Is This Any Way to Make a Living?

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Outside Magazine January 2003

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Is This Any Way to Make a Living?
With $100,000 for the winners, the world's most relentless teams, and a 138,000-vertical-foot Rocky Mountain course, the Subaru Primal Quest seemed poised to give big-time adventure racing a smashing return to U.S. soil. But then the race began—and all hell broke loose. A front-line report from the wildest, bumpiest game in the wilderness.

By Bill Gifford


	Team Sobe/SmartWool's Michael Tobin near Ophir Pass. (Mark Cosslett)

EVERY SEASONED ADVENTURE RACER has a hallucination story. The visions usually happen on about the third day of around-the-clock hiking and biking, blistering and bonking, puking and paddling. Sometimes they get pretty weird: Frank Sinatra in pink Gore-Tex, or a Vietnamese fruit stand in a New Zealand cow pasture. My favorite is about a guy who decided, in the middle of a long trekking section, that leaves on the trail were actually $100 bills. Naturally, he dropped to his knees and started scraping up fistfuls of precious C-notes, while his teammates gaped. At the finish line he was chagrined to find his pack filled with worthless foliage.

The tale neatly symbolizes the pitfalls of professional adventure racing: Even at the highest levels, there's more pain than money in this game. The winning four-person team at last year's Eco-Challenge, the sport's marquee event, took home $50,000, which sounds like a lot until you subtract the $15,000 entry fee, plus airfare to the race site in Fiji. Factor in food and equipment costs, and each thrashed competitor was probably looking at a net loss. In smaller races, you're lucky to win free entry to the next event. That began to change on the afternoon of July 7, 2002, when 248 of the world's top adventure racers, along with some not-so-great ones, lined up at the base of a ski slope in Telluride, Colorado, for the start of the inaugural Subaru Primal Quest. Billed as the highest-stakes expedition-length adventure race ever held on U.S. soil, Primal Quest offered more prize money than you could stuff into a GoLite pack: $100,000 for the winners, with a total purse of nearly a quarter-million dollars.

The big money had attracted the most competitive field ever, including such luminaries as Steve Gurney, winner of the Southern Traverse in 2000, three-time Eco-Challenge champion Ian Adamson, and Rebecca Rusch, winner of Vail's Adventure Xstream in 2001. From overseas came well-oiled squads like the Finnish Nokia team, the Spaniards of Red Bull, the Kiwis of Seagate.com, and a Spanish/Latin American polyglot known as Team Buff. At the other end of the spectrum were outfits like the Too Much Fun Club, the Jelly Donuts, and Team Fred, whose names said it all.

Between them and the sport's biggest payday lay a daunting course. Starting at a woozifying altitude of 9,550 feet, racers would climb straight up Telluride's black-diamond ski runs, scrambling hypoxically over a series of nearly 13,000-foot ridges to hit the first three checkpoints (CPs), before looping back toward Checkpoint 4, at Telluride Mountain Village, the condo/golf-course/trophy-house complex at the base of the resort.

From CP4 they would switch to mountain bikes for a 103-mile grind over Last Dollar Pass; then they'd don mountaineering helmets before traversing a couple of crumbling peaks; then they'd bike some more; and then they'd paddle down the Animas, formerly the Rio de Las Animas Perdidas—the River of Lost Souls—in the nearly unsteerable inflatable kayaks that are a hallmark of the sport ("heaps of shit," in the succinct view of John Jacoby, a veteran Aussie racer). From the takeout near Durango, teams would bike, trek, and rappel roughly 55 miles back to Telluride. To hit all 28 required checkpoints, they'd have to climb and descend a rugged 138,000 vertical feet over 238 total miles—assuming, optimistically, no wrong turns. That's like starting at sea level and racing up and down Mount Rainier almost five times.

With the clock ticking toward the 3 p.m. start, the only thing on most racers' minds was the prize money—and, apparently, where to pee. In the starting corral, two women squatted right beside me, in full view of racers, spectators, and TV crews. The anxiety was palpable. "I see all the same faces," Gurney had said at the pre-race press conference, "but there's a look of grim determination I haven't seen before." When the race began, the entire pack charged off the line at a dead run, even though the lead racers weren't expected to finish for at least five days.

Fifty yards from the start, one prong of the field veered left, breaking through gaps in the metal barricades and charging straight up the steepest slope. A racer from Team Whole Foods Market wrenched her ankle immediately and vanished in the cloud of dust raised by the stampede. I focused on the blue backpack of racer Jan Bear, who followed a less-steep service road, then cut left to ascend a gentle slope, picking his way through ankle-turning tufts of dried brown grass.

Jan, 47, was racing with his wife, Kim, 46, and their friends Ries Robinson, 38, and Lisa Barnes, 36. The foursome made up a good but not elite squad sponsored by Stryker, the medical-products company. I spent the first day with Team Stryker, struggling along as an unofficial fifth wheel to taste adventure-racing pain firsthand.

As we power-hiked to the top of the ski hill, my heart rate redlined past 180—awfully high, I thought, for the start of a weeklong race. Even so, a burly woman chugged past me, using a bungee cord to literally tow a male teammate. Jan was pushing hard, too: He wanted to get off the high ridges before nightfall. At the first checkpoint, several teams converged, and we were surprised to see Team GoLite, one of the favorites, arriving at the same time. Someone yelled, "We're only five minutes behind the leaders!" and we all trotted down the trail in a long, panting line.

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Philadelphia-based correspondent BILL GIFFORD wrote about the Tour de Faso bike race in July 2002.

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