Allan: "I wonder how broken we'd have been without CurraNZ in hard racing conditions"

CurraNZ is celebrating another stunning victory after Team Privateer Adventure swept to an unbeaten Multisport racing series success in China, including the World Championship of Adventure Stage racing.

Team Privateer – made up of Kiwi endurance athletes Dougal Allan, Simone Maier, Sam Clark and Sam Manson – prevailed in the four-race series, headlined by the Wulong Mountain Quest, the world’s toughest and most prestigious stage race, which is limited to the best 27 elite teams in the world.

Then, just ten days later, they triumphed in the Suqian Eco Quadrathlon after 14 hours of racing, achieving a long sought-after success in the race.

The team are "postive" that the berries helped them deliver top performances consistently, despite the effects of extreme tiredness from this block of racing.

The 228km international Wulong Mountain Quest consists of four unrelenting days of technical mountain biking, trail running, kayaking, swimming, abseiling and rock climbing across the spectacular mountainous landscape of Wuloung County in Southern China.

Our 2019 World Multisport Champion describes the race as ‘one of the hardest events I have done’ and believes CurraNZ gave them a 'clear advantage'.

The athletes had to contend with temperatures of up to 40C, which led to many of the 140-strong field suffering heatstroke, with one being rushed to hospital in a life-threatening condition.

The team had been dosing on CurraNZ for six weeks leading to this block of racing for the performance, recovery and exertional heat stress-reducing benefits. 

Dougal says: “The terrain was so unforgiving, our bodies were battered and despite taking CurraNZ every day to improve blood flow and aid recovery, we were starting to show signs of the accumulated fatigue of hard racing every day.

"The feeling of DOMs has become rather foreign to me in the two years since I started regularly using CurraNZ and it left me wondering how truly broken we’d have been without preloading on the magic berries and using them throughout the race as we did.

"However, I only needed to look around at some of our main competitors to realise that we were actually walking straighter than most, so it was clear we were at an advantage with CurraNZ."

This was Dougal's second victory in the Wulong Mountain Quest and first in the Suqian Quadrathlon from eight attempts. 

"The team is positive the berries helped. We felt, despite suffering expected effects of exercise (tiredness, soreness etc) we still seemed able to ask our bodies to continue to deliver top performances consistently.

"Wulong was an absolute punishment to our bodies. Yet ten days later we were able to race hard for 14 hours and snatch victory at the end. 

"This illustrates to us the way our bodies recovered in time between races which aligns well with the reserach and information coming out about CurraNZ."

Dougal reflected: "I think the key to our success this year was largely our level effort throughout the race, where we never felt we had to push extra hard, rather we just focused on being efficient, consistent and relentless.”