After a long and partly snowy winter it is finally time to put on the race bibs again and head out on a big adventure race. Tomorrow is the start of Raid Gallaecia in Spain, part of the Adventure Racing World Series, and team Haglöfs Silva will be on the start line! The competition in Spain is expected to be really tough, with reigning world champions team Seagate competing, amongst many other strong teams!
The Adventure Racing World Series consists of 9 different races in different countries; New Zealand, USA, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and Spain. This year’s edition of Raid Gallaecia will be held in the area around Santiago di Compostella.
As Björn, due to his newly discovered Type 1 diabetes, had to cancel his participation in the race and Aaron was unable to leave with such a short notice, we are very happy that Jari Palonen wanted to join the team for the race in Spain. Jari has been Adventure Racing since the late 90s (where he raced in the old team Silva) and will add both routine and motivation to the team.
The race course will be kept secret until the start of the race, but according to information revealed a week ago it will consist of in total 12 legs, divided into 114 km of trekking, 19 km foot orienteering, 271 km MTB, 68 km kayaking and 4 km of canyoning. The expected winning time is 75 hours and if a team decides to stop to rest, that time will be included as the race is non stop from start to finish!
The race will be covered by several international and Swedish media. All teams will carry a GPS transmitter along the race course and the position of each team is supposed to be shown on the live website during the whole race, https://tracktherace.com/raid-gallaecia-2015/live. We will try to keep our homepage www.arsweden.se updated during the race and for shorter more frequent updates visit our Facebook page.
The team is highly motivated, hopefully well enough prepared for the altitude and they are looking forward to the adventure!