Originally published Outer Edge Magazine.
Two of adventure racing’s biggest stars recently rolled into the offices of Outer Edge to chat about running and paddling, riding through the world’s remotest regions and their lives lived together, in love.
Individually they don’t stand out from an after-work crew of ski paddlers and stand-up boarders milling about on a windy Port Melbourne beach car park one November Thursday afternoon.
It’s just after knock off time and people are pulling fibreglass watercraft of all shapes and sizes of roof racks and out of boots. Guys still in business shirts but with a bottom half clad in rolled down rubber wetsuits and booties are busy releasing ockie strapped kayaks and skis. Some greet their fellows with strangled cries between hands free bites of a sandwich, chewing last minute sustenance and unpacking gear at the same time, mindful of the approaching 6pm race start.
In the middle of all this stands a woman already kitted up scoping the racecourse buoys set up offshore. She breaks into a smile when, from the crowd of fellow competitors, a similarly attired man emerges to stand beside her. Mimi helps Jacky fasten his life jacket and Jacky adjusts Mimi’s in return. They are standing amid a typical scene of chaotic pre-race scrambling, except they aren’t scrambling and instead seem relaxed and carefree.
Weeks later when organising the interview, Jacky’s voice crackled down the line in heavy French brogue “We are happy to be interviewed, how will we see you?” An impasse materialised – they were staying in Upwey, about 50 kilometres as the crow flies from the Outer Edge office in South Melbourne. “No problem,” comes the French accent, “we will ride”. Instantly, a mundane journalistic accessibility issue is transformed into a training opportunity for Mimi and Jacky. A 100 kilometre round-trip bike-ride for a 45-minute interview – formidable! These dudes don’t get out of bed for less than 80 clicks per day.
“We arrived at the world championships in Tasmania three weeks before the race to prepare and test our gear,” Mimi tells me. “It’s very important to be well prepared in these races.”
These two are consummately prepared. Ready to train, race or be interviewed on the other side of the city – it’s symptomatic of their professionalism. The fledgling sport of adventure racing is their lives, the exotic way-out race destinations scattered across the globe are just places to get to in order to race. The enviable globetrotting lifestyle is just a bonus for 30-year-old Jacky Boisset and 31-year-old Myriam ‘Mimi’ Guillot.
“It’s good to travel; to see a lot of things, to do a lot together. Now we don’t have a child so we can do that and after it will be different. Yeah, it’s racing, holiday and job. It’s the same thing for us at the moment,” explains Jacky who assumes the role of coach when the duo is in training mode.
Mimi chimes in, “in fact, I think in the main we are very professional and during the week when it’s not our training, I never think I am in Australia or whatever and when it’s my day off, it’s like my holiday. When we are in training I think it is a normal day. It doesn’t matter if I am in France, Australia or anywhere.”
Mimi and Jacky’s story begins in the middle of the Canadian alpine boreal forests during the maelstrom of a 2005 adventure race start. The carnival had come into town. An adventure race team in an elite race must comprise at least one female member. The woman in Jacky’s team became injured. Mimi happened to be in area trail running. A teammate recommended her as a possible last minute replacement. Initially unimpressed with the diminutive, amber-eyed Mimi, Jacky reluctantly relented when options dried up.
“I said, no! Too small, too skinny, not good for a long adventure race! But there wasn’t really any alternative so we went with Mimi.”
Theirs is a union forged in sweet mountain air, to the sound of cranking gears and dipping paddle and the hazy giddiness of enforced insomnia, “during this race was the start of our relationship,” Jacky laughs. Not the usual, but in a very fundamental way, this pair are far from usual. There they sit across a polished media agency boardroom table not in shirt and tie, but in full bike gear, their reinforced mountain bikes gathering a crowd of admiring office weekend warriors, oo-ing and ahh-ing while circling around them. The bikes are festooned with all manner of gadget – topographical maps and GPS screens telescope off handlebars on extendable octopus arms. They clatter around on the hard-tiled floor in riding shoes stiff-legged in their Kevlar impregnated racing suits.
Last November they were half the team that took out the Adventure Race World Championships in Burnie, Tasmania. The format for the prestigious mantle of world champion is an arduous multi-day event. Team Thule, the winning team, took nearly six days to finish. Six days and nights with little sleep, running, paddling and riding through Tasmania’s beautiful worst.
“You race during the day, during the night, you are in the middle of nowhere most of the time, you need to think, you need to repair gear in the middle of the rainforest. It’s very strange, you are tired all the time, you need to fight with your body,” Jacky explains, trying to describe a question directed at understanding the rigours of adventure racing.
It’s an obscure sport with nothing like the widespread popularity and participation rates of more traditional endeavours – like golf for instance. Unlike golf though, remoteness of the field of play from civilisation is a necessity. This is the quixotic nature of the sport. Like an invisible man who can only perform his trick when no one watches, adventure racing must happen where no one visits. It’s a sport one step ahead of the zeitgeist, perhaps a reaction against golf. Anti-golf.
Course designers like Craig Bycroft, the designer of the 2011adventure race world championships in Burnie, Tasmania are flown in to prepare and map the confines of any given race. Their remit is to explore the unique possibilities of an environment, sum up the cultural heritage, explore the flora and fauna and through the design, extol the virtues of the location. Dave Bateman, a 52-year-old competitor in the Five-Ten team that raced in Tasmania described it as “breathtakingly beautiful; pristine, pre-historic and absolutely remote. I really did feel completely privileged just being there.”
“It involved long and arduous multiple crossing of the remote Vale River. The water was bitingly cold as it ran straight off the Cradle Mt plateau. And the hazards on the river were numerous – from logs to sieves. Slipping on slick rock was a constant problem as was the cold,” he said.
The Vale river system was a focal point. Sections were introduced to highlight the virtues of Tasmania’s natural magnificence, to showcase these to the athletes competing. It is a privilege, as Dave says, because there is no way the pristine nature would survive the onset of popularity. The course design, the decision to introduce canyoning and caving alongside the usual mountain biking, trail running and paddling were planned to accentuate the area’s attributes to the racers.
Like all passionate people dedicated to the perfection of something, Jacky and Mimi yearn for their sport to evolve into something more. One that will enable them, perhaps, to eek out a lifestyle more attuned to golf’s millionaires. Yet this is plainly not possible – the nature of adventure racing doesn’t fit with staging events enthralled to filming and TV station budgetary constraints. Allowing TV executives and advertisers full range would, in all likelihood, see adventure races set in urban areas; stands set up, people charged for admission to watch, ten dollar popcorn for sale and see advertisers rapaciously lunging for every logo flashing opportunity.
Mimi and Jacky’s ideas, however, are innovative beyond the crass commercialisation favoured by television executives. They believe the internet and the undoubtable fascination people have with mobile screen and computer-aided technology will lift the sport into people’s homes without radically altering its nature.
“We were in a race in Idaho, as we arrived at each checkpoint, a cameraman shot a 30 second clip of each competitor. He shot about 100 of these and put them onto the internet straight away. Then people, family, friends can see and make comments and the athletes can see and comment next time during the race. This was very nice to see,” Mimi explains.
Interactive sport. Allowing the spectator to immerse themselves in the ongoing struggles of the athletes; an ongoing race that can be accessed and interacted with via a screen whipped out of a pocket. This is extremely progressive thinking and probably a bit too imaginative for your average nervous media executive under the cosh to churn out millions for the shareholders and directors.
“They don’t think about the opportunity. If you want to promote adventure racing, you can see all the good things, because here we are going for five or six days,” Jacky suggests with the air of someone genuinely stupefied by irrational behaviour.
“If you watch a football match it’s just for an hour and a half or something then it’s over. There’s not much you can do. An adventure race goes for one week and you can have more drama”.
If only the sport could find a patron – a media mogul with a vision that matches that of these two redoubtable Frenchies. Viewers could watch on their screens, joyfully engaging in adventure racers taking on the planet’s most remote areas safe in the knowledge no damage is being done. A huge scattered audience where the stands are digitally represented via smart-phones and tablets just as densely packed as wooden bleachers.
After their interview they clacked away in their shoes and kit over the hard floor of the office towards their bikes. Always smiling, always laughing and slightly amused, I think, at the novelty of being in an office with a bunch of people hunched in front of computers bashing keys.
“When you are tired, the other guys sometimes forget there is a girl in the team and she is perhaps more fragile. But me, I don’t forget because she is my partner,” Jacky explains cracking into a grin at the eye rolling this explanation causes Mimi.
“Maybe it’s a case of I protect Mimi and Mimi protects me. Maybe there is more energy because of this. When you are very tired it is easy to forget the other teammates and just keep yourself safe, but we have each other.”
Much of the joy they derive from racing comes from the challenge to organise and prepare. To put themselves on a starting line that could be in any forest, jungle or beachside scrub locale around the world with no illusions about what it is they are about to face. It’s the preparation and dedication that sets them apart and has made them world champions. Just as they stood on the beach in Port Melbourne, serenely standing apart from the crowd, everything in place, everything ready to roll, nothing that could be done, undone.
