I’m happy that we still have races like Risnjak Mountain Trek! Although in last years organizers are turning their events more and more towards trail format (marked course, refreshment points, more competitors) this weekend we got a classic adventure run, just the way I love it!

For readers that are not familiar with adventure run concept in Croatia, it’s the easiest to describe it as a trekking discipline taken from an adventure race, it’s a mixture of ultra trail and orienteering, on a bad map! 🙂 Organizer places checkpoints over some terrain and you have to find them in a given order. Sometimes you have marked hiking paths connecting checkpoints, sometimes the paths are not marked and sometimes there are no paths in between! 😮 If the checkpoints are not cleverly placed, it can be as simple as a trail race with occasional map check at crossroads. But if you want the real thing, then you should come to RMT!

Some of the characteristics of a true adventure run (in my opinion) and all experienced this weekend:

Wilderness. In a whole day of racing I passed by only three houses (one closed mountain hut, one burned down (?) and one actually functional (!) ) and 50m of paved roads. Everything else was trails and no trails! If I don’t count competitors and organizers, I saw one group of hikers (5 to 10, didn’t count) and one car with two people in it and that’s it. The feeling of being far from civilization is something that makes me go to the mountains in a first place…

Off the beaten path. Sometimes it’s nice to follow hiking paths. Red-and-white markings shows you the right way. But if you take the path less traveled, you can find so much more. And when your trail ends and you continue completely off-trail, when the forest is your playground, when you wonder how long has it been since this part of nature has seen another foot (if ever!), that’s something to search for…

Getting lost. I like getting lost. Well, not completely. You should know more or less where you are, and if you continue in wanted direction, you’ll eventually get to that road/creek/ridge you’re looking for. But standing at the crossroad that shouldn’t be there, watching the terrain that shouldn’t look like that and then following your intuition (or happy guess) to find some recognizable feature and relocate on map, it’s so full of satisfaction!

Reading map. Map and compass are your best friends here. As GPS is not allowed, strong orienteering skills are must (ok, you can also follow your friend who knows everything, but run slower than you…). Racers coming from orienteering competitions should be warned about maps: you don’t get orienteering/state-of-the-art/every-unusual-tree-is-on-the-map map, you have an imprecise hiking map that shows only most important paths (that were important 20 years ago) and the situation on the terrain is (of course) completely different. 🙂 Just keep that in mind and you’ll be fine…

Time limits. Although time limits sound bad, they do give you additional push, motivation to run faster, concentrate harder. Time limits on RMT doesn’t give you much room for error. You are allowed to get lost, spend some time browsing around, but just once, and not for long. 🙂 On RMT, you have to run, walkers don’t finish this race. And although it doesn’t sound too hard on paper (40km and 2500m climbs in max 11 hours), the winning time of little less than 7 hours, average finisher time of 10 hours and finisher rate of just 55% say it all…

Views. It’s not all about racing and running. We are going to this races in order to experience something new, to enjoy the nature, to have good time with friends, to discover some hidden nature gems. One of these is called Paklena and it’s a peak with one of the best views I’ve seen… I am getting back there with my picnic backpack 🙂

So, thank you Elvir and Ad natura Team for this exceptional race and experience over all! Thank you. See you again…

Vanja

P.S. RMT is part of Salomon Ad natura Multisport Series. Ad natura organizes one more adventure run in November and few more trail races/mountain races throughout the year. For a calendar of adventure runs in Croatia, take a look at this page, it’s not a complete list, but we’ll update it as more information is available.