La Ruta de los Conquistadores 2008 / Путь конкистадоров 2008

[Winny]

Несмотря на то, что постоянные участники этого марафона и впервые пожелавшие уже готовятся к гонке 2009 года, я решил упомянуть о марафоне 2008 года, т.к. наткнулся в интернете на несколько интересных материалов на эту тему. Хочется сразу всеми ими поделиться, но ввиду ограниченности свободного времени буду выкладывать материал по мере возможности.

Те, кто впервые слышат об этом мероприятии, могут взять с торрента фильм о "La Ruta de los Conquistadores 2006" ("Путь конкистадоров 2006").

В 2008-м году гонка проходила с 12 по 15 ноября. Она состояла из четырёх этапов: один день - один этап. Сухая статистика (расстояние, набор высот и т.п.) несколько позже, а сейчас, так сказать для затравки, красивый ролик

La Ruta de los Conquistadores 2008

[Winny]

[img float=left]http://www.velofan.com.ua/forum/uploads/20090318/la_ruta_2008_dax_jaikel_1_480.jpg[/img] Когда едешь сердцем, ноги не нужны

Наверняка, те, кто смотрел ролик из предыдущего моего поста, обратили внимание на гонщика с "кочергой" вместо правой ноги. Dax Jaikel член команды «Duratec». Гонка проходит в тропических районах Коста-Рики, где участники должны преодолеть высокую влажность, обезвоживание организма, бурные реки, топкие грязи и высокие горы. Это тяжело даже для здорового человека, но Dax Jaikel, несмотря на более ограниченные возможности своего организма, занял 57-е место среди 345 гонщиков. В течение гонки Dax использовал 2 велосипеда Duratec: RASS CC2 и CANNER CC1. Этот выбор производился в зависимости от рельефа этапа. На горных этапах предпочтение отдавалось CANNER CC1.

Источник: Duratec.

[Ulan]

уважаю таких людей
настоящий мужик

[Winny]

Ещё один постоянный яркий участник La Ruta de los Conquistadores, на которого нельзя не обратить внимание, - Heart Akerson.

La Ruta de los Conquistadores, Stage 1, 11/12/08 (by Rob Jones)	Heart Akerson is riding his 8th La Ruta, November 11-13, 2005 (by Rob Jones)

Источник: canadiancyclist.com



Для владеющих английским - небольшая статейка трёхлетней давности о нём. Было бы в сутках хотя бы 48 часов, постарался бы перевести, но пока что лишь языком оригинала...

[img float=left]http://www.velofan.com.ua/forum/uploads/20090324/heart-akerson-gottahaveheart.jpg[/img] Gotta Have Heart
The amazing journey of La Ruta's toughest--and most eccentric--gringo.

By Roy Wallack

Heart Akerson, the toughest gringo in the world's toughest mountain bike race.
©Colin Meagher

"My god! A homeless guy with hair down to his ass and no clothes riding a Y-bike! All I could think was, 'Is he racing or going to work or escaping from an insane asylum?'"--Rich White, Big Bear, California; La Ruta, 2005

Appearance notwithstanding, Heart Akerson is not homeless or insane. Quite the opposite. A 56-year-old father of nine and grandfather of four, with a long, flowing mane of gray hair and a dense Father Time beard, Akerson is a wealthy businessman and a trained physicist. He invents medical products and runs an alternative-energy company that he says will revolutionize electric power, all from a sprawling Costa Rican oceanfront estate where engineers and programmers come to work and family members have been known to walk around naked. And athletically, Akerson's a warrior.

Every year since 1998, Akerson has lined up at the start of La Ruta de los Conquistadores, a three-day, 200-mile crossing of Costa Rica from Pacific to Atlantic by mountain bike that is so hard 50 percent of all competitors, most of them half his age, don't finish. And at each La Ruta, which often involves slogging through sweltering rain forests, wading through thigh-deep mud, and staving off hypothermia-_inducing freezing rain, he has crossed the finish line. Akerson has established an enviable record that no other American--and only two young Costa Ricans--have surpassed: He's nine for nine. Including the 2006 race, in which he finished on the podium in the master's class and 225th out of 510 riders overall, he's finished every stage of every race he started. Deep into his sixth decade, Heart Akerson is arguably the toughest gringo in what may be the world's toughest mountain bike race.

And for the first eight races he did every La Ruta shirtless, in cutoff jeans and sandals on a 1994 Trek Y-bike.

"I thought he was a hermit. He reminded me of the Governor, a recurring character in Carl Hiaason's books, who was once the governor of Florida but now lives in the Everglades swamps, subsisting on snakes and roadkill."--Peter Dollard, Kennebunkport, Maine; La Ruta, 2005

Despite his unconventional first name, Akerson was not a countercultural love child of reefer-smoking beatniks. Born in Maine, he grew up in country-club estates all over the United States as one of three offspring (sisters Donna and Suzie) of a part-Swedish, part-Apache mother and a straitlaced computer-salesman father. A classically trained pianist and brilliant student, Akerson became obsessed with nuclear physics in the seventh grade after reading about the Manhattan Project, the massive American effort during World War II to build a nuclear bomb.

But while an undergrad at Virginia Polytechnic Institute during the Vietnam era, Akerson changed his tune. The protests and civil rights struggle made it "a very active time to think," he says. By his 1972 graduation with a B.A. in theoretical physics, Akerson had hair down his back and played keyboard, drums and guitar for Andromeda, a rock band that sang against nukes. "It was 'heavy metal'--even through the genre didn't exist yet," says Akerson. "The science guys in the group interpreted it as being against heavy metals that were destroying the earth: uranium and plutonium."

Surviving on savings from music gigs and his Mr. Fixit mechanical skills, Akerson traveled for a year in India and the Himalayas after college, sailed a boat around South America, then breezed through the doctoral program at the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon, in Eugene. Yet even with corporate jobs beckoning, he moved south to a commune near Ashland, Oregon, where, for three years, he wore a loincloth, grew his own crops and cooked over an open fire. After fathering two daughters with a commune resident named Honey, Akerson built a 41-foot ocean-worthy trimaran, and led his family and several others on an open-ended sailing adventure up and down the coast of South America.

All this drew Akerson away from his traditional upbringing. "The shift is what makes life interesting," he says. "The black and white instead of the gray, the waves instead of the calm."

Akerson and Honey had three more children in the next few years as they sailed the Pacific and returned for part of the year to Seattle, where Akerson sold solar panels. Dissatisfied with the transverters that convert solar energy to usable electric power, he founded a company, Heart Interface, to do it better. During sailing trips over the succeeding years, he and Honey fell in love with a pristine ocean bluff on a bay near the end of Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. When he sold his company, the couple bought 240 acres of land there, determined to nurture their growing brood in a natural state unencumbered by clothing and societal expectations.

"When I saw him, I thought, 'Here's some expatriate who's been living in the jungle for 20 years like one of those Japanese soldiers in the Philippines still fighting World War II. And he's going to do a race that I trained six months for?'"--Robert Forster, Santa Monica, California; La Ruta, 1998

Although Akerson hadn't participated in sports since his days on the high-school football team, he had ridden a bike 20 miles a day to and from grad school. That's why he wasn't intimidated when a close friend challenged him to do the 1988 Ironman Canada.

"It damn near killed me," says Akerson. "I froze because I had no wet suit for the swim. I rode a Huffy that was way too small for my body. The announcer thought it was a joke--me running in cutoffs, barefoot. But I did it the way I knew."

Akerson had started going barefoot back in college and taught classes shoeless at the University of Oregon. "I learned long ago that taking your shoes off in a temple was a sign of respect," he says. "As I traveled, I began to have a hard time determining boundaries. As far as I can tell now, the whole world is a temple."

Being shoeless (and shirtless and shaveless) for years toughened more than Akerson's soles. "It puts pressure on you to be good," he says. "You can't relax. You gotta get it together. People see someone like me and look for weaknesses, something to criticize. But they'll tolerate you if you have a great idea or perform an impressive feat." Like invent technology that will cut their electric bills in half--or finish an Ironman. Akerson ultimately completed four straight Ironman Canadas, taking an hour off his time each year.

Akerson thrived on being different. "It's like the [Johnny Cash] song, 'A Boy Named Sue,'" he says. "At first the boy cursed his dad for naming him Sue, then after a while he liked it. It made him tough." Living in Costa Rica, it was only a matter of time before Akerson heard about the toughest event in the neighborhood: La Ruta.

Ironically, riding a bike--and walking through airport customs--are the rare ocassions when Akerson actually wears shoes. Being a high-tech aficionado, he was drawn to the sleek, carbon-fiber frame of the radical (for 1994) Trek Y22 full suspension mountain bike. (In 2006, Trek finally pursuaded Heart to upgrade to a TopFuel 110 Carbon.) When his fellow American-expatriate neighbor buddy, Nat Grew, a cattle rancher and marathon runner in his 60s, told Akerson about La Ruta in 1998, Akerson bought a pair of Shimano SPD clipless-pedal sandals, and started training.

"I saw Heart at breakfast on the second day, which was the climb up the Irazu volcano. 'Is there something wrong with him?' I wondered. This is not for real. He had no shirt. I had two layers and a rain jacket. That year it was freezing. Eventually, halfway through the day, he put on a plastic trash bag.Back in the day, I was naive, I didn't really know what hardcore was. Now I do. Heart's one of my heroes."--David Gomez, Miami; La Ruta, 2000

People often train half a year for La Ruta. For his first race, in 1998, and all those since, Akerson trained only once a week.

"Hey, I'm extremely busy," he says. "But all my family is fit just from our normal lifestyle, from walking around our property. We can drop what we're doing and run and swim until we fall asleep. We always eat wholesome organic food prepared from scratch. My wife coordinates the biggest weekly organic produce market in the country. My kids grew up running naked in a natural paradise--my two-year-old granddaughter just ran by! So to prepare for my first La Ruta, I did the Pre-Ruta [an abbreviated version of the event the month before] to know what I was getting into. Then I did a hard 60-miler once a week."

His first La Ruta wasn't a piece of cake. Akerson crashed four or five times on Day 1 and was plenty tired. But quitting was simply not an option. At age 48, he finished midpack.

"I take it for real," says Akerson. "For me, it's finish or die."

Over the years, Akerson's nine-for-nine La Ruta streak has proceeded free of drama. The only exception was the 2003 race.

"I don't often get sick--but I did that year on Day 1," he said. He threw up all night, and had acute diarrhea as well as a high fever.

"My wife said, 'You're not going out for Day 2,'" says Akerson. "But I knew I had no choice. After all, I put out all this heavy rhetoric--'finish or die'--so it was time to walk the talk. To flush the sickness out of me, I drank water all night--no food. I arrived at the start line completely empty, like I'd been fasting."

Akerson lined up next to sons Rom Kanga, Orion Orca and Nyo Stream Falcon, who had all been doing La Ruta for years. (The kids, nine total, including Teal Oceans, Forest Bear, Zan Wolf, Silke Grasshopper, Eden Spring and Shade Bamboo, were all named after "walking through the world with them on the first day of their lives," says Akerson.) Rom, 21, is a Red Bull-sponsored rider who finished 23rd in 2006. Nyo Stream, 17, finished 25th. When the gun sounded on Day 2, 2003, they left their dad in the dust. Akerson was hurting.

"It was the hardest thing I ever did--climbing 8,000 feet up Irazu on just water, not even a piece of papaya or banana," says Akerson. "They tried to stop me on the last two stations because I was already past the cutoff time, but I just rode through. And I made it to the Day 2 finish line in Turrialba before the cutoff."

"We just call him The Hippie. We consider him a local. He always finishes. He just did the Chirrip? [trail-running] Race with four of his five sons, and was the only one barefoot for 21K up Costa Rica's tallest mountain, 12,530 feet, all rocks. We don't understand him. He makes a lot of money. So why doesn't he shave his beard? Why does he walk into our office barefooted?"--Luis Diego, La Ruta race manager, 2006

Talent and willpower have helped Heart Akerson shape his life. Now he is gearing up for his most formidable challenge of all.

"We have a serious problem in the world," says Akerson. "It's on the verge of becoming dysfunctional--and we're running out of time. Environmental catastrophe and the vast infrastructure differences between the developed and undeveloped worlds are creating economic and political pressures that are already exploding. We need clean energy for everyone--now." After a decade of focusing on medical products, he's back in the renewable-energy businesses with the Heart Transverter, which builds on his previous concept of seamlessly patching solar, geothermal, fuel cell and wind power into the existing energy grid at no expense.

Can one man and one idea make a difference?

"You know the whole spiritual path that a lot of people work for--the all-one-god, all-one-consciousness, the spirit, fate or Jesus or whatever they want, right?" says Akerson. "That's one direction. Quite a long time ago, I went the other way--I marvel at the feeling that we're individuals. Then I use individuality or ego or whatever you want to call it as one of many tools to get things done."

Like La Ruta nine straight times. Or something even harder.

Roy M. Wallack is the coauthor of Bike for Life: How to Ride to 100.


Источник: bicycling.com