Team Profile: Team Nomad
Posted on 11/18/05 11:57 AM| by Osprey
You can probably count the number of American adventure racing teams that have recorded top-10 finishes on foreign soil on one hand. November 18, 2005
By Brian Metzler
You can probably count the number of American adventure racing teams that have recorded top-10 finishes on foreign soil on one hand.
Obviously, a few big names of the sport come to mind: Nike/Balance Bar, GoLite/Timberland and the team formerly known as Montrail.
But what about Team Nomad? Despite a seventh-place finish at Explore Sweden (2005) and an eighth-place showing at the Southern Traverse (2003), not to mention numerous top-10 efforts in the U.S. and Canada, this unique foursome from the U.S. has gained little fanfare. That’s just fine with them. For this group of Nomads, it’s all about the adventure.
“All of us race because we really like to be outside and have fun with our friends,” says team member Grant Sisler. “We can’t afford to do a lot of races, so we pick one big one a year. Our goals are different than a lot of the other top teams, yet we always seem to do well. It’s not about winning; it’s about going to great places, meeting great people and having a great time.”
Captain Scott Berk founded Team Nomad in 1999 and raced in the Southern Traverse with Steve Putnam, Lori Du Paul, and Bruce Genereaux (who later chronicled the experience in his adventure book “Beyond the Comfort Zone”). The team’s makeup has shifted through the years, but it is still driven by a common love for the outdoors, friendly camaraderie and the fun and growth gained from the sport.
True to their name, the primary team members are spread around the country. Among those who have raced with the team in the last two years include Sisler (San Francisico, California), Berk (Maine), Scott Cole (an American living in Sweden), Jason Shibata (Colorado Springs), Cary Kinross-Wright (Golden, Colorado) and Megan Gridley (San Francisco, California).
It is Berk’s fun-loving, adventure-seeking, nomadic lifestyle that has set the tone for the team. Although he currently runs Nomad Properties (a property management company), and is creating a café called Nomad Café near his home in Maine, the team’s ace navigator has lived all over the place.
He was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, but was raised in North Africa and various places around Europe. He’s also lived in Colorado and Massachusetts in the U.S. As a jackeroo (cowboy) on a cattle station in Queensland in the mid-1990s, he followed a path similar to the lead character in “The Man From Snowy River” by climbing Mount Kosciuszko.
Berk has extensive experience in climbing, skiing, paragliding, surfing and mountaineering. While in Colorado in 1994, he became the first person to fly a non-competition paraglider from Mt. Zion in Golden, Colorado, to the north side of Boulder, 28 miles away.
In 1999, he had made the mistake of making Southern Traverse his very first adventure race. Almost predictably, it ended on a sour note as his team, called Team Nomad, dropped near the end of the first day.
“I thought it would be fun to try a big race,” Berk recalls. “In hindsight, it was not the best way to get into the sport.”
Wiser from the experience, Berk spent the next couple of years getting more race experience and improving his skills and fitness level. He met Sisler and Cole at a race in Utah and soon Team Nomad was reborn. After a strong season of racing in 2002, the trio decided it was time to try a big race. They were the first team to email their entry to Southern Traverse race director Geoff Hunt, who allowed them to wear race bib Number 1 in 2003.
Their eighth-place finish in New Zealand ranks as one of their favorite moments and solidified their passion for the sport and to continue racing together. They’re looking forward to their first Primal Quest as a unit.
“Racing makes everything else so much easier,” Sisler says. “You push your body so far, and you go through so much in a race that life in general just seems easier. Traffic, work, little things that get most people riled up, are nothing compared to falling out of a kayak into 35-degree water at 2 a.m. in Sweden after only sleeping for a couple of hours the previous two days!”
Chris Sajnog has some serious payback coming. And when the captain of Team Gerber Gear is bent on payback, it’s probably best to get out of the way.
November 18, 2005
By Gordon Wright
Chris Sajnog has some serious payback coming. And when the captain of Team Gerber Gear is bent on payback, it’s probably best to get out of the way.
A 17-year Navy veteran, Sajnog is a long-time Navy SEAL who currently holds down a position as Naval Special Warfare Motivator, essentially charged with recruiting potential SEAL team members into what is widely recognized as the world’s finest fighting force. But even being in the elite Special Forces doesn’t guarantee a win – or even a finish – in the world’s toughest adventure race.
In the 2004 Primal Quest, Chris had a less-than-stellar result due to one of his teammates quitting the race. Chris and his other two teammates wanted to continue as a three-person squad, and even tried arranging a six-person team with squads in similar straits, but it simply didn’t pan out for Gerber Blades. As the race continued without them through the Cascades and San Juan Islands, the team was relegated to a six-hour training ride and pondering the squandering of a year’s worth of training and roughly $40,000 in sunk costs.
“We had lots of energy,” recalls Sajnog, “We had been in diesel mode and all we wanted to do was keep racing.”
This year is different. “The team isn’t about gathering a bunch of really fast people,” says Sajnog, “It’s about getting along together and getting to the finish line.”
As deeply motivated as Sajnog is to finish Primal Quest, he’s just as dedicated to the Navy, where his role as Motivator brings him in contact with hundreds of young men.
“We go to high schools and events throughout the country,” says Sajnog, “We talk with young athletes, attend air shows, make speeches and presentations; basically representing the Teams and recruiting people both within and outside of the Navy.”
Gerber does most of its training as individuals, and focuses on strengthening their weaknesses and trying to work on what Sajnog says is their most important challenge, getting along with each other, a task that should be easier with their current line-up.
Joining Sajnog for the 2006 Primal Quest is long-time teammate and fellow SEAL Ron Harrison, who is a “third phase SEAL instructor, focusing on land warfare, demo(lition) and weaponry,” according to Sajnog.
Also along for the ride is Duncan Monroe, a Canadian described by Sajnog as a “little ball of fire and energy.” The two met at the World 24 Hour Mountain Bike Championshiops in British Columbia. Monroe was the course-setter for the race, which no doubt was a small factor in the two of them (plus former Gerber teammate Bernice Pierson) winning the World Championships in the Three Person Co-Ed division.
The history of military teams in adventure racing is as long as the sport itself; Eco-Challenge founder Mark Burnett raced in just the second Raid Gauloises with members of the Navy SEALs. But in general, military teams have found that adventure racing and their war-making skills are not exact analogues. They both require navigation knowledge, but UTMs are rarely used in military navigation. Long slogs on foot are common to each, but military teams tend to carry much more gear and move slower than adventure racers. And while both activities have in common a reliance on small teams, adventure racing is much more inclusive (and co-ed) than Special Forces’ top-down and all-male hierarchy.
Gerber Blades has learned many of these lessons, and now has only to get to through the course intact to achieve redemption.
Part One By Tom Jarecki
*Editor’s Note: For the 2006 Primal Quest, we have invited a small number of athletes to submit blogs to us regarding their training and preparation for the race. The views expressed are that of the author alone and do not reflect the views of race management.
We welcome you to follow Tom Jarecki and his newly-formed Team MindOverMountain.com as they gear up for one of the most difficult races in the world.
In which Team MindOverMountain.com is Formed, and Excitement Expressed
Potluck and Television = Early Training
“WE’RE IN, WE’RE IN, WE’RE IN!!!!!” (repeat, till you get slapped)
I registered for the Primal Quest lottery on a whim and with a prayer – a whim due to not having a team or finances, and a prayer due to, well, everything. When I had heard that Primal Quest was coming back in 2006 and had hired Don Mann and John Howard to manage and design the course I was hooked. This race promised to be the best in a long, long time – a totally epic adventure. That’s what I’m in for – Yeah baby! Other than my family and my faith this would be the most important thing in my life in the coming year.
Then, OH MY GOD – WE’RE IN!!!!!! My whole office heard all about it when I got the phone call and I confess to not doing much real work at all for the rest of the day. The first challenge was breaking the news to my wife and telling her how much it would cost (thank you to Canada’s petro-dollar, otherwise that would have been the deal breaker – as it is, good thing we have no couch). Telling my boss was even more fun – I still owe the company several days of vacation from this past season and won’t be able to accrue enough by June. I work as a Program Manager for a software development company, which means I spend all day on my butt staring at and swearing at a computer screen. Luckily our release schedule shows a gap May to August – just perfect for that last intense push to the race. Quality training, not quantity, that’s my mantra.
So far so good, but who am I going to race with? Choosing prospects for the team was a balancing act of reasonable physical and technical skills with an all-consuming passion for expedition racing. Skills and physical ability can be trained, but what’s in the head determines everything else. There’s enough blood, sweat and tears in getting to the start line of a big race that the last thing anyone on the team needs is to be out of step with the others.
I had the great fortune to meet up with Gary Robbins and Mark Fearman during the summer when I navigated their team in a Raid the North race. These guys are nuts for adventure racing and though being new to the sport, are competitive athletes and skilled outdoorsmen.
I sent Gary an email asking if he and Mark would be interested – this is what I got back: “YEEESSSSSSSSS!!!!! I AM SOOOO IN, SO FREAKIN IN!!!!! It is like a dream of mine to do that! I regularly go to their website just to watch the trailers for it! HOLY CRAP – I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS!!!!!!!!! This is the ANSWER TO MY DREAMS!!!!!”
I called him up a day later and had to turn the volume down on my phone – yup, he’s got the right excitement. Mark is quieter on the outside but apparently he spent the week floating on cloud 9 – “I’ve planned to compete in an expedition race for years and still can’t believe that I’m going to be racing in the BEST DAMN RACE ON THE PLANET”.
Through Gary I was introduced to Aimee Dunn, who had happened to tell Gary a year ago that her dream is to race an expedition race, and her reaction was, “PRIMAL EXCITEMENT! I am so extremely excited about this opportunity to race with you all (words can’t describe!). Once again, I am so excited about this opportunity…WOW, this is unbelievably GREAT!”
You go, girl. Aimee is a fierce competitor and national champion soccer player and since starting adventure racing a few years ago has racked up a bunch of top finishes – we’re lucky to have her.
So our team’s together and it’s totally a Sea to Sky Experience: Mark lives in Whistler and works as a fine dining server, Gary lives in Squamish and works in Whistler as a bell man, Aimee is an outdoor event planner and lives in North Vancouver, and I live in Ladner and work in downtown Vancouver. Sea level living and a winter full of rain and snow isn’t going to be the most specific training environment for Primal Quest but it sure is steep throughout Sea to Sky. Well, OK, I’m the odd one out – Ladner is not steep – the average elevation within 10 km of my house is 1 metre above sea level and my hill training consists of 100 repeats on the local overpass. That’s why we’re practicing towing!
With 8 months to go now we’ve spent the last month chasing potential sponsors and integrating our individual training into our team schedule and the race countdown. The web is a wonderful thing and it means that via email and an online group (thanks, Yahoo) we can do almost everything remotely. Still, we need face time to learn to love each other through thick and thin. For our first official all-member team meeting last Friday in Squamish we planned a potluck dinner (pasta and spinach salad, preceded and followed by chocolate cupcakes with pink icing provided by Aimee, aka Betty [Crocker]) – followed by discussion on progress with sponsor seeking (going quite well with some product arriving already), planning our technical skills training (how to not get thrown by a wild mustang, how to swim white water without getting caught in a strainer, how to climb up a thousand feet of rope, etc) and finally watching the full PQ 2004 OLN show in one sitting.
Since Gary was our host he planned the training, which would take us by bike from sea level to around 1,500 metres along logging road and ATV trail to the Elfin Lakes hut in Garibaldi Park. From there we would drop our bikes and scramble another 1,200 metres to the top of Diamond Head. All in all a 70 km route that had to be completed by 8 am since I had to get back to Ladner by 10 am to coach my son’s soccer team.
The best laid plans of mice and men and all that meant that we didn’t start watching the race show until 11 pm, so we opted for the CBS version. Totally pumped for the race, and with tears flowing freely. Of course we had great weather all the previous week but on Friday morning a savage storm front moved through the area with lots of rain and wind. So at 12:30 am we’re preparing for our ride and run with the rain absolutely pouring down. No worries, we’re tough adventure racers – let’s go.
Little did we know that the freezing level had been quite low so by the time we got to 1,200 metres elevation on the trail to the Red Heather hut we were ankle deep in snow and our bikes were totally unmanageable. So we dumped the bikes early (at least at 3 am in the backcountry in the middle of a storm there is no need to lock bikes up), laced on our runners and headed up the trail. By the time we reached Red Heather hut at 1,450 metres the snow was knee deep and beautiful. Can you say snowball fight and snow angels?
At this point our progress was pretty slow and we decided to turn around. Now we’re headed SW straight into the storm and visibility was poor, to say the least. On bikes it was even more exciting when you’d run through a cloud bank at 40 km/hr and have your headlamp blind you to everything around. Who says that endurance sports don’t generate adrenalin?
By the time we made it back to Gary’s place 6 hours, 40 km, and 1,450 metres of elevation gain and loss, it was pouring rain again and 7 am. After a quick clean up and a joyous group hug Aimee and I are off to brave the most dangerous part of any adventure race – the drive home. With the help of Tim Hortons (a Canadian icon – think of a combination of Starbucks and Crispy Creme, frequented by everyone from long distance truckers, sleepy commuters, families on the way to the ski hills and mountain bike parks, and the Canadian Prime Minister) and a short nap on the side of the highway half way home, we made it safely back to Vancouver.
I had time for another 30 minutes of sleep, then it was into a full day of being a dad to a 4.5 year old boy (his soccer game went well – each team scored a bunch of goals, nobody but the kids keep track of the score, and no injuries beyond momentary tears) and a 7 year old daughter (play date, gymnastics, and spelling practice) and continuing the renovations in the kids’ rooms that we’d started the previous weekend. I know they say you can’t train sleep deprivation – I say just try having young kids and leading a normal life as well as training for adventure racing.
LLTNT
Tom Jarecki
Team MindOverMountain.com
