Maxi-Dash 2011: Caught between a rock and a steering wheel

The hills in nature are pretty perfect aren’t they? I mean they’re perfect for both sexes as well. Cosmic gender equality and all that. Think about it. Men like curves and contours. Women like big phallic looking bulges. And some men like big phallic looking bulges while some women like curves and contours. So it works out either way. Now, let’s break it down further. Climbers, they’re the thorny adventurers who want to get their sweaty palms all over these curvy contours and phallic bulges of earth. Passionately grunting, twisting and thrusting against walls, you could even go as far as to say they live to mount these passive structures.

Anyway, enough with the pseudo sexual imagery and analogies.

It was 7pm on Friday evening and I’d just finished football training when I get a tweet saying “How would you like to witness and write about the only climbing competition of its kind in the world?”

Booyaa! Natural excitement and adrenaline is sometimes better than stunning yourself with an electrical charge for kicks. Sometimes. It's all relative to the voltage.

“Can you be ready by 8pm?”

An hour later, we’re in a 4x4, packed with climbing gear, a few bits of food and a few nerve-soothing beers chilling in the cooler, cutting through a strangely, starless night into the veiny backroads of The Great Rift Valley towards the industrious little town of Naivasha.

Ladies and gentlemen, the name of the game is the Maxi-Dash. Here’s the simplified version of how you play. Open number of teams in competition. Two members per team. Five crags in the surrounding area of Nairobi: N’deiya, Hell’s Gate National Park, Frog, Lukenya and Embaribal. Each crag has allocated routes that you have to climb, dust yourself down then drive as fast as legally imposed speed limits allow, to the next site which could be more than a hundred kilometres away. Each climb is awarded a predetermined number of points. Goal of the game? Climb as many routes as you can physically climb within the twelve and a half hour time limit with the intention of beating the rest of the teams.

Chalky fingers, strained. Tired muscles, tensed. Stinging sweat, dripping. Breath, heavy. Mind, as alert as it’ll ever be. It takes a strong body to endure the physical strain and climb multiple rock faces in the space of twelve hours. It takes an even stronger mindset to dull out the pain and maintain focus. Considering that the winners usually win nothing but bragging rights for a year, it’s all done out of passion and pride which shows you that even in this day and age, not everything is about monetary gain. These are individuals who place themselves in intense situations and put pressure on themselves to succeed and I’d think that that philosophy trickles into their day to day lives as well. The duality of their lives as businessmen and women by weekdays and climbers and adventurers by weekends seamlessly merges into one when they’re on the rock negotiating their way up or down with carefully calculated precision.

The team I tagged along with, Nikunj and Ekya, are both experienced climbers. Calm and collected individuals who never let the frustration of the climb get to them. They’ve been in the scene for a long time and know their way around the country and the crags. However, this time they hadn’t trained at all and the self imposed set limit of one drink turned into a couple more the night before the climbing day as interesting conversation unfurled about their experiences and expectations of the event and their philosophies on life. There was much wisdom in their words, not so much in our actions as we sat up late into the night. So after just two and a half hours, we all woke up groggy from the hazy fog of warm sleep and made our way to Hell’s Gate. Lungs filled with morning air, bottles filled with cold water, they begun their climbs at Fischer’s Tower scaling it thrice and making it look easy. I watched. And learned. And captured the souls of the moments with a camera. That would become the order of the day; they’d climb, we’d drive to the next place and I’d take pictures trying to document this fascinating journey. By the end of the day, we’d traversed across sundried and rain-speckled, rough and smooth terrain encountering dying trucks on the escarpment, small thorn fences made by the Maasai, avoiding strict old Maasai elders, lazy cows sitting in the middle of rough roads and witnessing spectacular panoramas. We’d travelled all the way from Hell’s Gate in Naivasha to Frog at the cliffs in the shadow of the Ngong hills to the sleeping stone-beast of Lukenya.

The day ended as they came down from their last climb in the relative darkness of the evening, exhausted from the day’s excursions but buzzing with the anticipation of possible victory and the thrill of having competed. A celebratory beer was drank under the stars as the Lukenya cliffside became all the more ominous silhouetted against the light pollution of a far away Nairobi. From our vantage point, the traffic on Mombasa road sounded like the rapturous applause of a large unseen crowd.

The team, fuelled only by water, chocolates, bananas and crisps the whole day, impressively completed a total of thirteen climbs but unfortunately came in second place. The following is how the points table lined up in the end:

Tobin’s team – 295 points
Nikunj’s team – 290 points
Geraldine’s team – 275 points
Spencer’s team – 200 points

The Maxi-Dash is the only event of its kind in the world and is organized by the Mountain Club of Kenya. For more information do visit their website at http://www.mck.or.ke/ and while you’re at it clicking links, click on this one too: http://www.africapoint.com/savemountkenya.php

A lot of people don’t know about the existence of the Mountain Club which is a shame. Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone on a number of trips with the people I met through this organization. We’re lucky to live in a country with vast mountain ranges, rapid rivers, lush green forests, lakes that make you thirsty just by looking at them, hike and bike trails and flora and fauna fit for a paradise.

The Mountain Club of Kenya is the vehicle to experience this beautiful country through. Don’t miss out on the ride. Because nature is the best teacher, she’ll teach you things you’ll never learn until you get down and dirty. And we all know the wisdom of older women. There I go with the pseudo sexual remarks again.

I’ll leave now.

Click here for pictures of the Maxi-Dash.