Hondarribia, Espana
Wake up at 8:00 am and guess what? It’s raining… First breakfast “as in a race”: banana, muesli, yoghurt and coffee to get into a good habit from the start. It’s still raining … time for me to switch to Vibram FiveFingersV-trek instead of V-Run, the holes are nice, it’s airy, but not very waterproof. Just to get going, to motivate ourselves, we take advantage of the hot showers of the campsite and then we leave for the first meeting of the day: the collection of X-Pyr “goodies”. Top Secret design cardboard, like children at Christmas, we tear off the tape that closes all that to discover a strange surprise … at registration we had to give the sizes of shoes, t-shirt, shorts so that the organization can prepare all that, and then … the sizes have neither tail nor head obviously. Small example, Thibault finds himself with a t-shirt size XL after a bit of bartering for an element or two, here we are with good sizes, even if some things look a bit doubtful. It’s still raining… An hour to kill before the official race briefing, we head for a small bar on the Place d’Armes for a cappuccino for some and hot chocolate for others. It’s raining … 11:00am rings, we go for the briefing, it promises to be long, Iñigo (the GO of the X-Pyr) tells us that English is not really his thing, but it’s going to be ok… let’s be patient. The different rules are reviewed, the obligations and duties for the pilot and his assistant, detailed review of the course and the different airspaces, etc … in short administrative part. Interesting reminder: this is a race that is not only won as a driver, but in teams with his or her assistants. Humorous point about the videos, don’t shoot vertical, shoot horizontal please. Humans are not Instagram.
We finish on the reception and control of the trackers. Phew, finally free. Casually it’s already 1:30 pm and breakfast is far away now. And guess what? It’s still raining… We headed for a small tapas restaurant in a hurry. Well … once we found one with space and dry. All that’s left is for us to “keep busy” for the afternoon. After some food shopping to be autonomous for the next two days, we head to Decathlon for some additional accessories given the ambient humidity gloves, a third poncho and an umbrella come to join Thibault’s team while Thomas is already replacing his mattress which gave up the soul the first night. Back to the campsite to get back to the heart of the matter, to examine the different options for tomorrow according to the possible evolution of the weather, to check our communication elements such as Zello and XCTrack. It’s time for me to take advantage of this early evening to perform a very critical task: washing my hair … no idea when will be the next installation with shower & hot water to do this properly, believe me, it’s not with 30 litres of water for three that we get there. This is followed by a relaxing evening over pizza so as not to think too much about tomorrow. It’s all very real now, so there’s no need to fill your head with details before going to sleep. If you want to follow us, go to LiveTrack24: https://www.livetrack24.com/events/xpyr2022. Other tracking methods such as Flymaster or SportsTrackLiveare possible, you can find them directly on the X-Pyr website: https://x-pyr.com.
Last briefing tomorrow morning at 8.30am and then departure at 10am. And it’s always in the rain that we slip into our feathers.
