“Stop. Breathe. Take your time.”

Day two of the 2014 Grand Final saw teams assemble on a frosty lawn underneath Rotorua’s skyline gondola network. Unknown to our teams, the blue sky acted as perfect cover as the race itself had plenty of dark clouds lying in wait.

Just a brief recap on how we got here. Day one of the Grand Final was designed to allow luck to play a strong cameo. For some teams, Lady Luck was long gone. Many teams simply couldn’t catch a break. Or a bus. No matter how hard they try - a sprint to a bus stop was met with a departing bus and escaping teams.

That day for some of our teams proved the most soul-searching. 

To a team, competitiveness abounded - the only variation being the degree. One dad confided they had had a most wretched day. 

Their team never caught a single, smooth bus connection. Losing over an hour and a half sitting at bus stops, this dad shared how philosophical his daughter was. 

His attitude at the interminable waiting was dragging her down and he needed to “man up” to her dignified standards. Here was competitive dad forced to wait. And wait.

She too was naturally disappointed but had only a positive outlook about their stalled predicament. “Other teams might be doing as bad as us too dad” she offered trying to cheer her father up. 

Let me reinforce this. This was the daughter providing counsel to the father. He said he learnt a lot about himself that day and even more about his girl. He shared her story with such great pride.

The way the game was played on day one, some teams finished almost two hours behind our day one champions. If we started day two, with teams starting in the same timed position - it would have been pointless for the teams down the back. They wouldn’t have had a chance.

The slower teams were penalised and the gondola network above provided the solution. Teams assembled from first to last, based on day one standings and almost like Noah, filed on to their cars – three teams by three.

First to last were now separated by just fifteen minutes. Everyone was back in with a chance.

The first challenge provided the most delight. Luging down the side of a mountain is every child’s dream and secretly, every parents as well. 

At the bottom of the luge track, teams could bypass the second challenge if they chose to run back to the top of the mountain (the much faster and brutally harder solution). Others took the chance of a chair lift ride to the top and then had to find a 2 metre tall purple bunny rabbit - saying the exact words “are you lost, poor purple bunny rabbit” to receive their next challenge. This tall bunny would not accept any other instruction.

Then, the dreaded gondola roulette arrived. Teams agonised as they waited for the gondola to collect them and whisk them down the mountain. Had they have known the terribly tricky challenge that awaited, they may not have been so keen.

Assemble a simple toy animal. Twenty-three pieces. A walk in the park to these talented family teams.

No, sorry. It was genuine agony.

It probably took on average around thirty minutes to complete this devilishly difficult assignment. To compound the tension, our own bus network was leaving every ten minutes and teams desperately tried to finish, to get onto the bus and the next challenges and not lose any more time.

All teams got to keep their cruel memento and post event, some couldn’t help but pull it apart to see where it all went wrong.

The next challenge typified the whole day. The music challenge. In most cases, teams lost an absolute truckload of time - not knowing their Poison from their GNR’S. This was a hard race.

After the music challenge, the race developed a “pointy end” - and teams were starting to streak away from others.

One team held the lead for a brief few minutes but were completely undone by not listening to the few words delivered by our inspirational professional, Cabin Leishman. What he said was painstakingly simple. He said “when you get to a set of new instructions.”

“Stop. Breathe. Take your time.”

If XRACE had a big cousin, it would be adventure racing. Teaming up, heading into the unknown, defeating other teams and your own demons, yes, XRACE and adventure racing are genuinely related. 

Cabin have been there before but for him, it was most likely in a deep, dark jungle in Borneo - but the rules still applied. 

“Stop. Breathe. Take your time.”

Their next challenge was written on a rubbish bin.

Te Whare Taonga O Te Arawa

No clues, no nothing. Translate it somehow or you are stuck.

Our leading team out of the music challenge sipped no air and ran for it. Dad goes “it’s a street name - I’ve seen it” and blasts of. 

In the wrong direction and this teams time at the tip of the field is gone for good.

Other teams took over the lead only to relinquish it.

The father daughter team that displayed such sportsmanship on day one, helping the tiny tug-of-war team - led the race into the finish line compound only to immediately lose it.

How hard is this challenge?

Over two days, write down six letters (you’ve all seen them, it the same letters we use at packet collection at your local XRACE). 

We placed them in the most obvious places. You couldn’t miss them. 
Yeah right.

The challenge was simply to remember the challenge.

Dad is asked “the six letters please” or a three minute penalty for each wrong letter. He has five. He asks his daughter. “Guess a letter”. They have a 1 in 21 chance. 

She guesses wrong, the stopwatch is handed over in an agonising three minute penalty sees the lead relinquished. They eventually finish in second place overall, two minutes behind the champions.

The last two challenges involved balance. Go on. Try the first. 
Take a water bottle, place it on your head and walk 20 metres. 

Repeat. And repeat about a dozen times.

The penultimate challenge was the same as last year. The dreaded sausage. The tenacious father and son team, Grant and Jack Ogilvie from Palmerston North had for pretty much all of day two chased. They were first team to the Rotorua Museum but immediately lost the lead there.

They were the fourth team onto the last challenge and the first across the finish line.

I take this moment to sing the praises of the XRACE champions of New Zealand. They were gentlemen both. Competitive as all stink but completely sporting. I will let you sum up this team.

Our water balancing bottle on the head challenge was proving to be quite a handful for our fantastic volunteers. Two minutes after winning the whole shebang, I said to the Champions of New Zealand “mate, we need a hand on this challenge - can you help the volunteers out.”

They did and not just as a token gesture. They stayed and they helped out their fellow XRACERS. No real time to bask in glory, just cheer on the other teams - the majority not knowing who they were. They had won and now they were helping out.

Enjoy your family time on the Gold Coast - Ogilvy family. You genuinely deserved it.

All that now mattered was prizegiving and the chance for teams to reflect on their amazing two-day XRACE Grand Final. 

We asked for the teams who thought they were particularly adept at the choreographed “Happy” challenge to give the assembled families and encore. Our stage was flooded - not with the supercompetitive but the superconfident.

It was a truly joyous celebration of everything that we would come to expect from our XRACE families.

The top two teams in the dance-off on face value were probably the last two teams you would expect. Both teams will led by talented dancing kids, nothing unusual there.

But it was the dads; the same unshaven (by now, for a good week) rough looking Kiwi blokes that would be the last people on the planet you would expect to have entered a dance competition. They looked more at home in the bush than under lights and on stage.

Could they dance? 

Could they what! The cheers for these teams were completely deafening. 

After prizegiving, I asked the daughter of the winning dance team – “were you proud of dad?”

All she said was “oooo, dad was AWESOME.”

I’ll leave her the last words.

Shane.