Prize giving in Sexton

Sexten was a beautiful stage town to finish in, with a spectacular back-drop of the Dolomites. Having Having freshened up with a shower and got through the first beers and champagnes of the finishing party, we moved into the prize giving, which took about 3 hours! The team that particularly enjoyed the evening was the Swiss Men, who had succeeded in coming second on the final stage, their first time on the podium. They celebrated in true Swiss style with cow bell and lots of beer! The cow bell was particularly loud.

The Mixed team overall prize was won by Angela Mudge and Chunky Liston from Scotland, with the South African team of Linda Doke and Ryan Sandes coming third. They had known that for the final stage, they had to beat the pair ahead by 40 minutes on the final stage. This would normally be too much to ask, but they knew the man was carrying an injury, so they went for it. Linda said she was really pushing it, with Ryan towing her hard up the mountainside and then sprinting down to the finish, only then after 33km of hard running discovering that their competitors had pulled out after 3km! So 30km of pain when they could have relaxed and enjoyed the run in.

After Grand Masters and Masters (Our category won by a German team), the Men prize went to the Scots Andy Simmonds and Tom Owens, who also won last year. To beat them, we would have had to knock off 20 hours from our time!

After all that, we went thorugh a slightly surreal moment of Chris and I being invited on stage with two other teams who had been raising money for a German Children's Hospice. The difficulty was that the interview on stage was in German (of which neither Chris nor I speak a word!). I discovered afterwards that the other teams had raised £1,200 for their cause, but we had a good cheer for having raised 26,000 Euros for St Peter's Hospice! Again amny thanks to all of our supporters in achieving this target so far.

We then had all finishers handed their finisher shirts. A great achievement for both of us (even though I do say so myself), especially given the very high attrition rate for the event.

It was an early morning start again to catch the bus back to Munich, but we had a last view of the Dolomites, which remain awe inspiring.

As one competitor said: "Life is not about how many breaths you take; it is more about how times your breath is taken away."

There are many times during this event where our breath was taken away, which has helped us enjoy the friendships and comeraderie of this gruelling 8 day race. I'll post a short reminisce of some of our abiding memories and special moments of the Transalpine race very shortly.