Welcome To The Jungle

Test your mettle in the Chapman’s Challenge, an adventure race that salutes an epic WW2 survival tale

- Ben Jhoty

In the early 1940s, British Colonel Freddie Spencer Chapman survived three years behind enemy lines in the wilds of Malaysia. Enduring punishing treks though dense, leech-infested rainforest and debilitating bouts of pneumonia and malaria that at one point left him unconscious for over two weeks, he came to live by Shakespeare’s immortal line:

“There is nothing either good or bad, thinking makes it so.”

A useful collection of words that. You can see how it might resonate with a man fleeing for his life.

Unfortunately, as I haul my weary body up a steep jungle trail on the island of Pangkor Laut as part of the Chapman’s Challenge, an adventure race named in the Colonel’s honour, I’m starting to fear my mind is feeble. Because make no mistake, I think this experience is brutal. And so it is.

Perhaps that’s because I gravely underestimated the physical demands of the race, a 6.2km run followed by a 1km open water swim at Emerald Bay, where 72 years earlier, Spencer Chapman was finally rescued by submarine.

On paper the distances sound manageable. In preparation I focused on the swim, logging a couple of sessions in the pool each week leading in. The run, I reasoned, would take care of itself.

You know who didn’t underestimate the race, even though he had every right?

Ironman champion Matt Poole. Eyeing the race record of 47 minutes, Poole scoped out the course the day before the race while I was lounging by one of the resort’s tranquil pools. At the race briefing Poole asked questions, keen to see off any surprises.

“I’m a very competitive guy,” Poole says. “It’s that stubborn athlete mindset. You train to do your best.”