Marcello Duarte is thinking about golf. His equally exhausted adventure racing teammate, Addy Goodvibes, is thinking fishing.
In the past 28 hours, neither has slept. Along with two other teammates, they have relentlessly paddled, biked and trekked through disorienting terrain, covering about 100 miles. They are pondering less punishing pursuits to distract themselves from the 30 hours and 150 miles of biking, hiking and paddling ahead.
“It’s a bit tortuous and we just started really,” said Goodvibes, a professional 39-year-old Australian super-athlete with Team Balance Bar, which finished second in last weekend’s four-day, 250-mile sufferfest known as The Expedition.
“Remind me again why we are doing this?” said Duarte, 41, as he transitioned from a 35-mile overnight trek into an 80-mile bike-trek-bike that will take at least 24 hours.
Ignoring what’s ahead and simply surviving, which entails essentially keeping your stomach full of carbs, Red Bull, caffeine pills and water, is the key to winning an ultra adventure race.
Races that reach four sleepless days aren’t about pushing bodies to the edge. They are about throwing bodies over the edge and seeing who survives.
“Attrition is what wins the race,” said Eric Krantz, 30, with the Bay Area, Calif., team Shooting Star Adventures.
Krantz is devouring food after a 13-hour, 42-mile bike ride and 14-hour, 35-mile trek through the night. He loads a heavy pack in preparation for 40 more hours of biking, hiking and paddling.
“Our strategy is to just hang in there. We are fast enough,” he said. “We just have to persevere and wait for other teams to drop.”
Perseverance in a race that meanders for more than 250 miles is predicated on focusing only on the next few steps. Think too far ahead and bodies break under the foreboding pressure that the end – and blissful stillness – is too far away.
Several weary racers bristled when, 24 hours into the race, a meddling reporter asked how they can keep their minds from wandering toward the hundred-plus miles that lie ahead.
“Thanks for reminding me. Is it really another 100?” said Louisa Jenkins, a 39-year-old 103-pound Boulderite whose inclusion on Team Balance Bar marked her first ultra endurance race. “I’m tired. The mental game is just as hard as the physical. I’m trying not to think about the next 48 hours. Just check off (the race’s) legs as you go.”
Lemonheads quickly turn sour
The Expedition featured 16 checkpoints along its dizzying route. At 7 a.m. Oct. 7, 16 teams began with a quick trail run followed by a 25-mile paddle down the Colorado River. Then came another trail run, with an intermission of rock climbing or rappelling. The following 42-mile bike leg through Utah’s bewildering desert landscape took at least 12 hours with slower teams making it an 18-hour, 50-mile slog. The 35-mile, all-night trek took another 14 hours.
The first bike leg sucked the life out of Team Lemonhead from St. Louis. Somewhere in the darkest hours of Sunday morning, pushing bikes through deep sand, the two-man team lost its optimism. At the beginning of the bike, Matt Luetje and Matt Nelson were aiming for a top-five finish. At the end of the 42-mile ride, which took them more than 18 hours, they were dead last. Simply finishing seemed the loftiest goal as they started the 35-mile trek. About 8 miles into that hike, they quit.
“It’s a bummer, especially after the big production to get out here,” said Luetje, from St. Louis, who suffered a physical breakdown he could not push through, a dilemma worsened by bloody blisters on his feet. “But I’m just done.”
The first-place team, California’s Team Silly Rabbits, finished the 35-mile trek about 24 hours after the race began. The team spent less than an hour gobbling massive amounts of food before the 80-mile bike-hike-bike segment, which took it up, over and through the La Sal Mountains without any support. Twenty-four hours after the snowy overnight slog up a 12,000-foot peak in the La Sal Mountains, the team trotted into camp ready for another brutal hike and lengthy paddle. Seriously, Team Silly Rabbits was trotting.
Silly Rabbits’ tricks leave kids in wake
It was 6:45 a.m. Sunday and they had raced too fast. Shortly after they left a mountain checkpoint deep in the La Sals, race organizers suspended the race, holding all other teams until snow and hail stopped falling from the starless, thundering sky.
But the Silly Rabbits raced on, not knowing that the racers on their heels were stalled. It was not easy racing.
The four-person team carried mud-caked bikes through freezing rain on the final bike leg, a 35-mile slog that could have violated all sorts of international humanitarian laws had it not been voluntary. The athletes were nearing hypothermia and had not stopped moving for two days.
“But we were racing like we were being chased,” said Rick Baraff, a 33-year-old Silly Rabbits athlete from Oakland. “Always looking in the rearview mirror.”
Sometime in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday – about 45 hours into the race – Silly Rabbits racer Jennifer Ratay started hallucinating. Then she started chatting with the trailside visions.
“She was babbling,” said teammate Jason Quinn, from San Francisco. “We were expecting the hallucinations. You can’t fight them. I said ‘Jen’s there. She’s found the zone”‘
Still, the incoherent prattling from Ratay, who was competing in her first race longer than 24 hours, prompted an extraordinary measure from the professional racing team. They stopped, dropped and took a nap. For exactly two minutes.
“It was amazing. I had a dream,” said Ratay, of her brief and only bout with immobility during the race.
“You feel really refreshed,” added Quinn.
“Yeah, for about 15 minutes,” quipped Baraff.
About 24 hours into the race, every athlete realized this was no training race. The Expedition was on par with the international Primal Quest and Raid Gauloises races, which sit at the pinnacle of adventure racing. The eye-opening culled grins from Will and Jenny Newcomer, the Durango organizers whose seven-race Adventure XStream series offered $30,000 in prize money to hundreds of adventure racers this season.
Will Newcomer, who founded his Gravity Play race organizing company six years ago, is the type of guy who chuckles when mentioning that the bike leg 30-plus hours into the race will take “at least 14 hours.” He seems to glean pleasure from the pain his seasonal masterpiece course inflicts.
“He did not pull any punches,” Quinn said. “Nothing here was candy coated.”
“I feel very sorry for the amateurs,” said Goodvibes, after the all night 35-mile trek. “If they are just trying adventure racing, this will make them never come back.”
Staff writer Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
