If you’ve been following Primal Quest Badlands presented by SPOT, you know that the racers push themselves to the extremes of their mental, physical, and emotional capacities to complete a 600+ mile race. They frequently go with little or no sleep, ultimately ending in some cases in very vivid hallucinations, delirium, or a total lack of knowledge of what is going around. In the adventure racing world, these hallucinations are called “Sleepmonsters.” In fact, there is an adventure racing blog by the same name.
This year in Primal Quest Badlands, racers have experienced these hallucinations and laughed heartily about them later (after a little rest). Last night, when Bones team member Walt Brumniach crossed the finish line, he described his experience on the Warren Windows Lake Orienteering, which the team did at night, in vivid detail. Completely delirious from exhaustion, he did not even recognize his teammates. When his kayak companion Jason Quinn would get out of the boat on shore to run and get an orienteering check point, he would return to Walt’s questioning: “Who are you?” “Where’s your dad?” “Why don’t you get your dad to do this?” “Who are those people following us?” (those people were his other teammates). When Jason explained that they were in a race, Walt found this unfathomable. “We’re not in a race!” he would say, “There’s no one around! Are you mad?” Eventually Jason told Walt to paddle a bit and relax, and Walt said “I’m just not into this.”
Later, he described his behavior on a trek, as he kept bending over as if he were picking things up. His teammates asked what he was doing, to which he responded “I’m picking the donuts out, just before they’re done. They’re best that way.” When Suze from SCAAR was told about Walt’s adventures, she related to the experience. “I always try to pick up money!” she said. When she’s in the throes of the sleepmonsters, she sees quarters everywhere and is thrilled to pick them up and stash them away.
Charlie from TecnuExtreme/StaphAseptic recounted his encounter with the sleepmonsters at the Lake TA. He had a vision of four racers standing in a circle, when all of a sudden they were illuminated. They then each started spinning individually, then as a group; at which point they began moving away from him. That was when he knew he had to sleep. Although most serious adventure racers have experienced sleepmonster hallucinations, Charlie mentioned that this was the first time for him.
All of this puts in context the current reports on Team nuun, who was 4 hours from completing the race roughly 24 hours ago. By viewing their tracks on the SPOT Team Map, you can see that they lost their way, then doubled back multiple times. Team iMoat reports passing them on the trail. One of the iMoat racers had been telling the team they needed to go back for a birthday party, and they knew he was hallucinating. Then they passed nuun, who was heading in the wrong direction. “We’re going to a birthday party!” they shouted. “See!” said the iMoat racer, “I told you there was a birthday party!” iMoat could see that nuun was having a shared hallucination, the rarest form of the sleepmonster.
The moral of the story is: Don’t do drugs; Adventure Racing is legal and just as potent.
Without our valued partners, Primal Quest wouldn’t be the event that it is. Each day, over the course of the race, we would like to take the opportunity to thank those partners that have contributed to the success of PQ and have helped us to put on the best adventure race in the world.
