Competitor Blog - Team Tango
Posted on 12/13/05 12:15 PM| by Will
By Anna DeBattiste
Ask adventure racers why they do it, and you’re likely to get a number of predictable but meaningful responses. We do it to test the limits of our minds and bodies; we do it for the pride of accomplishment after great physical effort, pain and discomfort; we do it for the camaraderie and teamwork; we do it to see beautiful places and experience exotic cultures.
Blah, blah, blah. It’s all good stuff, and it does truly mean a lot to me. But I tend to focus on the more eccentric side of AR. I live for the random hallucination, the 3:00 am sleep-deprived and garbled comment that induces hilarity on the team, the surrealistic midnight encounters with strangers who have no idea what four dirty people with backpacks and ice axes would be doing carrying their bikes through impenetrable brush in the middle of the night on a mountain top. I love the time a teammate saw me lying on the ground with my feet up on a tree trunk and thought I was the Madonna with babe-in-arms, and the time I sang “Rubber Ducky” to stay awake until my teammates threatened to throw me out of the boat. I especially love the time during last year’s Primal Quest that I woke up, mid-sentence, in motion, to find myself asking my teammates if there would be any basketballs at the transition area. Now that’s good stuff. I feel bad for people whose entertainment comes from TV.
That doesn’t mean that Team Tango doesn’t have goals this year. We’ve added two new members since the 2004 PQ event, and I’m darned excited about both of them. With an even split between serious military types and recreational Colorado types, we should have the perfect mix of skill, experience and attitude to do our best in this race. See our profile if you want to hear more about that.
But here’s what I really want to talk about today: what a challenge it was to make that video! When the first PQ update came out, asking us to submit team videos for PR purposes, we blew it off. With the two halves of our team split up across the country, one half in Miami and the other in Colorado, I figured it was too hard and not worth the effort.
Two weeks later, we changed our minds–three days before the deadline. I drove to my new teammate Russ’s house in Steamboat Springs, Colorado during a major snowstorm, taking three hours to make an hour and a half drive. The plan was to film the two of us, overnight the tape to Miami so our teammates could add their piece, and hope they could overnight the tape again in time to make the deadline on Wednesday. A risky proposition, given that Fed-ex doesn’t do overnight from the mountains of Colorado.
“I wrote a script!” Russ announced as I walked through the door.
“Really?” I asked, incredulous. I hadn’t even thought about what to say. Somehow, I thought it would just happen.
Russ’s wife Clay, a woman nearly as funny as Russ himself, walked into the kitchen and slapped a bottle of wine on the counter. Chardonnay, my favorite. “You’ll need to start drinking right now,” she advised me. “I’ll be in the living room getting the video camera set up.”
Thank god for Clay. Russ and I watched from the couch, stupefied, drinking, as she navigated the wilderness of video camera technology. We tried to practice a couple of times. When I had a few glasses of wine down the gullet, I decided I was now brilliant enough to come up with a theme.
“So!” I said. “I’ll give a serious introduction to the team and our background, and you can break in every couple seconds or so with a funny one-liner. What do you think?”
Russ nodded. “That’ll work,” he said. “But I’m not sure how funny I can be on cue.”
“Nonsense,” I sputtered. “You’re always funny.”
I had paced Russ in the Leadville 100 last year, and I knew this to be true. Seventy miles into the race, utterly spent, dry heaving and staggering and incoherent, Russ had still managed to crack me up with a running litany of jokes and one-liners. I had delivered him to his next pacer in a state of hilarity, despite the freezing temperatures and the fact that it was 3:00 am.
But alas, it was true. In front of a camera, trying to be funny on cue, Russ was about as funny as I am. Which is to say, about as funny as a turd in a punchbowl. Clay watched, worry lines furrowing her brow as we did take after take. Each one got harder, more stilted, less entertaining. Finally, we threw up our hands and delivered the tape to Clay for transfer to the Miami half of the team.
We did have one or two good moments. As I described our teammates, Luther and Blain, one an Infantry Officer with a Special Operations background and the other a Special Forces Officer, Russ broke in, “and I’m just kind of your basic ‘special’, myself.” We can’t tell you if our Miami teammates have redeemed us because we haven’t seen the rest of the tape yet.
Next year, if someone wants to lend us a couple thousand dollars, we’ll hire a media company to do a proper job.
One more thing. In case you haven’t read our team profile yet, it’s important for you to know that “Tango” is not some team name that I thought was cute. Tango is my best friend, a 15-year-old dog who has been with me her entire life. I thought it important to report this fact before our team name potentially changes due to sponsorship. If Tango had any money, she would make sure she got to keep the lead spot on the team name. Right now, however, she’s mainly focused on keeping control of her bowels and getting me to feed her dinner early.
Tune in next time to hear about the results of Team Tango’s efforts to pursue sponsorship.
