Greg’s gritty directorial debut about the realities of staging a race of this magnitude. Shot and edited on location in Moab, UT

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Article by Blaine Reeves

March 01, 2006
Article by Blaine Reeves in the March 6th edition of “Navigation Games Magazine.”
http://www.navigationgames.com/Mar06pdf.pdf

February 27, 2006
By Anna DeBattiste

Have you ever seen the Darwin Awards? You know, those tongue-in-cheek internet write-ups about the stupidest adventure feats to naturally select a human being for extinction in any given year? Well, welcome to my world. I get to see more than just internet write-ups, and on a fairly regular basis, too.

When I first volunteered for my local search and rescue team, my main motivation was all the free training I would get for my adventure racing pursuits. Over the past few years, I’ve been trained and certified in Rigging for Rescue, Outdoor Emergency Care (OEC), and avalanche safety. I’ve had weekly training and refresher sessions on wilderness survival, compass and GPS navigation, rope skills, snowmobile and ATV operation, and tracking & search. Sometimes I even get a cardio workout while on a SAR mission.

That’s still a motivation for me. But it’s been slowly supplanted by another one: the entertainment value of witnessing the staggering hubris and utter stupidity of humankind.

Take the snowboarders in Summit County this year, for example. Now, I have nothing against snowboarders, personally. I even dated one last season. But the fact is, it hasn’t been the skiers calling us out this year. It’s just been the snowboarders. They keep ducking ropes in the ski areas, which is illegal to start with, and getting hopelessly lost and/or injured as a result. Even after one of them was missing for three days and we found him a stone’s throw from the ski area boundary with an unexplained gun and badly frostbitten toes, the excessive media coverage the incident got did not seem to deter other snowboarders. A few weeks later, another one did it and was lost overnight. Again it made the papers, and again the warning was ignored.

Last Saturday at about 4:30 in the afternoon I was getting ready to go out to dinner at a high-end restaurant in Breckenridge with my friends when the pager went off. If the dispatcher had said, “Report to the staging area to evacuate a snowboarder who ducked a rope at Breckenridge ski area,” I would undoubtedly have blown off the mission and headed to dinner. That wasn’t the message I got, however. The pager said, “Report to the Nordic Center for the evacuation of an injured party.” Poor innocent Nordic skier, I thought. Must have been a bad fall.

When I arrived at the Nordic Center parking lot, Dan, our mission coordinator, gave me a quick briefing. “Pack lightly,” he said. “You’ll need to snowshoe a little ways off the cross-country ski trail to get to him, but he can’t be in there too far. The Nordic Center staff heard him screaming from here.”

“Anybody else in yet?” I asked.

“Joe Ben and Warren are already on site doing medical. I’m sending you in with the vacuum splint, they need it right away. Glen can run you part of the way on a snowmobile.”

I hopped on the back of Glen’s sled and we sped off on a wide, groomed trail following a guide from the Nordic Center staff. Ten minutes later, Glen stopped beside a set of snowshoe tracks plunging steeply off the side of the trail into a ravine.

“Take a hypo bag as well as the vacuum splint,” he told me. “They’re in a hurry, so get moving.” I’m known on my team as one of the people who responds well when ordered to get moving.

I ran down the hill, tripping over my snowshoes and toppling into the deep snow several times. When I reached the scene, Joe Ben and Warren were standing in a small clearing of packed-down snow, and at their feet, a snowboarder sat leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette. He had long dark hair and several silver studs through his eyebrows.

“I’m sure you’ve already been told, but that won’t help,” I said, referring to the cigarette. The snowboarder nodded, clearly uninterested in my opinion.

“What’s the situation?” I asked Joe Ben, our Group Leader and an EMT.

“Somehow, he got here from Peak 8 in Breck,” Joe Ben said, shaking his head. “He crossed the parking lot at the Nordic Center and kept going. Then he hit a tree.”

“I realized I had gone the wrong way, and I was trying to get back up from here,” the snowboarder defended himself. “I kept sliding back down every time I tried.”

“Anyway, he’s got rigidity in his lower left quadrant and a possible coccyx fracture, and we need to get him out of here and into an ambulance as soon as possible.”

“I told you, I’m not going to the hospital!” the snowboarder shouted. “I’ll walk out of here if I have to!”

I’d seen it many times before. He didn’t have medical insurance.

“We can’t force you to go to the hospital,” Joe Ben said. “But it would be a very bad idea not to.”

Warren knelt beside the patient and tried the gentler approach. “I don’t mean to scare you, but understand what that rigidity in your abdomen means. Your body is trying to protect something that’s damaged inside of you. It could be internal bleeding, it could be a ruptured organ. We just don’t know for sure, and frankly, you could die.”

“Risking your life isn’t worth avoiding a few medical bills,” I added, trying to sound concerned. In reality, I didn’t give a rat’s you-know-what whether the patient refused ambulance transport or not. I missed my damn dinner for another rope-ducking snowboarder. As if he sensed my indifference, the renegade rope-ducker didn’t answer. He glared up at us and continued smoking.

Joe Ben sent me back up the hill to help Glen with the rigging. While the distance from the accident to the Nordic trail couldn’t have been more than half a mile, it was steep, and we needed an up-haul system to get our patient’s litter to a waiting snowmobile toboggan. We tried hauling him on a straight rope-and-pulley system using sheer manpower, but it was too difficult, so we built a five-to-one mechanical advantage system. That worked, but took a long time. We still had only six or seven search and rescue members on scene, so we enlisted everyone else we could find: three Nordic Center employees and the two helpful women on snowshoes who had originally discovered and reported the injured snowboarder. Chatting with them, I found out they were adventure racers from Ohio. Whenever you need help, seek out an adventure racer and you shall get help! We worked past sunset and into darkness. Finally, the litter reached the top of the ravine.

I strolled over from the up-haul system station to get a look at our patient. He wasn’t shouting defiantly anymore. Wrapped in the hypo bag and vacuum splint, only his ashen face was visible. His eyes were closed. I glanced at Joe Ben.

“He’s willing to go to the hospital now,” Joe Ben said.

It was 8:00 pm when the patient was finally loaded in the ambulance and we were free to go home. No chance of making my dinner anymore. Driving home, I thought about the snowboarder and how he would stack up against my other personally-selected candidates for the Darwin award over the past three years. Certainly he wasn’t at the top of the list. There were the two young guys who got high and climbed up the Sky Chutes near Copper Mountain one early spring evening, finally getting themselves cliffed-out and spending two nights on a ledge in freezing temperatures. It took nine hours and two six-hundred-foot ropes for us to reach them, and when we did, they demanded to know what took us so long. One of them was wearing a cape, as if he had climbed up there to fly off the cliff, Batman-style.

Then there was the drunk guy on Mount Royal, who called to say that he had hurt his knee and had ants crawling all over him. One already-broken arm was in a cast, and he had drugs in his system as well as an unbelievable amount of alcohol. It took us a while to find him because as we came up the trail, he spotted Joel, our Sheriff’s Office deputy, and crawled off the trail to hide. Later we found out he had outstanding warrants for his arrest.

Then there have been all the bodies we’ve dug out of avalanches, some of them snowmobilers with a penchant for “high-marking”, a stupid sport that involves driving your machine as high up a wall of snow as you can get before it runs out of power and forces you back down.

The list goes on. When I tell so-called “normal” people about my passion for adventure racing, they like to comment that they think I’m crazy. I tell them, trust me, you ain’t seen nothing.

February 16, 2006

How does a Navy SEAL unwind from what many would agree is one of the most physically and mentally demanding jobs in the world? 17-year Navy veteran and SEAL Chris Sajnog stays in top shape as a professional adventure racer. Chris is pumped up to be competing in PQ for a second time, as captain of Team Gerber Gear. Chris talked about his military career and adventure-racing lifestyle and Primal Quest during a recent interview for the Navy’s website, Navy.com. The video webcast is expected to reach an audience of more than 100,000! Check out Chris’ interview for yourself.

http://www.navy.com/about/videowebcasts/

February 16, 2006

By Anna DeBattiste

“What do you mean by ‘weak’?” my doctor asked me. “You mean you feel fatigued?”

I shook my head. “No, I mean I can’t keep up with anyone. I can’t run as fast as I used to, or bike as fast, or lift as much weight. And it seems pretty sudden.”

Dr. Oberheide looked at me for a moment as if considering whether I might be having a spell of hypochondria. I know the look.

“I guess it would be a good idea to do a full blood screen,” he said finally. “I’ll send a nurse in to take a sample. If you haven’t heard back on results by this Saturday, give me a buzz.”

On Saturday, I called from a chairlift in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“Everything looks fine,” he said. I felt vaguely disappointed. “Sometimes there’s no telling what causes these sudden drops in performance. You did turn 40 this year, didn’t you?”

I tried to tell myself I was being ridiculous. Did I actually hope to hear that I had cancer, or that after years of Advil and Chardonnay, my liver was finally failing me? Or was it just that I hoped to hear that I had something treatable, as opposed to a bad case of aging?

I decided to call my teammates and see what they thought about this business of getting old. Luther had turned 40 earlier this year too. Blain was 41, and Russ was 46. Maybe they had some insight for me. I called Luther first.

“Do you ever think about how long you’re going to feel like racing?” I asked him.

Luther always looks on the bright side. “I sure don’t see any reason to quit in the near future,” he said. “I tend to train more efficiently and race smarter as I get older. You know, when I retire from the military in 18 months, I plan to do this full-time, for as long as I still have fun at it.”

Just what I needed, an optimist. I wasn’t going to get any sympathy here. “But you don’t feel any physical effects as you get older?” I persisted.

“Travel gets me more than aging does. Not having access to a gym, eating out all the time, gaining weight; that’s what really disrupts my training.”

I nodded. I could relate to that. Having taken on some consulting work in mid-2005, I was now on the road most weeks. That’s it, I thought. I’m not getting older, I’m just traveling too much. I felt a brief sense of relief at the idea that there was an easy answer. But then I realized the problem: it’s only because of my travel job that I can afford to race this year. There must be other answers out there. I called Blain.

“When do I say enough?” he mused. “Good question. I see a lot of elite racers our age retiring now, the Murrays, John Howard, Robert Nagle. I tend to think about my own retirement during a long race, but those thoughts go away at about the same rate the blisters do. I guess I won’t quit until racing no longer feels like a compulsion to me, or when race directors stop managing to design courses that I think are awe-inspiring journeys. I think the main thing for me is that when I quit, it needs to be on my own terms.”

Quit? Who’s talking about quitting? I felt panicky for a moment. Is that how my questions sounded to my teammates–like I was looking for reasons to leave the sport, to stay on the couch and eat bon-bons? Good lord. I figured I’d better call Russ for a good dose of humor. As the oldest member of our team, he would surely put things into perspective for me.

“Being a Master is much harder because of all the gear you have to pack,” Russ told me. “You know, like Poli-grip, Metamucil, a walker, Depends undergarments…”

“Seriously!” I protested.

“OK, seriously, I was way more competitive at 23 than I am at 46. Probably about twice as much. I have nothing to prove anymore except to myself, and that’s probably the biggest difference. I need to finish a race, but I don’t care when other teams pass me. In fact, it gives me someone to talk to.” He chuckled.

“But how do you deal with feeling weaker?” I asked. “How do you keep your enthusiasm for the sport when you start to feel like it’s all downhill from here?”

“Feeling like your body has ‘left the building’ doesn’t make it all downhill, really. It just means you have to focus more on the mental challenges of the sport, and the emotional rewards you get from it.”

I thought about that for a moment. Is that what Luther meant when he talked about training and racing smarter as he got older? Is that what Blain meant by keeping things on his own terms? Maybe they had something there.

I’d like to tell you that my conversations left me feeling better about my age. Probably about the best I can say is that I understand the importance of shifting one’s focus to stay motivated by the things you can control, rather than obsessing about the things you can’t change. What’s that old saying? Something about having the strength to change what you can and the grace to accept what you can’t. If my dog Tango could talk, she would probably tell me that it means you should keep on jumping for your treats, even when it makes you fall down.

February 16, 2006
By Mike Bitton

Outside Pacific Northwest adventure racing circles, team DART probably sounds like a gang of grease monkeys that can’t get over its Mopar fetish. In Washington and Oregon, though, DART is synonymous with dominance in multi-sport endurance races. In 2005, it won the Pacific Northwest Adventure Racing Championship for the third year in a row, and captured first place in the Explore California adventure racing series. This year

DART even made a worldwide impression in October 2005 when it placed 5th out of 35 teams at EcoMotion in Brazil. Much of the international field was stunned. This continuing success has led to a not-surprising amount of interest from sponsors, and the team recently picked up nuun, a growing electrolyte supplement company, as a big sponsor. As the company points out, nuun is optimal hydration made easy. nuun takes a back-to-basics approach to hydration: simple, sugar free, soluble tabs stored within a portable tube. Each compact tube contains 12 tabs; supplying 1.5 gallons of electrolyte hydration. That’s enough to keep you out there racing for days with a minimum of fuss. Just drop a tab in your water bottle, or race bladder… by the time you’ve tied your laces or put on your pack, you’ve got a complex electrolyte drink that recharges your mind and body. nuun’s flavors are light and refreshing. The low acidity reduces stomach irritation and the hypotonic solution is more efficiently absorbed than water alone or most sports drinks on the market.

So who is this team DART?DART is a team of nine athletes who rotate in and out of the lineup depending on race venues and racer availability. For the 2006 Primal Quest, DART will be team captain Cyril Jay-Rayon, Ryan VanGorder, Matt Hart and Jen Segger.

The men live in Seattle, and Segger hails from British Columbia, Canada. Jay-Rayon generally handles navigation, while VanGorder, Hart and Segger act as engines capable of pounding away mile after mile. Hart qualified for mountain biking’s ultimate 2005 suffer-fest: the 24 Hours of Adrenalin World Solo Championships in Whistler, B.C. Segger ran the 2005 Marathon des Sables in North Africa’s Sahara Desert, where she covered 150 miles in just seven days.

The 2005 adventure racing season featured many DART victories. In addition to the Explore California series, the team won the three-race TRIOBA adventure race series in Washington, and the four-race Wicked Adventure Racing series in Oregon. It also took first place at Raid the North in Nelson, B.C., Canada.

Countless things have to fall into place for any team to win consistently. Not every race went as DART planned in 2005. Consider the team’s disqualification in April at the AdventureXstream Moab in Utah. After having thought it had beaten legendary team Nike/Balance Bar to take first place, DART was disqualified for taking an out-of-bounds route.

And how about the team’s disappointing performance in June 2005 at the X-Adventure Raid’s North American stop in Bend, Ore.? With the course set in the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest, DART should have had something of a home-team advantage. Instead, it placed 21st out of 52 teams.

The bitterest loss of all in 2005 may have been DART’s second-place finish at the final TRIOBA race of the season in Washington state. Just two minutes behind team Mergeo.com, DART literally watched the winners cross the finish line before them. DART still had the points to carry the series, but there’s a new monkey on the team’s back, and that monkey will likely haunt DART throughout 2006.

There is no question DART is physically strong. But can the team also be savvy enough to make a good showing against the world-class competition at Primal Quest 2006?

DART’s 2004 Primal Quest finish (racing as dirtworld.com) was an impressive 11th out of 60 teams. Not bad, considering it was the first expedition-length race for most of the team’s members. But Jay-Rayon is the only remaining member of the team from that race, making the others newcomers to the expedition-length format of PQ.

Hart said DART’s 11th place finish at Primal Quest 2004 proved that a Pacific Northwest team can make a good showing in an international field. Eleventh place this time around, though, would be a disappointment, Hart said. “We’ve been improving so much, I think we’re capable of a strong performance at PQ06.”

VanGorder also exudes confidence about DART’s odds of a strong finish at PQ06. He predicts a top-10 showing. “We are moving beyond figuring things out,” VanGorder said. “Not to say we are not constantly learning, but I think with a healthy team we will have the ability to perform well.”

Segger said she looks forward to the challenges of PQ06, because the race will teach DART how to be a more efficient and competitive team. “You have to race against the top teams in the world if you’re going to get better,” Segger said. “It’s the only way to improve. I think we’ve been making a great name for ourselves in the sport, and I look forward to proving ourselves at Primal Quest.”

January 31, 2006
By Anna DeBattiste

Tango, my elderly, mixed-breed dog, has been our team mascot for almost four years now. It isn’t because she trains with us, or because she’s a trail dog, or because there’s anything about her that would reasonably remind you of adventure racing. It started out simply because I was sitting at my computer one day, racking my brains for a team name to enter in the Lake Tahoe Primal Quest lottery, and time was running out. Tango was sitting patiently at my feet waiting for her walk, and it popped into my head that Team Tango had a certain ring to it. Not that any of my teammates have ever agreed with me on that point. They’re usually afraid that everyone will take us for Latin ballroom dancers.

Now that I think about it, Tango got her name in a similar haphazard fashion. It was May of 1990, the day of my 25^th birthday. My boyfriend at the time, Richard, had gone to the store to get last-minute supplies for my birthday party. I was sitting on the lawn at my family’s New Hampshire lake house, drinking a beer and shooting the breeze with neighbors when he returned and dumped a puppy in my lap.

“Happy birthday,” he said with a grin. “I tried to find a pay phone to call you, but the old farmer who was giving away puppies at K-mart said he wouldn’t hold her for me, so I took a chance.”

I was furious. We already had one dog, and had discussed getting a second one several months ago. We’d decided it wasn’t a good idea, with both of us just out of college and unsure where we might be living a year from now. I couldn’t yell at Richard in front of all these neighbors, but I vowed I would corner him later.

“She’s adorable!” said one of my neighbors, lifting the wriggling puppy out of my lap. I was seething, but I had to agree. She had German Shepard coloring, and a little pug nose. Every time someone took her out of my lap, she struggled to get back to me. It seemed she had already decided something.

My best friend Kevin, a pilot, set about the task of naming her. He went through the phonetic alphabet from the beginning: “Alpha, Bravo, Charlie…” When he got to the letter ‘T’, I stopped him.

“That’s it!” I said without hesitation. “She’s Tango.”

Richard never got yelled at. By the time I got him alone, I had already fallen completely and irrevocably in love with my new dog, and she with me.

Tango will be sixteen in April of this year. She has arthritis, and she’s deaf, and she can’t really climb stairs anymore without my help. Last week, our vet told me that Tango’s heart rate was abnormally low, and she went in for an EKG. Now we’re waiting to see a cardiologist to find out how bad the news is. But Tango has moments of gladness when I know she still wants to be here with me. She’ll spin in a circle when I carry her in from the snow and she feels the warm air hitting her face, and catches the smell of her home-cooked chicken and rice breakfast. She still jumps for a treat, even though it usually makes her fall down. People may scorn me for clinging to her little life, but if she can have a pacemaker without too much risk from the anesthesia, I’ll do it.

We humans like to say, “Life is short”, repeating the cliché as an excuse for anything from “Eat dessert first” to “Let’s defy our spouses and spend ten grand and ten days racing through the wilderness”. But is anything really as heartbreakingly short as a dog’s life?

January 17, 2006
By Anna DeBattiste

One of the challenges of the 2006 Primal Quest is its early start date. For a September race, I’ll usually plan four months of 24 – 72 hour races leading up to PQ and presto, instant training. With the race in June, however, it’s hard to get in a lot of races beforehand. I live in the mountains of Colorado, where trails are snow-covered until late June or early July. There’s plenty of snowshoeing or cross-country skiing to be done, but that doesn’t exactly get you ready for long-haul biking or paddling. Besides, heaven forbid that I should have to get out there all by myself and have actual training days. It never works. With no teammates beside me for distraction, I’ve always got some kind of excuse for cutting the day short. I have errands to run. I’m too cold. My dog is lonely at home by herself. There’s a glass of wine with my name on it somewhere, calling me.

Pondering my dilemma this fall, I got the idea to go south in the spring for a tune-up race. I called a few local teammates and pitched the idea of a four-day Costa Rican race in April called Between Two Continents, Between Two Oceans. They liked the idea, and we registered a team.

That left me with an even bigger dilemma—how was I going to get ready for a four-day race in April? Now we’re talking about trying to bike and paddle in January and February. The good news about living where I do, however, is that the Front Range (the Denver/Boulder area) is only an hour and a half away, and while it may be snowy and cold during the winter down there, it may also be 60 degrees and dry on some days. We had such a lucky day last weekend, so off I went with my Costa Rica teammates for a day of biking and hiking.

The truth can be painful, especially when it has to do with facing up to one’s physical conditioning. If you’d run into us that day, you’d have noticed three men, peddling casually in a pack with enough spare breath to chat about football games and the weather, and trailing far behind, a lone, pathetic-looking woman gasping like a hooked fish and occasionally managing to squeak, “Wait up, you guys!”

In desperation the next morning, I went to my boss at the Copper Mountain Ski & Ride School and demanded the next three days off, which were graciously given. I packed up my bike and my dog and headed out for the four-hour drive to Moab, my usual training grounds for getting out of the snow in the spring and fall. I’d never been there in the winter before, but the weather report said it would be sunny with temperatures in the high 40’s or low 50’s.

The weather report lied. On my first day in Moab, road-riding through Arches National Park, my friend Julie and I threw our bikes on the ground every half-hour and ran in circles, shaking frozen fingers and lurching unsteadily on frozen toes. We talked about the possibility of a car offering us a ride if we were seen walking our bikes down each hill. Julie tossed out occasional sarcastic comments about what a great idea it had been for me to invite her along. Misery loves company, so I answered, “You’re welcome”. On day two I was alone again, and decided that I couldn’t possibly be expected to suffer the same temperatures on my bike. I went hiking instead, and found a dozen good reasons to quit early and retire to the bar for a glass of wine.

Day three warmed up a bit, and I found a pleasant, sun-lit canyon to ride in. On top of Hurrah Pass that afternoon, I sat on a rock with an inspiring view of Dead Horse Canyon Park spread out before me, and had a stern chat with myself. No one had done this to me but myself, I pointed out. No one stood over me with a stick and said, “You have to plan an impossibly early season this year whether you like it or not”. I had chosen this. It was supposed to be fun, for god’s sake! Then I made some resolutions. There would be no more drinking in the bar with my ski clients every day. Days off were for riding and running in the Front Range, not for terrorizing the mountain with my ski instructor buddies. Winter was effectively canceled this year. I would pretend it didn’t exist. And one way or another, I’d be ready to race in June.