Looking back to 2016 Warrior Nelspruit was definitely one of my favorites, partly because of the hill we had to go up and down, this time that hill showed me who’s boss!

I am beginning to like the sprint courses more and more, the intensity, the small margin for error and the competition! Warrior started off on Saturday with the individual sprint race, this time being around 100-200m with 10 obstacles. Qualifying with the second fastest time I was in the quarterfinals, then the semi-finals and after a very close race, I was into the finals… The sprint started off with some hurdles you have to get over and under which are fine during the qualifying but when you have 4 people all trying to do it together it becomes a bit cramped!! The obstacles were all stuff that was rather fast paced with a set of monkey bars, a sandbag carry and a balance beam to slow us down, in the end it was a very tight race down to the balance beam where I was able to make a gap on Jay Jay to take the win. What was really cool was I got to share the top spot with Michelle who managed to win the ladies sprint!

In the Black-Ops Elite on Sunday, I lined up excited to be back on the Warrior starting line! The race started up and stayed that way for the first 5km having us climb about 300m. This took its toll on my legs and I dropped down to about 10th place and knew I’d have to push the downhills to make up lost time. After some carries and a long steep downhill stretch, I was able to catch up and overtake 6th place where we 3 of us stayed together for quite some time chasing! Coming into the last stretch of the race were all the fun obstacles, my chance to make up some more time… After a tire flip, it was straight into Breaking point where 5th and 4th were still resting before attempting the obstacle, I decided not to rest and started straight away after drying off my hands with some sand. I started and finished the obstacle with Bradley who was in 4th at the time and after the rope traverse I managed to overtake him, but with about 2km to the finish I wasn’t able to hold him off and finished about 10sec behind him in 5th place, all in all, a great race with some very tough competition!

Then it was rest and recover as much as possible before we started with the team sprint, where it’s the same course done in a relay form with a final lap done as a team with a few changes to some of the obstacles. This was as always a very close finish with my team, made up of Louis and Michelle, having a sprint off with team AOT from Durban to finish 2nd. I love the element of adding the team aspect into the race!!

After all that it feels like its time to curl up in a ball and sleep for a week, but we can only wish… Back to the grind we go!