It’s Anegada, everyone’s a winner.
Race Your Way Or Race Everything
The Drowned Island Challenge is six events across two days. You don’t have to do all six.
We built the event so that runners, swimmers, and paddleboarders can come for their preferred discipline and sit the others out. Sign up for the runs, the swims, or the paddleboard races as standalone categories, compete against everyone else in that discipline and spend your down-time the way Anegada intended. Slowly.
For those who want a fuller weekend or competing, but still with plenty of time to explore Anegada, there’s the overall category competing for the Poseidon and Amphitrite awards for top male and female. Two runs of 12km and 7.5km, two 1km swims, and two 4.5km paddleboard races. Six events. Two days. One overall score.
How the overall scoring works
After last year’s inaugural event we looked at the scoring and tightened it up to minimise any potential for skewing one discipline. The method we have adopted is called discipline-balanced averages, and it does exactly what it sounds like.
Your finish time from each race is converted to a placing within your discipline. The two run placings are averaged together. Same for the two swims, and the two paddles. Those three discipline averages are then averaged again into a single overall score. Each discipline – run, swim, paddle – counts for exactly one third of your result, regardless of how many races make up each one.
What that means in practice: a strong swimmer who paddles well but runs steady isn’t going to be buried by someone who blows the run and coasts everything else. The scoring rewards athletes who can do all three, not just the one they are really good at. Specialists are welcome, just know the system is designed to find the best all-rounder in the field.
One hard rule: if you don’t start or finish a race, you’re out of the overall running. No partial scores.
On the subject of winning
The Drowned Island Challenge is two days on one of the most inaccessible and offbeat islands in the Caribbean, doing things you love, with other people that appreciate sand-in-the-toes racing. There are morning races and afternoon races and long gaps in between for reef snorkelling, eating lobster, touring the island on a moped, and whatever Tommy Gaunt has lined up on the water. Winning is a bonus.
Sign up for everything, or just the bit that fits. Either way, it’s a great weekend on the drowned island.
