Melbourne Rat Race winners Aberdeen Asset Management at the finish

During the UK Rat Race series of urban adventure races, the AAM team had put in some solid performances and managed to take an unassailable lead into the London race. This meant that the team won the prize of a trip to Melbourne to compete in the first international Rat Race.

I went out a bit earlier to get acclimatised and check out Melbourne for a week before the event, with Nick and Iona flying in on the Friday before the race, hoping that their jet lag would not affect the team’s performance.

I had a great time checking out the city, going to the cricket, watching some international track cycling, and checking out the best cafés in town, which did certainly play a part in the team’s ability to race a bit faster around the streets on the Saturday night.

After a team recce on Friday in hot sunshine, the rain set in, and the temperature plummeted. Breakfast on Saturday was accompanied by a very heavy hail storm! Was this going to be the first ever truly wet Rat Race?

As we arrived at the event village all wrapped up against the cold, many local teams were thinking that surely the event would be cancelled. We, however, were relishing the cooler temperatures as it wouldn’t affect our performance as much as the heat possibly could. We were also thinking that the huge stocks of Nuun we had brought with us to prevent dehydration might not be needed at all.

With a great turn out for the first Antipodean Rat Race, Saturday night began. We only got 30 mins to mark the map up and every café was bombarded with rats all trying to mark their maps fast, and try and waterproof them too. The pace was fast off the line – with many checkpoints nearby it was crucial to get there first to avoid queues. Three hours of racing passed quickly, with trips up to the top of the highest residential building in the southern hemisphere (40seconds in a lift!) to swimming in outdoor pools, tennis games against the Victorian veteran champs, and trips down some very dodgy alleyways to secret hideaway pubs. A mass scramble was had at the finish for the four checkpoints available there, and we flew through all of them. We finished a few minutes over the three hours, but the penalties were worth the bonus we had got for being late.

A hearty meal cooked by our team helpers, Lou and Kyle, helped us spend more time on the map and we rocked up on Sunday morning to see a very windy day making the water where we were due to paddle very choppy indeed.

The race started with the usual run, then mental challenges – finding various shops in the new arcade and counting how many pods there were on Melbourne’s newest tourist attraction, the Southern Cross (a smaller version of the London Eye). We managed to fly through this, and then headed off on the bike for the first wee loop. This included a Land Rover off-road test track, a mountain bike trail underneath the main highway into Melbourne which was a great find, and then back into the event village for the kayak.

We had been caught by the lead all-male team at this stage which included some Aussie international orienteers, so not light competition. However, our paddling proved much stronger and we pulled away from them, and didn’t see them for the rest of the day. The second loop was much longer, taking us towards Melbourne’s famous horse race track where we completed an orienteering course with a river swim at the end to cut off a 1km run!

A long ride later and we arrived at the ‘Tunnel o’ Death’ a 5km long storm drain. Fortunately we only had to punch at the entrance and not descend into the depths. Next up was a fantastic abseil from a disused silo with an uninterrupted view back to the city from 40m up, it was a great location and very well set up for the race. We then headed north over a huge viaduct and then dropped steeply down to the river below to find a checkpoint on an old Ford Laser abandoned in the water.

A cycle along the scenic river path was interrupted by a very steep climb up the side of the valley to a quintessentially Australian check point, the barbie! Here we had to cook and eat a sausage each, we took our time to ensure it was cooked, but some of the later teams decided to go fast and eat it raw!

We continued along the river with a detour to a rowing club where we had to row 2km, and then shortly after find a ‘Rat’ on a street, he was very relaxed, reading the paper having a coffee in a nice café! Soon after we found ourselves in a very foreign place, a storm drain, and because of all the rain, it was pretty damp! We followed this for a number of kilometres crisscrossing under major roads and finally came to a cycle path which took us back to the finish, where we were once again shown a kayak and had to paddle across the docks and back before we could finish for good.

We managed to win the race by about 30 minutes and we were all very relieved to have done so considering the hype that had surrounded us for the past few months. The race was brilliant, very well organised, smoothly run and had some fantastic activities thrown in.

I would highly recommend the Melbourne Rat Race to anyone, coincide it with a holiday or something, the city has so much to offer, and the organisers are a great bunch of folk.

So thanks to the UK for the great races which enabled us to get to Australia, and to the Aussies for setting us such a top challenge and enjoyable race.

We logged our route on the way round – if you’re interested, you can find it at www.gmap-pedometer.com