangers to adventure racing, having competed in various triathlon and mountaineering events. In fact, the team won the recent Carrera Habagat’s Mystic Island Quest in Siquijor, a three-day, 200-km adventure racing.

In the Eco-Challenge, a relatively new sport in the country, the teams will travel around 500 kms of rough terrain mostly on foot with no food or water and armed with only a compass and a map.

Although the odds are pretty well stacked against them, Greville remains confident of their chances in finishing the race.

"Finishing among the top 25 will be some kind of an amazing feat. Finishing better than that would be a miracle," said Greville during the send-off press conference yesterday at the Savannah Lounge of the Discovery Suites in Ortigas Center.

"The object is to reach all the checkpoints with the fastest time. Of course, a team must not get lost," said Greville, the bespectacled 49-year-old native of New Zealand but a resident of Cebu for the last 12 years. "I do think that endurance-wise, navigation and discipline, we’re pretty good. We take long hikes with very little sleep in between."

The team, according to Greville, is accurate in map reading and does not usually make mistakes, which saves a lot of time and energy in reaching the designated checkpoints, where food and water can be found for the athletes.

He said they are all in good physical shape although he stressed that one has to be mentally tough to survive the challenge.

Their primary concern for the event is how they will be able to cope and stand the cold since the competition is scheduled Oct. 21 to Nov. 2 with the temperature dropping and lots of snow on the course.

"That’s why we’re leaving one month in advance to acclimatize and find out how to tackle the course with snow," said Greville, who has scheduled a seven-day alpine mountaineering training upon arrival in New Zealand.

Known as Team AXN Philippines, the group boasts of experience with Greville having had a series of endurance/adventure sports stints, including triathlons, winning most of them. Jarina, 32, is a veteran swimmer from Cebu and an accomplished mountaineer, so does the 29-year-old Oracion while Luengco hails from Davao and has been in adventure racing in the last three years.

The team has been in deep training for the last nine months, sharpening their navigational and mountaineering skills in the hinterlands and suburbs of Cebu although Oracion said they still have to polish their skills in horseback riding as well as in white water rafting, avalanche rescue and high-end mountaineering.

Truly, the field and the route are enough to discourage the faint-hearted but this gritty bunch of adventurers, despite lack of sponsors, have vowed to push themselves to the limit against the world-class opposition and the perils of adventure racing.

That alone should make them a class of their own.