LIKE many happily married couples, Jenny and Damien Enderby like to spend their weekends together.
But the Valentine couple have little time to stroll hand-in-hand around the nearby Lake Macquarie shore, or share a bottle of wine over a candle-lit dinner.
A typical weekend for the energetic Enderbys involves running, swimming, cross-country riding, kayaking and orienteering their way over tracks and trails around the state.
The Newcastle Orienteering Club members usually team up with partners of the same gender in their bush-bashing pursuits.
Last Saturday, they competed together for the first time and beat all couples home to win the Cams Wharf leg of the national Kathmandu Adventure Race series.
‘‘That was our plan, to hopefully one day win it, but we just didn’t know it was going to happen in our first race together so we were pretty excited about it all,’’ Jenny said.
‘‘Damien’s done the race twice before with a male partner and they’ve come first and second, and I’ve raced with a female partner and we’ve come fourth overall and won the women’s, but this is the first time we’ve done it together.
‘‘We won the mixed event but also beat all the male and female teams in a field of 133.’’
She said the race series rules dictate that couples must remain within 100 metres of each other at all times during an event.
Race distances and the order of disciplines vary from course to course.
Damien and Jenny completed the Cams Wharf route in three hours and 20 minutes.
An orienteer since she was eight years old and a personal trainer by profession, Jenny is the national 45-years orienteering champion.
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‘‘That was our plan ... we just didn’t know it was going to happen in our first race.’’
- – JENNY ENDERBY
They also won national cross-country cycling titles.
‘‘Orienteering is the easy part for me,’’ she said.
‘‘We’ve done a lot of adventure races. I won a Go Natural adventure race in Sydney last year and pretty much finished on the podium in every race I did.
‘‘We’ve both done triathlons in the past and represented Australia in triathlons,’’ she said.
‘‘They’re all sort of inter-linked together because we also do the Australian mountain-bike series as well.’’
Even their daughters, 9-year-old Mikayla and 7-year-old Erika, are getting in on the multisport act, ensuring there is rarely a spare moment after school each day or on weekends.
‘‘The girls did a triathlon on Sunday and they do Little Athletics as well,’’ Jenny said.
‘‘Mikayla is the Australian under-10 orienteering champion over the sprint distance, and Erika is the youngest orienteer in Australia to navigate the national championship course unassisted.
‘‘We had October to Christmas off because we did so many races last year and took a break over the start of summer. Now we’re back into it again,’’ she said.
