It's almost midnight in Ballyhoura country and the rain is hammering down on the roof of our jeep, which is halfway up a mountain.

Driving the jeep is Vanessa Lawrenson, the organiser of the "Beast of Ballyhoura", a 24-hour adventure race that took over large swathes of the Galtee mountains and counties Tipperary, Limerick and Cork at the weekend.

At this stage, fourteen teams consisting of four people in each team were running, mountain biking, kayaking, shooting, orienteering and abseiling their way across rough terrain in appalling conditions.

Lawrenson is trying to drive, with the aid of my shoddy navigation, and stop every minute for a relentless number of phone calls.

The abseiling supervisors call to say they are worried: darkness has descended, the rain is relentless, and there are two teams somewhere on a mountain that are facing a 50m-abseil through an icy waterfall. A few hurried phone calls later and the teams are located, disaster is averted for another few minutes.

The weekend had two main races, a short intense Ballyhoura Blitz that saw a field of 55 athletes do a 10km mountain run followed by a 20km mountain bike ride which gave first-timers a taste of adventure racing.

However, the main focus of the weekend was the race. At 7am on Saturday the teams received their maps, getting their glimpse of the gruelling course, with a marked series of control points where they had to electronically tag off, using wristbands. At 12.27pm the race started in glorious conditions and some seven to eight hours later the first team had made it to the abseiling point in teeming rain.

Thanks to Keith Bickford and Liam Cleary of the Kilfinane Outdoor Education Centre this reporter got a first-hand experience of the abseiling section, which involved negotiating a 50m drop through a waterfall. It was as thrilling as it was terrifying, and after eight hours racing it must have been utterly exhausting.

After the abseil it was a short gorge-run to the mountain bikes, and off to a clay-pigeon shoot, where the teams had to pick off fluorescent clays in a floodlight mountain-top facility after an energy-sapping cycle up fire trails in the pitch dark. After that, came more biking in dense forest on purpose-built trails which, when completed, will make up more than 90km of the most expensive mountain-biking system in northern Europe. To make things that bit more challenging, ghostly glowing monster heads lurked in the forest and were vital to the race, two of them contained mandatory control points where riders had to tag off.

Then it was a further bike ride to kayaks and a paddle to the finish line through swollen rapids and over natural debris in the water. After 24 hours of racing and more than 150km, the first four-member team to cross was Irish AR (Denny). Paul Mahon, Róisín McDonnell, Willy Rock and Eoin Keith opted to take a lengthy bonus loop track that only one other team went for, and this helped secure them the top spot.

"The course was really well thought out. There were lots of challenging parts and we even had a bit of jungle fighting in the kayaks," said a thrilled Mahon, moments after crossing the line in the majestic surroundings of Blackwater Castle, Castletownroche, Co Cork.

"We were so wet going in to [the abseil] that we didn't even really notice the water," said Gearóid Towey, whose Taurus team came second. "The beast trails were excellent, an absolute pleasure to ride. Orienteering at the beginning was probably the toughest. The weather was bad but in the full picture of what's going on you're focused and you don't have time to think about it."

Vanessa Lawrenson was upbeat about the race's progression. "The course reports are that people are really enjoying it. The motivation for me doing this event was to blow people's minds with adventure racing and have them say 'this is amazing, I want to do more'."

Lawrenson and her team have spent months organising this event, and has got a bit of a reputation among the locals. "I hear that one is pure mental," one young local farmer said.

"I think it's absolutely brilliant for the area, but at the same time I think they are all a bit mad," said Thomas Cook from Anglesboro, Co Limerick. The adventure race may have not scared the locals, but, much like Lawrenson, it has certainly left its mark on the area.