As your excitement builds for the start of Primal Quest Badlands 2009 presented by SPOT, tune in to Inside Primal Quest at www.ecoprimalquest.tv for your daily dose of motivation.  A new video is posted every day with an exclusive look ahead to PQ Badlands, or a look back at the highlights of past Primal Quest Expedition Adventure Races.  This week’s schedule includes:

Friday, June 12th – Now Showing…Primal Quest Badlands Presented by SPOT
Saturday, June 13th – Traffic Jam – Primal Quest Utah 2006
Sunday, June 14th – Don Mann introduces Primal Quest Badlands
Monday, June 15th – Introducing Primal Quest Montana 2008
Tuesday, June 16th – Adventure Racer – The Human Powered ATV
Wednesday, June 17th – Pre-race Jitters – Primal Quest Telluride 2002
Thursday, June 18th – The Gun Goes Off – Primal Quest Lake Tahoe 2003

Beginning on August 10th, Inside Primal Quest will be at the race in South Dakota to bring you video updates every 12 hours so you can watch Primal Quest Badlands as the race unfolds.

If you are into social networking, you can get the latest Inside Primal Quest updates at Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Zherpa.  And you can sign up for the weekly prize drawing at www.ecoprimalquest.tv.  This week’s prize is the Primal Quest Montana Presented by SPOT 2008 DVD.  The producers of Inside Primal Quest are also taking video submissions.  If you want to see yourself, your team, your gear or your sponsor featured on Inside Primal Quest, contact John Stann at john@racedayfilms.net.

The last few weeks have brought some fun early summer racing to Team Salomon/Crested Butte, and we have a bit more in store before the big one of the summer…PQ, of course!

Mountain biking legend (he’s beaten Lance and Floyd at the Leadville Trail 100) and Gunnison, CO local Dave Weins puts on a great mountain bike race each year called The Original Growler.  The Full Growler is composed of two laps of 99% singletrack totaling 64 miles; the Half is 32 miles.  The rough-and-tumble course winds in and out of endless sage, steep little climbs, and hairy descents.  In fact, one descent about five minutes into the race was so hairy that I crashed hard and bent my front wheel.  After deciding that the wheel worked just well enough to continue, I moved on until a broken chain about a mile from the end of the first lap forced a bit of running with the bike.  Thank goodness for Dan, a mechanic with Mavic, who fixed the chain and lent a wheel, allowing me to complete a second lap!  Dan also saved me at 24 Hours of Moab two years ago—what a guy.

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How do adventure racing legends Don Mann and Chris Caul find new ways to challenge themselves after years of training and experience? Well obviously if you can’t make the courses any bigger, you have to take other measures, as evidenced by the photos below. In this case, the plan was to make the bike smaller. No word as to which one of them got to “go first”.

The Reason Why We Do

Since I normally travel so much for my work, I am not used to the transparency that comes with working in an office.  The various injuries I have suffered (shoulder and ankle) are telegraphed as a source of conversation for my colleagues.  My answer is normally pretty general, but for some reason when my friend Franz saw me hobbling around the office one day after an unusually brutal hill sprint routine, it got me to thinking.

His comment was very simple; “Todd, why do you keep putting your body through this?”   My response to him came in the form of one of those Wayne’s World flashbacks to when I was a paramedic on the mean streets in Michigan.

I recall getting a “man in distress” call one night to a residential address.  The police were already on scene as were the fire department.  They looked utterly bemused at the sight before them of a young man in his mid 30′s who was continuously banging his head against the back door to his family’s home.  As I approached him, I could see he had been at it a while by the look of the very large contusion on his head and the slight trickle of blood down the side of his face.

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PIERRE, S.D. – Only 67 more days left until the World’s Most Challenging Human Endurance Competition, also known as Primal Quest, begins in South Dakota. South Dakota’s home team will be competing against 37 other teams from around the world when the race starts August 14.

Team South Dakota is a group of friends who are endurance athletes, mountain bikers, runners, climbers, kayakers and cavers. “This group has one goal in 2009 and it is to get all four of us to the Primal Quest Badlands finish line,” said Paulette Kirby, team leader. “No home team has ever finished a Primal Quest race and we certainly hope to do just that.”

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Ten Squishy Toes, etc.

As usual, my training comes in many strange and unusual forms.

Although I have insisted that my birthday isn’t until I reach the finish at PQ this year, I had decided that I needed to do something fun and interesting (and very Dutch) for my actual birthday weekend (May 23- 24).  I decided to go wadlopen. (www.wadlopen.net)

Literally translated, wadlopen means mud walking (wad = mud, lopen = walking).  This is an activity that is special and unusual to the Dutch culture.  Because so much of the land mass of the Netherlands has been reclaimed from the ocean, wadlopen is what happens when the tide of the North Sea retreats to such an extent that you can literally walk on water; or at least what used to be water.

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