Adventure Beat

 

Now in its fifth day of competition, Primal Quest 2006 has thrown every imaginable hardship of terrain and challenge at its 356 competitors, and they have responded with relentless determination.  Race management has found a way to make the challenge harder, even as the lead teams race without sleep and the squads in the back of the pack begin to show signs of wear. Primal Quest's Gordon Wright reports from the field.

Primal Quest 2006 just got harder.

Not satisfied with the degree of punishment already inflicted, course director Don "The Sweet Satan" Mann added a twist early Thursday morning: a challenging orienteering loop that the leaders would have to traverse at night.

417 miles, it seems, won't be enough to finish PQ. In addition, the racers will have to find five orienteering flags, requiring approximately eight miles of hard navigation.

The coed teams of four from 20 nations are already using maps and compasses to navigate PQ's unrelenting terrain. Orienteering is navigation with a higher degree of difficulty, using maps with greater detail to find flags that are much more obscure than the typical PQ checkpoint.

One other nuance? Much of the "O-course" is above 10,000 feet.

The late-breaking addition did not come as a complete surprise to racers who read their official course books thoroughly, and interpreted the clues liberally. The "Notes" portion of the TA9/CP29 description includes the underlined sentence: "Special Instructions may be given."  

Whether or not the leaders intuited the new route, they reached CP29, the transition from a 68-mile mountain bike leg along the infamous Poison Spider trail to the mountain sections that loomed, in a state of utter exhaustion. 

Faced with the dispiriting news of additional mileage, they slept for only the second substantial time since the race began:  Merrill/Wigwam logged a little over three hours, and Nike PowerBlast roughly five.

They left before first light. Merrill's strategy of enforced insomnia has them in the lead, but Nike roused themselves shortly afterward, and the teams are now chasing each other through the woods.

Since CP29 is one of the two places on the course where racers have access to their food bins, they were able to adjust their nutrition strategies accordingly for the estimated eight hours of travel the O-course demands. But it's a fair bet they won't be thrilled with the prospect of carrying a few extra hours of food up a 4,000 foot climb.

It's an equally fair bet that the rest of the teams won't be delighted either, whether they face this challenge by day or by night.

Farther back in the field, things are considerably less stressed, though no less difficult.

CP18 is staffed by volunteer Bill Davis, whose method of whiling away the long hours in between arriving teams is taking thermometer readings.  Yesterday afternoon, the temperature read 100 degrees four feet off the ground and 120 degrees at ground level — a scorching reality that's slowly cooking the feet of the competitors.

Arriving at CP18 and looking like something less than human, one member of Team Nemo was wearing a flip-flop on one foot and a running shoe on the other. Her reply to Bill's obvious question was, "The flip-flop doesn't give me blisters."

Sue Stonitsch, of Team Enviromark/Orthopaedic Specialists, rolled into the checkpoint wearing two flip-flops and towing one of her male teammates.

Kirsten Gum of Team Bulleit, however, most tangibly displayed the determination, ingenuity and lack of modesty common to adventure racers. With her team running out of water, Kirsten stopped at the San Rafael River just before CP18.  The water was a silty brown soup — so Kirsten, the on-air host of OLN's Tour de France coverage, poured it through her underwear to remove the silt, and then put the presumably cleaner water through their purifier.

Team Bulleit, comprised entirely of members of the media, continued on, no worse for wear.

After days of surprisingly low numbers of teams dropping out, the accumulated heat and distance has finally put a dent in the largest field ever to start an expedition-length race.  Primal Quest began with 89 teams; six have withdrawn from competition due to injury or exhaustion. None of the injuries are reported to be serious.  Another eleven teams have lost one teammate, and their three remaining members are trying to complete the course unranked.  Three other squads have been "short-coursed" because they have not made sufficiently swift progress.

That leaves 69 teams still officially in the hunt to be official finishers of Primal Quest Utah.  They have another five and a half days to reach the finish line.  Race management expects that only 30 to 35 of them will make it.

Stay with Adventure Beat for the latest from somewhere in Utah's desert stretches.