Completing the Red Bull X-Alps for the first time can be an incredibly frustrating experience. The ‘learnings file’ is often large at the end. There are the unavoidable mistakes that can happen to anyone, like launching too early and bottoming out, choosing a bad line, or making a navigational error on the ground.

But these are usually not the issues that get picked over in the postmortem. It’s questions like, did the team work as well as imagined, or could it have been more efficient? Did they do the right type of training, perhaps there was too much focus on hills and not enough time spent hiking on the flat. It could be diet. The truth is, no rookie ever finishes the race and thinks they had the best campaign. They always want to return and do better.