In which Gary Robbins gets through the holidays without beer and learns the perils of shaving cream

January 10, 2006

By Gary Robbins

So I just spent the better part of half a day taking my house apart, or rather putting it back together. My girlfriend and I live in a town home complex and somehow managed to get into a home decorating competition over the holidays. I would like to tell you that I was an innocent by-stander who was pulled into this contest, but I feel you would all know otherwise. My girlfriend, Donna, and I only bought here seven months ago. What better way to show our neighbours love over the holidays than by challenging all of them to a Christmas light showdown. Donna and I were on a limited budget, due to a certain race that I am taking part in, and we acquired most of our decorations at the dollar store. For just one hundred dollars we were set.

The contest became a two horse show, between my direct neighbour and us. We eventually called a truce and declared it a tie. This was only after I nearly killed myself on the roof while installing a ten-foot-high homemade tree of lights, and decorated and placed a second (real) tree on our lower roof, complete with presents and a Santa Claus, and hung lights and candy canes from every possible corner. Our neighbour countered with a homemade bent over Santa mooning us, a light projector on the side of his house and light strands outlining his truck in the driveway. I was told that this complex has never seen so many units decorated before, so it was nice to help spread some Christmas cheer. My neighbour and I were still trying to up each other until late Christmas eve, before we finally agreed to share a drink and start plotting for next year.

I am deathly afraid of heights, and my girlfriend could feel the ladder trembling as I was installing all of our holiday lights. While on the roof I nearly broke down in tears and had to concentrate on deep breaths for most of the experience. Today, while removing these decorations, I paid off my teammate Mark Fearman, with beer, to get up on my roof and take the stuff down for me…I had already proved to my woman that I was man enough (i.e. dumb enough) to get it up there in the first place.

My fear of heights has not stopped my from bungee jumping, sky diving and the occasional cliff jump, but those simply involve closing your eyes and taking a leap of faith. I can not climb a rope more than 15 feet without starting to freak out. When it comes to our fixed ropes section of PQ, I will spend most of it staring at the rock and concentrating on my breathing. I’ll have to look at pictures of the views at a later time, in fact I would not be the least bit disappointed if we ended up doing this section in the middle of the night…with no headlamp, or light from the moon. Just a repetitive motion in a big dark room not five feet off the floor…that’s what I’ll be telling myself.

I hope Santa was good to all of you, because he was rather questionable to me over the holidays. Officially I received a vacuum cleaner and a sewing machine…or as I have come to appreciate it as…relationship happiness! I guess I have PQ to thank for this one, for when I tried to make a compelling argument for other ‘necessary’ household items, such as a home entertainment system, a new bike trainer (I found my present trainer at a garage sale for ten dollars), or some new music, Donna had but to reply with,

“You are spending two and a half grand on a RACE! We are getting a vacuum”.

“Yes sweetie, what color would you prefer”?

Her mother wrapped up two big boxes, one for each of us, and placed them under our tree. On the big morning, I looked at Donna and insisted she go first.

“A sewing machine! Mom you shouldn’t have”.

I could tell by the similarity of box sizes that I would be going boxing day shopping this year.

“A sewing machine storage container! Mrs. Turner, you really, really shouldn’t have”.

I managed to salvage the holidays, by arising at 5am on December 26th and driving for just over an hour, to line up for two hours, to fight little old ladies with high flying elbows to save twenty dollars on a few items, while putting thirty dollars of fuel into my vehicle to get home.

I was quite happy to go home with a new television, to help with my bike training during hockey games, and some new tools, to over-compensate for what I had actually received under the tree this year.

This was the first time in my entire life that I actually trained on Christmas eve, Christmas day, New Year’s eve, and even new year’s day…I’ll be completely honest here, this is the first time in my life that I wasn’t drunk for the entire holidays…and I learned that making it through without alcohol is a lot tougher than I would have thought. Much respect to anyone else who managed to accomplish this feat. On a positive note, this is also the first time in my life that I escaped the holiday season with a single digit weight gain.

On New Year’s day I was a participant in a 50k run followed by a polar bear dip into the Pacific Ocean. I was born and raised in Newfoundland, which is as far east as you can go in North America, and until you have actually been there for yourself you will never understand why so many people consider it to be heaven on earth, even though it gets some of the worst weather in all of the America’s.

What I am getting at, is that I find it hard to justify calling a dip in the ocean on a day when the temperature hits 10 degrees Celsius, A POLAR BEAR DIP! I’m sure there are polar bears somewhere in Northern Canada that are already organizing a petition against this. Sorry but I have no idea what 10 Celsius is in American? I think the conversion rate from Celsius to Fahrenheit is fixated to the daily exchange rate of the American dollar verses the Canadian dollar, so check with your financial institution for exact numbers.

The run itself was beautiful, taking in the better parts of Vancouver’s Stanley Park and seawall trails. Vancouver would definitely be the only place in Canada where you would get 101 people out for a run and dip on the first day of the New Year. I was content to take 90 minutes off my time from the previous year, which basically equates to ten minutes for each beer I that I abstained from versus 2005. I was the sixth overall finisher, but I think there were only three sober people in attendance.

Team MindOverMountain.com has now officially met each other. After replacing our original navigator with a guy by the name of John Barron, we all got together over wings and beer…I know this seems to be the only theme I am consistent with, but it is still kinda the holidays, so it’s alright!

I was the only member who had met John before this past weekend, and overall our team had a very solid first experience together…we’ll see how it all goes when no one has slept for three days, and we’re lost somewhere in the western USA. Anyone can get along when they are at their best, it is when people are at their worst that you truly get to know them.

John will be a very busy man in the coming months as he is not only training for PQ, but also studying to take the medical school entry exam! After a brief career as a teacher he will be pursuing a new field in the coming years. At least we know that our first aid certification will be covered!

John lives the furthest away, being located on Vancouver Island. The distance is not the issue, but travel costs add up in a hurry. Unfortunately that will mean that our newest team member will also be the person we see the least in the months leading up to the race. Although we are not sure as of yet, I believe that John may be the strongest biker on the team, as he will also be competing in La Ruta De Los Conquistadors, in Costa Rica later this year. John will be the oldest team member at the ripe old age of 39, although I would still I.D. him if he tried to buy cigarettes off of me. He has more total race experience than each individual, however he has not yet competed in an expedition adventure race, which helps to bring our team’s total expedition race experience to a whopping ZERO.

The average age of our team is just 31 years, helped along significantly by our youngest member Mark Fearman, at just 25 years old. Although Mark is a solid athlete, his greatest asset is his endearing personality. No one that has ever met Mark will ever forget him, and very few people have ever seen him anywhere near being upset.

Mark and I went for a ski touring training session today, and while I was cursing the foul weather and cold temperatures, Mark kept it in perspective,

“C’mon man, this is fun! This is adventure! What did ya expect, we’re ski touring dude”!

I have known Mark for five years now, and have only heard one story of him being seen without a smile on his face. A few years back while he was sharing a house with his university buddies, he was resting for an early exam. His house mates had gone out to party for the evening and when they returned, they unanimously agreed to sneak into Mark’s room and cover him in shaving cream.

As the cream began to seep into Mark’s ears, he leapt from his bed and chased the main culprit out of his room. As his friend fled for his life, he was forced to lock himself in the bathroom.

You have to understand that I really mean it when I say that Mark ALWAYS has a smile on his face. I’ve actually seen him fall asleep with a smile on his face. When Mark responded to this situation with such aggression, all involved were frozen in fear. Mark ended up kicking the bathroom door in to make sure that he got his point across…he does not like to be ripped from his sleep by shaving cream in his ears, when he has an exam the next morning…so as long as we leave the shaving cream at home, and don’t throw a surprise exam at him, I think we should be fine during Primal Quest.

I already know that I will be the first person on our team to have to bite my tongue due to sleep deprivation. Mark will point out my aggravation and laugh at me, Aimee Dunn (Betty Crocker) will undoubtedly do the same, and we have yet to see what John will be like at his worst?

I have surrounded myself with Aimee and Mark because quite simply, I know they will force me to be a better person when my emotions try to get the best of me out there. Something I have been working on for a few years now, is to do a better job of keeping my emotions in check, and to not let lack of sleep erode my patience so easily. When things go wrong, and undoubtedly they will, I can not seem to let go of the issue until I have yelled a bit, usually with a cuss word thrown in for good measure. Once I do this I have officially vented and it is over and done with. Mark already knows this, John and Aimee, I will now know if you are actually reading my blogs, ‘cause this is your only warning!

Anyone competing in the 2004, Sea 2 Summit (www.sea2summit.com), Squamish to Whistler, two day stage adventure race will undoubtedly vouch for this. Mark and I were competing as a team of two, in our first ever adventure race of more than a sprint distance. We were holding our own, late on the second day. With just 10km to go on the final bike stage, my chain skipped, ripped off my derailleur hanger, and threw the whole set up into my rear spokes! I could not even make a single speed bike with what was left. As each team and individual passed my then prone bicycle, I became more incensed. I had to unleash and did not hold back. It was my first experience with a serious gear related problem during a race, and something that at that moment in time, I could not accept. I believe I heard avalanches on far away glaciers as I shared my disgust with the world.

I sucked it up and we battled through. I would run my bike up the hills, coast down them and grab onto Mark’s pack for a tow on the flats. This was going great, until we crossed handlebars as we were entering the transitional area. We were on the main road, and after about a twenty foot superman slide down the pavement, the traffic stopped in both directions to make sure we were still alive. I don’t think a word was said at that point, not even to the kind people that had stopped to check on us. We simply peeled ourselves off of the road and ran the final kilometre to the transitional area and onto the races final section, a 20km trail run.

Mark and I hammered away and fought back from 20th to 9th, but we ran out of race course. It was not until I decided to try and stretch following the race that I noticed a strange pain in my calf. When I lifted my spandex pants it exposed a gash from our collision on the pavement. I ended up with my first ever stitches, a dozen of them in my leg. Cool, It was all worth it, I had my first official race scar!

The one thing adventure racing really teaches a person is that when things go wrong, it will always make for a good story, and the worse the situation gets, the better the stories in the end! I’ll just have to remind myself of that when we are 500km into PQ and I somehow manage to forget to repack my food, or we run out of toilet paper and are forced to use the ‘organic’ version, or someone forgets the maps…ahhh, too many variables…I guess that’s why we all love it so much.

HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Gary Robbins
Team MindOverMountain.com

January 02, 2006
by Anna DiBattiste

Ever wonder how a team with new members manages to get ready for a race like Primal Quest when the team members don’t all live in the same state?

It’s not easy knowing that your teammates have nightmares about turning on their computers every morning. But e-mail is a wonderful thing, all the same. The e-mails don’t fly out of control all year, but just at certain critical times: when the updates come out, when the gear list is published, when the certifications are due, when the website is being built, when we’re planning training weekends. And of course, they fly frantically for about a month right before the race. Once, during that period, a teammate from last year who shall remain nameless sent me a note that said, “If you send me one more freakin’ e-mail today, EVEN JUST ONE, I will check myself into the local psychiatric clinic and you will have to find a new teammate for the race…”

I’ve certainly met people who are anal enough to make me look easy-going. Engineers, accountants and their ilk. I guess I just haven’t met any of them in the AR world lately, because I seem to be the most detail-oriented person around these days. I make gear checklists, action step checklists, budgets, tracking sheets. My teammates often have to remind me that they have real jobs and can’t sit around reading my checklists all day. I just seem to have this uncontrollable fear that we’ll forget something important if it isn’t on a checklist posted on my bulletin board.

This year, I discovered that my new teammate Russ has conference call capabilities. Not those jerry-rigged kinds of conference calls where one person tries to string a bunch of lines together and inevitably loses one or two callers, but a real conference call line with a toll-free number and a code. Of course, I still had my checklists in front of me, but we could actually speak to each other about them. We even had Eddie, our first official alternate, join us on the call.

Luther is in his element on a conference call, because it means he gets to be the gear head he truly is at heart. He says things like, “I recommend that everyone buy a new bike light that has compatible batteries with an adapter to go from NiMH and NiCad, and weighs .06 ounces less than my carburetor exchange tube with the duoflage discriminator.” Or something like that. At least on a conference call I can say, “What?” several hundred times instead of sending more e-mails.

Russ is in his element too, because it means he can say things like, “Am I still on the team?” and sound funny instead of paranoid. His other favorite line, when Luther starts talking about the weight of our gear, is “My _______ weighs almost nothing, which will be great when you guys have to carry me off the course…”

We haven’t gotten to know Blain that well yet, but my sense on our first call was that he was just listening and soaking it all in. Blain is our most experienced racer, but also the one person on the team who hasn’t raced with any of us before, and in fact hasn’t even met two of us in person yet. I worry about the day he does. He’s already seen the photo of Russ on a bad hair day, so the worst is over. But he hasn’t even begun to experience the worst of my out-of-control e-mail days.

The topic of our first team conference call, was, of course, Holy Certs! Not sure if I’ve had a race with that many certifications before. I think it’s a good thing, however, to make sure racers are truly prepared. Don Mann’s reputation for dismal finishing ratios is not to be taken lightly. I opened the call by saying, “Do you think we can make an action step checklist with plans and due dates for each cert?”

“I’d like to go through the gear list first,” Luther said, “because we need to clarify the specs on the length and material required for each lanyard, and I want to make sure that none of our webbing weighs more than .0003 of an ounce this year.”

“Party on,” answered Russ. “Am I still on the team?”

Maybe these conference calls will get a little more focused as they go on…

December 27, 2005

Oh my goodness, what a shocking month it has been. I’m assuming that most of you are settling into the winter grind (good grief, even the wet coast has been frozen since the end of November and our local ski hills enjoyed their earliest start in decades) and it’s been a relief to get past the shortest day of the year. The big news for our team is that I’ve regretfully made the difficult decision to withdraw myself, but NOT the team, from the Primal Quest. This is a strictly personal decision based on the evaluation of how much time I would be taking from my family over the next year and also, thanks to a financial opportunity that didn’t come through, how much the financial commitment to the race would delay various family goals (yes, it’s true, I do have goals for other things beyond adventure racing). In the interest of remaining a committed husband and father I have decided to back away from my enthusiasm for the Primal Quest and dedicate myself to my family first.

MindOverMountain.com is still in the Primal Quest with Gary Robbins, Aimee Dunn, and Mark Fearman representing us in the race, with Daniel Havens, John Baron and now me as alternates. I really appreciate the comments and support from my team and will continue to be involved with leading the team in other events in 2006. Gary Robbins has taken over as Primal Quest team captain and the team is evaluating my replacement for primary navigation duties.

I am retaining my role leading team MindOverMountain.com through 2006 and beyond and managing race entries, training, and sponsorships, so you’ll still definitely see me at Mind Over Mountain, Trioba, and possibly the Full Moon in June and Raid the North BC races in 2006. As an added bonus, I’ll be doing at least one or two adventure races with my family again!

The decision itself wasn’t that tough to make – it is definitely the right thing to do for everyone except my ego and possibly the rest of the team – but accepting the consequences of the decision has been tough. I feel a little dumb for having come this far before facing reality, but my enthusiasm for the Primal Quest is undiminished and I’m vowing to try again in the future. I’ll let Gary speak for himself in the rest of this entry.

LLTNT (still!)

Tom Jarecki

They say the hardest part of an Adventure Race is just getting to the starting line…our team is quickly learning this to be very true.

The New Year is not even upon us and we have already lost our team navigator! This is a double loss, since Tom Jarecki was also our team captain, team web logger for Primal Quest, and the only team member with any Expedition Race experience!!

Tom’s decision was a tough one to make and the entire team supports him in this. He will still continue to be a big part of our team, but unfortunately won’t be able to join us in Primal Quest.

This is where I step in: my name is Gary Robbins and I have been nominated to fulfill Tom’s duties…all, that is, except for the navigation…we’d be on course for a month if I were leading us.

“Sorry guys, our maps must be wrong, there are funny little squiggly lines all over them?”

Thankfully we have an alternate racer who is able to step in and guide us through this race. However, he also has no expedition race experience, so we are now a team consisting of complete rookies!

I was forced to do some math as we were presenting our team video to Primal Quest, (the math portion of my brain has been on a permanent vacation and seemed to be suffering from serious heat stroke as I called upon it to once again function). I made a list and checked it twice, and was shocked to have calculated my total Adventure Racing experience to date, as a grand total of just 700km. Primal Quest alone will more than double my total racing experience! I have to throw in my two Ultra Runs just to eclipse the 800km mark…HELP!!!

See, I don’t come from a seriously competitive background like many in this sport. As many of you were competing and training over the last ten years, I was drinking, partying and traveling.

It was only in March of 2004 that Mark Fearman and I decided to give adventure racing and trail running a go. We showed up to a local fun run where you can select your distance on a 15km course. Fifteen kilometers would be more than I had run in 2 years, so Mark and I threw our names down and showed up the morning of. We met a group of very established and accomplished Vancouver Ultra Runners and before we knew it they had ‘tricked’ us into doing a second lap. Neither Mark nor I had ever run 30km in our lives, in fact before that fateful day, I had only run more than 10km three times in my entire life.

By the time the day was out, we had both suffered hallucinations, cramping and pure physical exhaustion…but something inside of us, somewhere deep, deep down inside, absolutely loved the pain and suffering we had endured. Hell, the longest run of my life before that day was just 20km. I upped that by 50% – what could our bodies withstand with some continual punishment?

By the time 2004 had ended, Mark and I had completed our first Ultra Run of 67km (just three months prior I had absolutely no idea what an Ultra even was), and I had somehow managed to win a trail racing series (well, my age group at least). We had competed in three adventure races, two sprint races and one stage race, having fared well in all of them. When the dust had settled and the injuries had recuperated, we had time to reflect on what a year it had been. We decided on the spot that we would do an Expedition Adventure Race, as soon as our bodies and bank accounts would allow!

During our first year of competing we met Aimee Dunn, who is now our teammate for Primal Quest. When Aimee was in her late teens and early twenties she was a competitive soccer player and triathlete. During the last few years she had been competing in adventure racing more for fun, due to work commitments. When I proposed Primal Quest to her she nearly hit the roof! Then she went about baking muffins, cookies and cupcakes to celebrate.

Aimee, you see, has a bit of an affliction. She cannot show up to a training session without some form of homemade baked good. She is well deserving of her nickname, Betty Crocker. I am convinced that our team will be the only one showing up to the start of PQ having gained weight through training.

Our team is spread out over a few hundred kilometers, which I realize in comparison to many teams is like sharing a bathroom together. Aimee and I being the closest in distance means I get to indulge in the greatest consumption of baked goods. This past weekend Aimee showed up carrying a pumpkin/almond cheesecake…I tell you she’s a sick girl!

On my suggestion we headed out to do some snowshoe running. I live in Squamish, B.C. and am blessed with variety of terrain. I am a five minute walk from a river that feeds into the ocean, a nice deep ‘Sound’, called Howe Sound, which generally gives great paddling conditions. I have mountain bike and running trails out my back door. “The Chief”- the most recognizable climbing rock in Canada – is basically nearby and it generally rains in town and snows on the mountains during the winter months. Squamish had been aptly named “The Outdoor Recreation Capital of Canada.” In small print somewhere it must also say, “and a great place to train for PQ.”

The snowshoe running was great, the pumpkin/almond cheesecake even better. Aimee was off to drive home and I was just getting started on my cross-training for the day…it was Saturday night.

While most people my age are off to some sort of social arrangement centered around beer, I am concentrating on how to best utilize my time – how to multi-task, as it were. We are Canadian, and Saturday night means Hockey Night in Canada. I refuse to miss this event, as it has been ingrained in me since childhood. I guess it rivals Sunday football in the States, or soccer in pretty much the rest of the world.What better way to take in the event than to set up my bike trainer and start peddling. I quickly discovered that one water bottle holder is actually designed to hold the remote control for the television, so as to allow channel surfing during commercials. The second water bottle holder seemed perfectly shaped to accept a beer bottle…who knew?

I immediately got to work, for my team was playing one of the best in the league that evening, and they would need all of my peddle power to succeed. We were inextricably linked, for as I peddled faster, they skated faster, and as I struggled to keep pace, so too did they. I rode for the entire game, all three hours of it, and am pleased to say that I helped the Edmonton Oilers defeat the nasty Vancouver Canucks.

Sure I live just an hour out of Vancouver, and Edmonton is thousands of driving kilometers away, but I am a dedicated fan and have never turned my back on the team that Wayne Gretzky made famous throughout the eighties. One day we will win the Stanley Cup again and when we do, I will be pleased to say that I contributed to that victory by sweating out every second of it on my bike trainer in my living room, while trying my damndest to condition my ass for Primal Quest!

Gary Robbins,
Team Captain for MindOverMountain.com

December 27, 2005

Oh my goodness, what a shocking month it has been. I’m assuming that most of you are settling into the winter grind (good grief, even the wet coast has been frozen since the end of November and our local ski hills enjoyed their earliest start in decades) and it’s been a relief to get past the shortest day of the year. The big news for our team is that I’ve regretfully made the difficult decision to withdraw myself, but NOT the team, from the Primal Quest. This is a strictly personal decision based on the evaluation of how much time I would be taking from my family over the next year and also, thanks to a financial opportunity that didn’t come through, how much the financial commitment to the race would delay various family goals (yes, it’s true, I do have goals for other things beyond adventure racing). In the interest of remaining a committed husband and father I have decided to back away from my enthusiasm for the Primal Quest and dedicate myself to my family first.

MindOverMountain.com is still in the Primal Quest with Gary Robbins, Aimee Dunn, and Mark Fearman representing us in the race, with Daniel Havens, John Baron and now me as alternates. I really appreciate the comments and support from my team and will continue to be involved with leading the team in other events in 2006. Gary Robbins has taken over as Primal Quest team captain and the team is evaluating my replacement for primary navigation duties.

I am retaining my role leading team MindOverMountain.com through 2006 and beyond and managing race entries, training, and sponsorships, so you’ll still definitely see me at Mind Over Mountain, Trioba, and possibly the Full Moon in June and Raid the North BC races in 2006. As an added bonus, I’ll be doing at least one or two adventure races with my family again!

The decision itself wasn’t that tough to make – it is definitely the right thing to do for everyone except my ego and possibly the rest of the team – but accepting the consequences of the decision has been tough. I feel a little dumb for having come this far before facing reality, but my enthusiasm for the Primal Quest is undiminished and I’m vowing to try again in the future. I’ll let Gary speak for himself in the rest of this entry.

LLTNT (still!)

Tom Jarecki

They say the hardest part of an Adventure Race is just getting to the starting line…our team is quickly learning this to be very true.

The New Year is not even upon us and we have already lost our team navigator! This is a double loss, since Tom Jarecki was also our team captain, team web logger for Primal Quest, and the only team member with any Expedition Race experience!!

Tom’s decision was a tough one to make and the entire team supports him in this. He will still continue to be a big part of our team, but unfortunately won’t be able to join us in Primal Quest.

This is where I step in: my name is Gary Robbins and I have been nominated to fulfill Tom’s duties…all, that is, except for the navigation…we’d be on course for a month if I were leading us.

“Sorry guys, our maps must be wrong, there are funny little squiggly lines all over them?”

Thankfully we have an alternate racer who is able to step in and guide us through this race. However, he also has no expedition race experience, so we are now a team consisting of complete rookies!

I was forced to do some math as we were presenting our team video to Primal Quest, (the math portion of my brain has been on a permanent vacation and seemed to be suffering from serious heat stroke as I called upon it to once again function). I made a list and checked it twice, and was shocked to have calculated my total Adventure Racing experience to date, as a grand total of just 700km. Primal Quest alone will more than double my total racing experience! I have to throw in my two Ultra Runs just to eclipse the 800km mark…HELP!!!

See, I don’t come from a seriously competitive background like many in this sport. As many of you were competing and training over the last ten years, I was drinking, partying and traveling.

It was only in March of 2004 that Mark Fearman and I decided to give adventure racing and trail running a go. We showed up to a local fun run where you can select your distance on a 15km course. Fifteen kilometers would be more than I had run in 2 years, so Mark and I threw our names down and showed up the morning of. We met a group of very established and accomplished Vancouver Ultra Runners and before we knew it they had ‘tricked’ us into doing a second lap. Neither Mark nor I had ever run 30km in our lives, in fact before that fateful day, I had only run more than 10km three times in my entire life.

By the time the day was out, we had both suffered hallucinations, cramping and pure physical exhaustion…but something inside of us, somewhere deep, deep down inside, absolutely loved the pain and suffering we had endured. Hell, the longest run of my life before that day was just 20km. I upped that by 50% – what could our bodies withstand with some continual punishment?

By the time 2004 had ended, Mark and I had completed our first Ultra Run of 67km (just three months prior I had absolutely no idea what an Ultra even was), and I had somehow managed to win a trail racing series (well, my age group at least). We had competed in three adventure races, two sprint races and one stage race, having fared well in all of them. When the dust had settled and the injuries had recuperated, we had time to reflect on what a year it had been. We decided on the spot that we would do an Expedition Adventure Race, as soon as our bodies and bank accounts would allow!

During our first year of competing we met Aimee Dunn, who is now our teammate for Primal Quest. When Aimee was in her late teens and early twenties she was a competitive soccer player and triathlete. During the last few years she had been competing in adventure racing more for fun, due to work commitments. When I proposed Primal Quest to her she nearly hit the roof! Then she went about baking muffins, cookies and cupcakes to celebrate.

Aimee, you see, has a bit of an affliction. She cannot show up to a training session without some form of homemade baked good. She is well deserving of her nickname, Betty Crocker. I am convinced that our team will be the only one showing up to the start of PQ having gained weight through training.

Our team is spread out over a few hundred kilometers, which I realize in comparison to many teams is like sharing a bathroom together. Aimee and I being the closest in distance means I get to indulge in the greatest consumption of baked goods. This past weekend Aimee showed up carrying a pumpkin/almond cheesecake…I tell you she’s a sick girl!

On my suggestion we headed out to do some snowshoe running. I live in Squamish, B.C. and am blessed with variety of terrain. I am a five minute walk from a river that feeds into the ocean, a nice deep ‘Sound’, called Howe Sound, which generally gives great paddling conditions. I have mountain bike and running trails out my back door. “The Chief”- the most recognizable climbing rock in Canada – is basically nearby and it generally rains in town and snows on the mountains during the winter months. Squamish had been aptly named “The Outdoor Recreation Capital of Canada.” In small print somewhere it must also say, “and a great place to train for PQ.”

The snowshoe running was great, the pumpkin/almond cheesecake even better. Aimee was off to drive home and I was just getting started on my cross-training for the day…it was Saturday night.

While most people my age are off to some sort of social arrangement centered around beer, I am concentrating on how to best utilize my time – how to multi-task, as it were. We are Canadian, and Saturday night means Hockey Night in Canada. I refuse to miss this event, as it has been ingrained in me since childhood. I guess it rivals Sunday football in the States, or soccer in pretty much the rest of the world.What better way to take in the event than to set up my bike trainer and start peddling. I quickly discovered that one water bottle holder is actually designed to hold the remote control for the television, so as to allow channel surfing during commercials. The second water bottle holder seemed perfectly shaped to accept a beer bottle…who knew?

I immediately got to work, for my team was playing one of the best in the league that evening, and they would need all of my peddle power to succeed. We were inextricably linked, for as I peddled faster, they skated faster, and as I struggled to keep pace, so too did they. I rode for the entire game, all three hours of it, and am pleased to say that I helped the Edmonton Oilers defeat the nasty Vancouver Canucks.

Sure I live just an hour out of Vancouver, and Edmonton is thousands of driving kilometers away, but I am a dedicated fan and have never turned my back on the team that Wayne Gretzky made famous throughout the eighties. One day we will win the Stanley Cup again and when we do, I will be pleased to say that I contributed to that victory by sweating out every second of it on my bike trainer in my living room, while trying my damndest to condition my ass for Primal Quest!

Gary Robbins,
Team Captain for MindOverMountain.com

March 03, 2006
By Stephanie Bruce

Prudence. It might be the most underrated characteristic of an adventure racer. It’s not as lauded as perseverance, fitness, skills, or even empathy. If you were prudent, you probably wouldn’t be racing, would you?

But if you think about it, what – if not prudent – is an adventure racer? You have to carefully manage your resources, which are few during the course of the race; you must have good sense in managing practical matters like sleep and food; and on the course you are constantly evaluating situations to avoid risk – like finding the balance between running fast moving water while keeping an eye out for strainers.

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