Rachel Baker – Highs and lows

It’s official, the entry fee is in, I’m now committed to racing the 2 day Coast to Coast but before Coast comes is Spring Challenge! It’s an all women adventure race in teams of three. This year will be my 3rd time racing Spring Challenge and I’m super excited that it’s in Wanaka. I’m excited to be racing it with Kathryn Bunckenburg(a previous team member) and Nicole Ranger.

Over the last few weeks I have had some good and bad luck. I got sick not once in 3 weeks but twice, which has been annoying a bit of a set back for training. The first time didn’t impact on training too much. It just meant I wasn’t feeling so great and I was a bit worried as it was 2 weeks out from a race. Luckily I got better and I was ready to go by race day. I smashed out Twin Peaks a 26km run/hike with compulsory gear (like 10kg of gear). It was an awesome course with a mix of hills, ridges, ice and mud. It even snowed while we were racing! I was really stoked with how the it went. I was 2nd place female most the way until the 2nd big hill where I overtook the 1st place female. This gave me a massive metal boost which powered me to the finish (5-6km ish). I was super stoked to take out 1st place female individual.

A few days after Twin Peaks I had an avalanche safety field trip in the Craigieburns so there wasn’t much time for training. I started to get sick on the field trip, which was just annoying – lots of coughing and a fever. It’s taken awhile to get over being sick but I’m nearly better and am looking forward to getting back into more training soon.