sport

Driving rain? 5m visibility? No training? It must be the Montenegro Adventure Race 2008! At the last minute I put together a team to take part in a roller-coaster ride of a race, albeit a roller-coaster that only went down. At least Team Property Styling didn’t have the 20-a-day smoking habit that Team Pluto had, which we felt gave us a fighting chance of not coming in last.¹The course this year was different to last:

• Starting in Kotor Stari Grad, we ran up the side of Vrmac - although not so much ran as climbed, since that old Austro-Hungarian road hasn’t seen much maintenance since the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918. Lightning strikes have left burnt-out trees reclining across the road, occasionally losing their purchase on the slippery stones and plummeting down the nearly-vertical mountainside.

• The bike leg went over Vrmac to Gornja Lastva and down to the Tivat waterfront - usually a magnificent route, in this case marred slightly by the massive cloud bank that shrouded the top of the ridge and the fact that all our bikes had dodgy gears and slow punctures. The downhill to Gornja Lastva was the site of my ankle injury last year, and this year it was the turn of my knees to get the Vrmac treatment. I now walk with two limps.

• The weather was so bad that the kayak leg was almost cancelled, but at the last minute the organisers decided to give us all a sprint finish of 3km from Tivat to Bijela through pouring rain, which was about as much fun as it sounds. Luckily we’d finished the bike leg ahead of most the other contestants, so we were able to wait in a conveniently located bar drinking cappucinos and beer, which took the edge off the kayak considerably.

Although it sounds pretty hellish, I was glad that I’d returned to the fray - and by some miracle Team Property Styling placed 2nd. That’s right, 2nd. Can the gold medal be far away? Find out next year, when the team will consist of four morbidly obese chainsmoking agoraphobics who don’t like getting dirty. Thanks once again to the race organisers at Black Mountain and Kayak Montenegro, upon whom I swear I’ll have my revenge, the various sponsors, and my solid gold team-mates Adrian Simpson, James Horgan and Marcus Parry.

All featured featured photos are at RW’s website, doing a sterling job as official race photographer.

1. Although I’d originally registered the team as The Last Orders, on the basis that we would probably cross the finish line around 11pm. [↩]

I would be remiss if I didn’t pick up on Jennine’s response to my earlier post on how religion might usefully approached in the same way as sport. I think that I meant to point out that religion is a social and cultural phenomenon in the same way as sport is, and that we can understand them in similar - although not identical - ways. Jennine takes a slightly different perspective:

But what I want to be cautious of in a way that I don’t think Paul and Maher are, entirely, is conflating “religion” and “faith”… I agree with Maher that an intellectual grasp of religions is not sufficient to fully understand what it means to live a life of faith.

Caution is always to be recommended on the Web, and I agree completely that a purely “academic” (in the derogatory sense) approach will never lead to true understanding of something so deeply felt.

While we agree on that, I think we disagree quite fundamentally on how religion and sport look from the outside - although as Jennine says, she occupies an ambiguous position with regards to both activities due to her upbringing (which is partly my point, I think).

However, knowing people of faith who live their faith - as expressed through religion - deeply and beautifully, there is something there that I just don’t see captured in sport.  And that is the relationship between a person and the divinity that they engage with.  Although supporting a sports team can offer a sense of identity and community, I hope at least, that most fans understand that the team is not invested in their wellbeing.  And that, at least in the Christian traditions I grew up in, is exactly what I was taught about God - that God is concerned with each person’s wellbeing, that God loves each individual and wants them to live a good life.

That may well be what people believe about God - but, just like their favourite sports team, God does appear to keep on letting them down. And yet those people keep going back for more, just like sports fans who follow their teams despite persistent losses and consistent mismanagement. It’s all about feeling connected to a higher power - whether that higher power is Yahweh or Nike.

I’m not a particularly big football fan. I support Crystal Palace because their playing grounds are close to where I grew up, and I had a particularly 1970s Eagles school bag while I was doing that growing up. I’ve been to a few football matches, watched a few more on television and play football twice a week with a bunch of people who are clearly better than me.

In this fascinating article, Ryan Maher is talking about American football rather than real football, but I think the principles are the same. In fact he’s talking about how to discuss faith in a meaningful way with those of other faiths, in the context of his work in Doha.

This template for discussing religion and faith is fundamentally flawed. It presumes that different groups of faithful people approach their religions in the same way football fans approach their favorite teams: I cheer passionately for mine, you cheer passionately for yours, and we all agree to play by the rules and exhibit good sportsmanship. For people of faith, religion isn’t like that.

Actually, football isn’t like that either. That’s a very strange view of sport - a matter of etiquette rather than passion. I don’t believe that Chelsea are any good, not on the basis of the empirical evidence but because I don’t like Chelsea. I don’t believe that Crystal Palace are any good, but if people ask I’ll still say I support them. I don’t think that England are much good, but I’ll still be jumping out of my chair whenever they win a match with a goal in the last two minutes.

Good sportsmanship has its place on the pitch; off the pitch, the barracking that opposing supporters give each other is seldom good-natured and sometimes spills over into violence. So perhaps it would be more useful to see religion as exactly like sport - pursued by different people for different ends and in different ways, and occasionally with more agreement between people of different faiths than with those of their co-religionists?

I’m pleased to report that I survived the first Montenegro Adventure Race. Thanks to Croatia Airlines, I got into Herceg Novi at midnight. Having found Hayley and Jack’s place, I crashed on their sofa until I was woken up at 6am by their baby boy. Suitably refreshed, we all pulled on the relevant gear and headed down to the Hunguest Sun Resort Hotel, where the race was starting at 7am. (We should have set our watches to Montenegro time, since we actually started at 8.30.)

Having been a late entry, I was placed in Ed Milbank’s team “The Dandies” with Ed, Charlie and Natalie. I’d never actually met any of them before, but all were excellent company throughout the day - which was lucky, because it was a team race and we had to stick together the whole way. You can view the race map here, but let’s break it down:

1. KAYAK. With 9km to paddle, Team Dandies were undaunted by the fact that 50% of the team had never been in a kayak before. I paired up with Natalie in a double, and she turned out to be a natural. Charlie had a few problems at the start, but Ed stayed with him and after the turn at Mamula Island they came in smooth to Zanjice. At this point in the race we were last but, apart from some saltwater chafing, still feeling quite good about ourselves.
2. CYCLE. Natalie and I went off before Ed and Charlie and stormed ahead, narrowly avoiding death by truck several times but enjoying a relatively relaxed ride over the Lustica peninsula. Once again, Ed and Charlie didn’t have much luck, since one of their bikes had a broken saddle. Ouchtown. Undaunted, we covered 27km of hill riding comfortably, realising that we weren’t going to win but enjoying it anyway.
3. RUN. We reached the Vrmac Fort in a group, took a break for peanuts and raisins, and jogged off for the final 12km of running on the top of the ridge. To our astonishment we passed three other teams along the way, with only one setback - I turned my ankle on rough ground, which made the rest of the race complete agony a little uncomfortable. I managed to continue solely thanks to the support of Team Dandies, and we romped home like true Olympians.
4. FOOD AND DRINK. The race participants and supporters recovered in the eco village at Gornja Lastva, another place I’d never been before. The weather had been warm but overcast most of the day (perfect race weather) but the sun came out for us at the end. The village itself was lovely, providing us with a hall to recuperate in and plenty of food and drink to get us back on our feet in time for the party that evening.

There’s a long list of people to thank: the organisers at Black Mountain Adventure Travel and Kayak Montenegro, Jack and Hayley for letting me sleep on their sofa, the kids of Montenegro Forum for cleaning up the route, Marija Nikolic and the preservation society in Gornja Lastva for their hospitality, the Sports Cafe in Herceg Novi for hosting the after-party, the other sponsors of the race, and of course - the other competitors. God, I sound like an Oscar winner.

Verdict: the Montenegro Adventure Race was an absolute blast, and I’ll definitely take part again next year. This year it was strictly for fun - next year we’ll take home the trophy (probably).

Since I missed the London Triathlon this year, I decided it would be a good idea to take part in the Montenegro Adventure Race. Right now, I can’t remember why it seemed like a good idea, but there you go. So on the 6th October I’m going to kayak across the bay, cycle up a mountain and then fall off it while trying to run along a narrow ridge. I’m also going to be doing this with a team of 3 people that I don’t know, since I signed up late for the event. I haven’t trained for nearly three weeks and I’m going to be arriving in Montenegro at 11pm the night before the race.

Let’s roll!