Adventure Racing - The Beast

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Carrick
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Hi all - first post on the forum, thought I'd share these. Not sure whether anyone else covers these type of things on here!

I shoot a few adventure races - multi-sport, multi-day expedition style, overnight, navigation based events - each year for an adventure sports website. The latest one was The Beast over in Donegal, Ireland, a 3-day race with an maximum finishing time of 45hrs. I got only slightly more sleep than the racers did - 4hrs total over the course of the event.

First kayak stage


Night trek up Mount Errigal


Bike stage on an old railway line


Early morning swim stage



All comments gratefully received!

Cheers

Carrick - P.Y. Photographic
 
Nice work and welcome to the forum! How did you go about tracking the teams and getting there ahead of them to take the shots? These mostly look like you got the teams leaving transitions? Was the climb on a mandatory peak or something? Haven't attempted photographing an event yet but have a plan to shot at an Ultramarathon in the Brecon Beacons early september. I like the idea of mixing landscape photography with mountain sports.
 
Hi Ian, thanks for the comments.

The kayak shot and the swim shot are close to transitions, the other two are very much out-on-course. I had a copy of the event maps so hiked out to locations that looked like they might be worth it - I was told early on on these things that "you need to be able to do everything that the competitors do, but while hauling 15kg of camera gear." Since it's navigational you can never be 100% sure of what route people will take, especially on more open stages, but on Errigal in the night trek shot for example, there's only one realistic way up and down and the checkpoint was on the summit. The whole route was just shy of 300km, so it's a lot of ground to cover!

These days all the teams carry GPS trackers so you can look up where they are at any given point (as long as you have reception!), but you're never certain of when they'll reach you unless you can actually see them. More than once over the years I've hiked out somewhere, 99% sure I was on course to get great evening light on a team in a place I knew I could get them, only to find, after waiting and losing the light, that they'd stopped to sleep, or eat, or something else. When I started covering these events, you'd have to check at transitions for when someone passed through and make a scientific wild-assed guess at where you might find them.

Good luck with the Ultra!
 
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