They tear off their toenails, by choice. They drink from puddles of dirty bath water, willingly. They even happily scarf down a greasy-spoon breakfast, fully fearing that intestinal problems may result.
All sorts of calamities, maladies and snafus beset adventure racing teams. It's part of the deal in this nonstop, multiday, multisport test of wills and wiles over unmarked and sometimes untrodden-upon terrain: Expect the unexpected and overcome it without being overwhelmed.
So they endure stalking by bears, trampling by horses, and attacks by flying frogs, angry wasps and creepy white bats.
So they deal with deprivations of food, water and sleep, leading to hallucinatory visions of animals and other spectrals more imagined than real. Pink flamingos in the Colorado mountains? Alligators morphing from mangrove trees in Fiji? Witches and UFOs in the woods of Oregon? Dude, they seemed so freakin' real at the time.
And so they risk injury and, yes, death, by gamely pushing on by hiking, kayaking, running and swimming through broken bones, bruised psyches, frost-bitten extremities and the occasional collapsed lung from being impaled by a branch.
All for …
For what, exactly?
Hard to say. For glory and money, of course. The winning team in Primal Quest, the yearly 12-day Super Bowl of adventure racing that begins Saturday in Big Sky, Mont., takes home $100,000 and probably earns a better sponsorship deal.
But the four-person, mixed-gender teams – including several from the Sacramento region – swear their motivation transcends the monetary.
Nor is it flirting with mortality. It's the horror stories athletes relish. They squirrel away choice anecdotes in their satchels like so many Clif bars.
"There's almost too many to remember," says Sacramentan Doug Judson, whose Team Tecnu Extreme will compete in the 12-day event featuring disciplines as varied as kayaking, trekking, orienteering, running, mountain biking, zip-lining and – boiled to its primal essence – surviving. "You always try to control the variables, but at the end of a race there are always about 30 things go wrong you never thought would happen."
At least make for great stories. And adventure racers aren't shy about regaling anyone who'll listen with unforgettable tales less hardy women and men would like to forget.
Agony of 'da feet'
Being ambulatory is key. If you can't move, you can't win. Simple as that. And when Davis resident Robert Beauchamp, a member of the Radioactive Beagles adventure team, finds blisters under his hiking boots or running shoes, he knows just what to do.
"I rip my toenails off," he says. "Most people kind of cringe when I say that."
Included in that cringing group was the doctor at a checkpoint during a race a few years ago in New Zealand. Beauchamp showed the doc his swollen, discolored big toe with a bloated blister. The medic drilled a hole in the nail to relieve pressure, but Beauchamp took things a step further.
"I pull the toenail up on one side and across the back and then just rip," he says. "It hurts and bleeds for a couple minutes. But then it stops, and I'm able to put my boot back on. … Over the next couple of days, it doesn't bother me. You think I'm totally nuts. But am I more nuts to leave the toenail on and suffer?"
Blistering is a problem, no doubt, but it beats the alternative of no shoes whatsoever. Roy Malone of Folsom learned that at the 2002 Eco Challenge in Fiji. On the fifth day while rafting on a slow-moving river, he took off his shoes to let them dry off. He ended up losing the right one.
When he told his teammates the bad news two hours later before the start of a trekking section, they freaked. But Malone decided to cobble together a "fabricated shoe." He wrapped his left foot, toes included, in duct tape, then duct-taped the insole of his surviving left shoe to the bottom, put on one sock, wrapped an Ace bandage around his foot, used more duct tape to secure it, and then covered the whole mess with a second sock.
Call The Bee's Sam McManis, (916) 321-1145.
