Adventure Junkie

The first Adventure Cup winners are officially Maria Plyashechko and James Pretto in female and male ranking accordingly. They both managed to accumulate the biggest amount of points based on results in three brutal multisport events:  Upper Murray Challenge, East Gippsland Challenge, and Grampians Challenge. 

The full ranking is here>> and we would like to congratulate all participants that took part in the inaugural edition of this unique Series. We hope you have achieved your goals whether it was to finish one leg of a single event, beat your best mate or get on the podium of all three challenges.

Adventure Cup Series is set to promote multisport, provide a thrilling atmosphere of competition, motivate and inspire you for being fit during the whole year and achieve your own best. We believe, together with you we are reaching these objectives and looking forward to the next years of adventures with you. 

The first edition of Adventure Cup was based on three multisport events, all of them are unique and hold in spectacular and rugged terrain, all the distances are different, scenic, challenging and demanding. What unites them is that they all require a lot of skills, endurance, and determination to complete. 

The 2018-2019 Adventure Cup kicked off with the legendary Upper Murray Challenge. This race is a pinnacle of Australian Multisport and is the Australian longest running and toughest multi-sport event. Every October since 2003 it takes participants to an epic journey from Khancoban to Corryong. 

Along with scenic MTB and run leg, according to all accounts, the highlight of Upper Murray Challenge is an exhilarating 26 km downriver paddle on Upper Murray River which is undoubtfully one of the best in the multisport world of events.  

Tim Boote and Maria Plyashechko dominated in 2018 edition, but other real winners were the students of St Leonards school, 8 of them completed the whole challenging course and took home all AR Duo category trophies.

The second race of the Adventure Cup was the East Gippsland Challenge – the newest addition to multisport family. This race features a heart-pounding mountain bike leg in Colquhoun MTB Park as the main highlight, spiced up by a run back to Lakes Entrance centre - and finally, spectacular paddle around Rigbys Island - located in Australia's largest waterways system, Gippsland Lakes. James Pretto captured a spectacular win over Tim Boote at the finish sprint after a neck to neck race. In the women’s field, Bern Dornom was unreachable for anyone.

The last but not least was the Grampians Challenge where the whole course set in the dramatic landscapes of Gariwerd country is a highlight. The race starts with a technical run along MacKenzie river and scenic Fish falls and Mackenzie falls, followed by lake Wartook paddle on a backdrop of Mt Difficult range and finishes with ride around the valley. The race attracted the biggest and most competitive women’s field in the newest multisport history and Sorcha Flett took the win there. She said:

“The race started with the run and I looked around at the start line and thought, ‘it’s going to be a hard day!’ The field was strong. My vague race intention was to try to get a bit of a gap in the run, try not to lose too much time in the paddle and then go all out in the bike, as it’s my strength. 

This pretty much went to plan, I was second on the water but knew that there were some (if not all) faster paddlers behind me."

Read her full story >>.

In men’s field eyes were on James Pretto, Luke Haines and New Zealand gun Daniel Jones- the eventual podium finishers. James said: “My race plan was to only give away 5 mins to Dan on the run and to chase him down on the paddle. So when I came into the first TA ahead of him I was very surprised. I was running well into my red zone as he was out of sight on every turn. The TA popped up a bit sooner than expected only to find that he’d taken a wrong turn. Training hard over the summer with Peak Adventure had paid off, as I felt strong and increased my lead in the paddle. I knew however that Luke and Dan would be chasing hard on the bike so there was never an opportunity to rest. I rode as well as I could have and was super pumped for the soft sand to finish. I was happy with how my body performed on the day and was pretty excited to have a win. I’m looking forward to the exciting events Adventure Junkie has planned for the future”

We are quite happy with the first year of Adventure Cup Series and grateful to everyone who have chosen to go adventuring with us. We hope we will see you next year too. 

Upper Murray Challenge 2019 is already open for registration and we’re looking forward to greeting new Adventure Cup 2019-2020 champions and finishers!