Veron’s Adventures

St Julians, Malta

On the 15th of March I wrote in a blog entry that I was going to do an Olympic Triathlon on the 29th of May in Trinidad and Tobago. Planning the race ended up being more complicated than I thought so I switched race plans a couple times and eventually raced on the 13th of June in Amsterdam!

How was I supposed to know that the fastest trip from Cape Town to Trinidad & Tobago in late May was 36 hours with 4 stop-overs? Such a ridiculous trip right before I was supposed to deliver an extreme sports performance just wasn’t going to happen, so It was time to plan a triathlon in Europe.

Spain had two high profile ITU races that looked very cool in Madrid and Pontevedra, but I needed race ranking points in order to qualify for those races, so I looked further and came out very close to home. There was a great olympic triathlon going in Amsterdam the 13th of June, and after a couple e-mails with the direction they let me do a late registration!

I had trained hard in the 3 months prior to the race. I averaged about 11/12 trainings a week, a combination of swimming, gym, cycling and running. The swim training was the hardest. In every training I was hurting, fighting against not getting enough oxygen, and thinking about calling it a session almost every 25 metres I got to the end of the pool. I find it very hard to push myself in a swim session when I’m alone. I really needed a trainer to push me over my limits in the pool, not to mention learning how to actually swim.

The cycling and running comes much more natural to me and seems to suit my body better. It was great training in a fantastic city like Cape Town, where you cycle for 5 minutes to ride in the mountains overlooking the Atlantic and go running in Table Mountain National Park or on the beach. Not sure I would have enjoyed all the training in a country like Holland.

The conditions were perfect on raceday, 20 or so degrees, no wind..so no excuses to be made. Until the water exploded for the start that is….

Right before the start.

You don’t know what it is to swim a 1500m in a 200 athletes peloton until you experience it. In my training sessions I got to the point where swimming 1500 metres wasn’t that tough, but while receiving 3 kicks and two elbows in the face in the first 300 metres it is quitte hard to come in a rhytm. The swimming felt like being in a washing machine with 200 others that are all out there to drown you. During the swim it felt like it was taking ages to get out of the water. I was very surprised to see 30.58 as my time, which is definitely acceptable.

The end of the swim felt like such a relief!

After the swimming I got some calf and hip cramps in the transition area because my muscles were so cold from the swim. The 1st lap on the bike (there’s 8 laps of 5km total) I really needed to warm up and find rhytm.. but after that the biking went really well and I could finally enjoy being in the race, until I had to start the running….

The first 2.5km of the run were horrible. Calf, upper leg and shin cramps even forced me to stop and stretch for about 10 seconds. After that I started to feel stronger and stronger. The heavy training was starting to pay off. The last 5km of the run (10km total) I was flying. I didnt feel my feet anymore and had so much air. Was a great feeling. The picture is at the finish line.

My final time was 2.37.48, a time I’m very happy with. This whole triathlon experiment and experience has been very positive overall. Working towards a goal for months and reaching it is very rewarding and satisfying and in the process I lived a very healthy and energetic lifestyle. The downsides? Time. Training twice a day costs a lot of time and planning, and other priorities did suffer a bit. For that reason I will have to think a bit wether or not I want to take it to the next level and do a 1/2 Ironman sometime soon. But that’s for later, now It’s time for the beach

Later,

V.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Trip report from a trip to the rainforests of equatorial Africa in search of the last wild mountain gorillas.

Ivar had arrived in South Africa and instead of giving junior some rest after 11 hours of flying southwards, we surprised him with a trip to Uganda the next morning, which meant another 11 hours of flying. It was going to be worth it. There was only one possible problem; two from the four of us didn’t manage to get the mandatory yellow fever shots in time. Following the letter of the rule this would imply no entrance to Uganda so we made sure we cashed out some extra US Dollars, the solution for everything in Africa…

We flew  Cape Town -> JohannesBurg -> Nairobi (which looks much more like a free-market than an airport) -> Entebbe, where we spent the night in a hotel to prepare for the next day of road travelling from Kampala (the capital of Uganda) to the rainforests in the South-West.

It was a fascinating day with an overkill of impressions. People everywhere in Kampala, chickens and pigs crossing the roads, 2 lane roads used as 4 lane roads and lots of children screaming and waving at 3 gingers and a blonde guy in a Jeep driven by a local.

(click on photo to enlarge)

Mazungu, Mazungu! is what we heard all the time. Our guide told us it meant white person in Swahili. The Mazungu was a good person in Uganda, it never brought trouble and would always spend a lot of money.

The way the Ugandan people welcomed us was overwhelming. We had never seen so many smiling people waving at us in one day….

The scenery was geting more and more impressive as we left the paved roads and slowly passed the Ugandan mountains over the very bad unpaved roads…

a 4×4 is a must!

Ivar in the South-West which they call ”the Switzerland of Uganda”

We arrived late and tired at our destination, Bwindi National Park in Uganda right at the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, so we jumped in our tent to rest up for a day of trekking.

Our guard for the trip, just in case we would walk into some border-crossers coming from the DRC.

After about 45 minutes of hiking we found the gorilla family we were looking for. The minute we realised this the silverback (dominant male in the group, recognisable because of his gigantic size and ofcourse the silver hair colour on his back) jumped out of the bush, ran towards us and shouted to the guard. Having this monster at 5 metres distance in an aggressive mood was more than enough to get my heartrate to 200 in a matter of split-seconds. The idea that this animal can break anybody’s neck like a straw pumped more adrenaline into my body than any parasailing or heli-ski adventure ever will…

After 5 seconds or so the silverback just quietly returned to the group and the guide smilingly said; he just wanted to show us who’s boss… The boss sure as hell succeeded.

We had an hour of hang-out time with the gorillas. More time could lead to the transmission of human diseases as gorillas have about 97% of our DNA. It was an amazing hour. The baby gorillas were very curious and walked up to you to play with your feet. The gorillas were constantly on metres distance, curious but certainly not bothered by our presence. We just had to be a bit carefull to not touch the babies, or let them touch us. Mr silverback was watching everything closely, and we didn’t want to make the boss angry….

The man of the family.

I still have a hard time believing mountain gorillas get so huge while only eating plants and fruits. They gotta be the toughest vegetarians out there!

97% human DNA

The silverback was constantly watching over his 16 family members for the time we were there.

The boss with one of his 5 or so wifes.

a grown up female

More than 24 hours of travelling to get to the Ugandan rainforests, all to see the last mountain gorillas in the wild, for one hour. Trust me, it’s worth it!

The youngest ones were so cool we wanted to take one home Mountain gorillas do however not survive in captivity. All attempts to keep them in zoos failed within months.

There’s currently about 700 mountain gorillas left in the world, of which about 340 live in the Bwindi impenetrable rainforest in Uganda. Their official status is critically endangered, but there is hope.. as the population in bwindi is currently slowly increasing. Reason for this is that there’s no more gorilla poaching going on anymore in Uganda (Rwanda and DRC are a different story) and funded by tourism, Uganda is capable of protecting the gorillas using the military.

I can highly recommend travelling to Uganda and making such a trip. The country is safe and the local people are very friendly towards tourists (and white people in general, but thats pretty much the same)

On a different note; I am currently in Holland after 3 months in South Africa, where I had a great time and met lots of great people. I promise I’ll blog about South Africa, probably this month.

For now I’ll focus on triathlon. I’m going to race the olympic triathlon of Amsterdam this sunday, very much looking forward to it. Will keep you guys posted on how it goes.

Enjoy life,

Veron