Turn-ons: Cycling, Paddling, Yoga, Jungle Navigation! (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2002

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Turn-ons: Cycling, Paddling, Yoga, Jungle Navigation! (Cont.)

THE PLAYMATES are standing around the beach at Point Dume in "X-Treme Girl" T-shirts and lank ponytails and black sweatpants, waiting for the climbing instructor to arrive. Their sweatpants are unlike any I grew up with, in that they have bell bottoms and cling provocatively to the buttocks and thighs. No one has panty lines. The women are well toned, but you wouldn't call them muscular. The main thing that sets them apart from the average female athlete is, well, their breasts. You could fill a set of C cups with an elite female athlete's calves, but rarely with her breasts, owing to changes in lean-fat ratios and estrogen levels during intensive training. None of that going on here.

The team's mastery of climbing lingo is the one thing marks them as beginners. "On belay!" Comes out variously as "on vuarnet!" and "bully!"

Folta is the only one who trains and competes full-time. The others are models or artists or moms. They don't claim to be hard-core. They are just gals who love the outdoors, love sports, love travel and camaraderie, and love having sponsors pay their way. The team's collective sports résumé includes mountain biking (22 of 22 women), distance running (12), in-line skating (10), and snowboarding (11).

Only five of the ten women here today have tried technical rock climbing, partly because it's rarely included in adventure races. They will learn how to tie in to a climbing harness, attempt a 5.6 route, rappel back down to the beach, and attempt a second, 5.9 route. It's an ambitious plan for one day. When I took introductory rock climbing, the course lasted two days and culminated in a 5.5 climb that a quarter of the class failed to finish.

The instructor, Tom Magee, has arrived and is unloading gear. He turns to the women and says "Who's worn a harness?" with absolutely no trace of a smirk. Magee is a former body-builder and WWF wrestler, a man who has answered, at various turns, to both "Mr. British Columbia" and "Joe MacKenzie, the Cruel Canuck." These days Magee is heavily involved in climbing.

The former Mr. British Columbia kneels down to help the former Miss January, Echo Johnson, with a leg strap. Like everyone else on Team Playboy X-Treme, she has a well-turned sofa-bolster ass and enviable thighs. The harness sets off the sofa bolster in a fetching manner. Although I have worn a climbing harness before, the similarity to a garter belt has heretofore escaped me.

One after another, the women climb the 5.6 arête as though it were the escalator at Nordstrom on a 40-percent-off day. They are clearly strong and seemingly fearless. The ones waiting their turn sit on the sand, talking and gossiping ("That female wrestler grew a penis from taking steroids!") and feeding sound bites to the two TV cameras that have shown up. A reporter from Channel 13 News tells Folta that his station is doing "a story on hot women who do extreme sports," which she relays to the team as "a story on cool women in sports." Either way, Channel 13 has an interesting concept of news.

On the ground, Playmate Victoria Fuller, blond and sultry-eyed, is talking to her teammates about a disastrous modeling shoot. "You should have seen what they had me in. The makeup people were laughing at me. Then the stylist took half my hair down. I looked like Predator."

To hear the Playmates tell it, nude modeling can be as X-Treme as much of what they do on the team. One recalls a Playboy shoot during which wooden props had to be made for her feet because her legs were cramping from being on tiptoe too long. "Basically," Deanna Brooks explains, "if it's uncomfortable, it looks good. 'Arch your back, put your chest out, now twist 45 degrees, now reach up and stick your hand in your hair...'" To the near-palpable disappointment of the Channel 13 man, she does not demonstrate.

Another hour passes as the women take turns on the cliff. Some start eating lunch. Jennifer Lavoie, a compact, high-wattage Playmate who now designs handbags, picks a veggie sandwich out of the cooler and then abandons it for tuna, crying "Gimme some meat!"

The Playmates do not eat like models. They work out too hard to be on diets. I asked six of them about their regimens and all reported daily or near-daily trips to the gym. Lavoie, who was on the 2000 Eco-Challenge team, e-mailed me her schedule: "Monday: 60-minute lift and 30-minute cardio. Wednesday: 45-minute lift, 60-minute spin class. Thursday: 60-minute Butts & Guts class, 25 minutes cardio, 60-minute yoga class. Friday: 60-minute lift, 20-minute cardio. Saturday: 35-minute swim, 60-minute spin class. Sunday: 60-minute lift. Tuesday is my off-day."

Team captain Folta's prerace regimen consists of six to 12 hours a day in the gym and on the bike and a 20-hour training session every other week. For multiday adventure races, she adds one 40- to 50-hour training session to "make sure I know how the team will cope with sleep deprivation and exhaustion."

Because she and the Playmates lack mountaineering skills, Folta decided to skip last year's Eco-Challenge, which took place in New Zealand. "We're not a cold-weather team," she says. She admits that they might miss this October's Fiji race, too, if a deal goes through to produce a Team Playboy X-Treme TV show, the rights for which have been purchased by Endemol, the company that brought you the ogle-fests Fear Factor, Spy TV, and Big Brother.

While the women eat, I ask them what they find to be the most challenging aspect of Team Playboy X-Treme. Most of their answers have to do with not being taken seriously as a competitor. I listen and offer words of understanding, and then I ask about their chests.

Do exceptionally large breasts handicap an athlete? Not really, is the consensus, though Lavoie confesses to wearing two sports bras at once and Nicole Woods has trouble with her golf swing. Folta says tartly: "If you were interviewing a male athlete, would you ask him if an exceptionally large package hinders him in his sport?" I reply that no, I wouldn't, unless his team were called, say, Team Playgirl or Team Clydesdale Penis—and then you bet I would. To make it up to Folta, I tell her I will pose the question to the next well-endowed athlete I come across. This is a lie, because that athlete would be Tom Magee, who is wearing a climbing harness, which does for packages what push-up bras do for bosoms, and I cannot bring myself to say it.

From high above, we hear a strident, agitated sound. Seagull? Police car? No, it's Victoria Fuller. Fuller has never climbed before. Three-quarters of the way up, she is plastered to the rock, arms and legs splayed like Wile E. Coyote. The women shout encouragement, and, as if powered by their collective will, Fuller reaches the top. Now she must rappel down—or, as one woman puts it, "propel" down. The team's mastery of climbing lingo has been the one thing that marks them as beginners. "On belay!" has variously come out as "On Vuarnet!" and, in a moment recalling the late Teddy Roosevelt, "Bully!"

The rappel requires Fuller to lean against her harness, step backward off the small ledge, and trust her fate to a strange man 70 feet below. She flaps her hands and lets out a long "Noooooo!" This devolves into a scream that provokes looks of alarm and forces a retake of the Channel 13 tagline ("See Playboy's X-Treme Team like you've never seen them before!"). Coaches Magee and Zagarino decide to hike up the trail on the back side of the cliff, haul Fuller up the remaining five feet of the wall, and escort her back down. Folta intervenes. "Vic's just veryÉcommunicative. She'll be OK." With shouts of support from her teammates, Fuller eventually makes it down, dignity and French manicure more or less intact.

By 3 p.m. the women have moved on to the 5.9 route. All of them make it at least halfway, and most make it to the top. By any standard, it's an impressive performance. Magee smiles broadly.

"These girls are risk takers," he says.

"Climbing a rock face and taking off your clothes both go against your natural instincts. I knew they'd kick ass."

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