Stage 2 started outside the Taiping Zoo with 32 racers on inline skates and a large crowd lining the streets. The Swedish team took off like a bullet, and Mari and I found ourselves in 4th position. We started working together and hunted down 2 teams to finish the 2 lap / 8k skate in second place. Big thanks to Rollerblade for the SpeedMaster 90's and to Leki for the poles that helped conserve our legs for what was to come. After a quick transition, we headed out on what was to be a 6k run to the rappel. We spend the next 2+ hours rock hopping, sliding down rivers, clawing up impossible jungle steeps, sliding down slippery slopes, and trying not to grab the cartoon-like thorns that covered most of the flora all while keeping our eyes peeled on flagging that lead us to the rappel. We were caught by a few teams on the jungle trek as I was having a real low point on the steep climbs, but Mari did the brunt of the work pulling me through the jungle and route finding. After being out of out of water for around a hour, working together with the New Zealand and Malaysia teams, and edging a few other teams out by staying on course while they got off course by not paying careful attention to the flagging, we arrived at the waterfall rappel in 5th place minutes out of 3rd place. After a very slippery, wet, fun rappel down the waterfall we took a 15 foot jump into a pool of water below the falls and swam out to run an easy trail to the bike pick up. After slamming some water, Mari and I worked together to recover from the run. We managed to catch up to the New Zealand team. They managed to hang onto our draft, but weren't able to help do any of the pulling, and it was doing us any good sticking with them as we needed to make up 11 minutes on them. I dropped to the back of the pace line as Mari was pulling and noticed both Kiwi's were working extremly hard to hang onto Mari's wheel. Mari pulled off to let one of them take a pull and no one went to the front. That is when we made a big push and dropped them for good. We finished the bike ride 8 minutes ahead of them and put into the paddle section with the intent of holding them off and closing the remaining gap on the 3 teams in front. We were able to close the gap on the Yogaslackers who finished in third palce 1 min and 20 secs in front of us, but we weren't able to pass them on the short paddle. We finished the paddle strong, hopped out of the boats and sprinted 1000 meters on a wooden boardwalk to the finish line in 4th place and moving up 3 spots in the overall classification to 5th place and 15 minutes behind the leaders. We then got a fun ambulance ride to the local clinic to get our thorns pulled out from the jungle trek, our cuts and scrapes cleaned and dressed, and a tetnious shot for good measure. Didn't have to wait, fill out any paper work, or pay!! And Yes the needles were sterile. Rest day today. Stage 3 is tomorrow with a bike, raft, run, cave.
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