St Leonards school students team up for UMC
Group of four boys and two girls from St Leonards school are getting ready to tackle Snowy Hydro Upper Murray Challenge this year as a team of six. Mark Slykhuis, well known adventure racing and multisport athlete and coach from St Leondards school is leading the team, and promted few questions to them. AJ team is looking forward to support young generation in our events!
Hi Guys, nice to chat to you, what is the reason, why you are doing all this?
'We have been part of the schools adventure racing program for a couple of years now and are keen to take on a tougher challenge where will be required to really test ourselves. The UMC seems like the perfect event with three roughly equally tough legs of mountain-biking, paddling and trail running. Working with our team over the day will require us to support, motivate and encourage each other. Our aim is to complete the event in around 10 hours.'
How you are going to prepare yourselves & others in your team?
'Training has begun and we have set ourselves a 10 week program. Each week we have a minimum of 5 sessions in place where we will average 20-30kms of MTB, around 10km’s of paddling and 20 km’s of running. Our program leader has booked some down-river sessions with Jarad Kohlar and we will do a few sessions at Lysterfield on the bike and running to get used to the hilly terrain.'
What concerns you the most & what will be the toughest part of the challenge?
'At this stage, we are pretty confident we will successfully complete the challenge. I suppose our biggest fears are of the unknown ….. how we are all going to respond when we are tired and shattered after 7-8 hours and still have 12-15 km’s of running/walking left. That also excites us, as we know that tackling this challenge as a team will mean that we have each other & when we do have those low points, hopefully we can pick each other up’
