Adventure Beat

 

Five days of continuous racing in Utah produced the expected results: cooked feet, dehydration and extreme fatigue leading to hallucinations.  Team Merrell/Wigwam, an early leader in the race, has begun to stumble as the effects of sleeplessness provoke navigation and mental errors. With the lead teams closing in on the finish, Primal Quest's Gordon Wright and Ken White report.

The winner of Primal Quest Utah will not be determined by who is more fit, who has better navigation, or who has better skills, gear or toughness.  All of the top five teams have those qualities in abundance.

What determines the winner of the longest, hardest and most lucrative adventure race in the world is strategy.  To be specific, sleep strategy.  Nike PowerBlast is renowned for playing a dangerous game: they bank sleep as if it were gold, taking every opportunity to get horizontal and refresh their bodies.  Their competitors forge ahead, until they become so exhausted that Nike, relentless in their pursuit, passes them again.

Nike's strategy, forged from years of experience and informed by their status as the best adventure racing team ever assembled, has the additional effect of unnerving rival teams.  No lead is comfortable knowing that Nike is rested and hard on your heels.

Of course, "sleep" in adventure racing is relative.  Competitors can, and do, fall asleep involuntarily: in their kayaks, while walking, in mid-conversation and even while riding a mountain bike — a phenomenon that invevitably results in a crash and a rude awakening.

Doctors Bill Webster and David Townes run Adventure Med — the company that coordinates the 40-strong medical team attending to the race — and conduct medical studies at every Primal Quest. In 2004 they decided to explore the phenomenon of sleeplessness and its bizarre and ubiquitous adventure racing corollary, hallucinations.

Of the 192 athletes enrolled in the 2004 PQ, 83% reported hallucinations.  They were as varied and fantastic as dreams: the athletes saw "hockey stick-wielding badgers," "teammates riding past with bathtubs for heads" and "enormous tubs of Cool-Whip hanging from trees."  What is disconcerting about these visions are their powerful reality; in some parts of their rational minds, racers know they're hallucinating.  Yet the visions, while transitory, are tangibly real and sometimes distressing.

The power of the mind to interpret reality and process sensory data crumbles.  Erik Weihenmeyer, the celebrated blind mountaineer who climbed Everest and the other "Seven Summits," competed in Primal Quest Tahoe and reported powerful and persistent auditory hallucinations.

Weirdly, "professional" adventure racing teams — those that you'll find in the top-5 of Primal Quest — report 50% fewer hallucinations than "amateur" teams.

And it is those teams that suffer greatly in Primal Quest, as our embedded reporter Ken White reports:

Back in the early days of Greek theater, playwrights invented a useful little device. If they had written their characters into a corner, a hopelessly tangled situation from which there appeared to be no escape, everything could be solved. A god appeared, hovering over the stage, and used his or her supernatural powers to set everything right. Problems solved, the god ascended back to heaven, and the mortals went on with their pale existences.

Primal Quest CEO Rich Brazeau got to play both playwright and god yesterday, and a bunch of teams got their racing lives set right.

The scene: Somewhere near CP26, on a 65-mile mountain bike leg, Day 5 of PQ, with the temperature hovering around 100 degrees.

The players: Teams Hombres de Maiz, Discovery/Velvet, TNT Canada, Balanced Athlete, your embedded journalist.

The problem: CP26 does not appear to be where CP26 ought to be.

The action: Teams are making like the Marx Brothers, circling around almost at random; popping up in unexpected places from unexpected directions, clustering for head-scratching and then spinning of on different bearings. At one point, Team Hombres de Maiz and Team Discovery approached each other from opposite directions, despite having departed from the same location about 30 minutes earlier.

The crisis: CP26 is less than halfway between CP25 and the next water source. Teams that spend too many hours spinning their wheels fruitlessly risk going into a downward dehydration spiral.

The solution:  Machina, in the form of helicopter

Your embedded journalist is traveling with Hombres de Maiz during this episode. The GPS tracking our team and others clearly indicates that we are making less than zero progress towards finding the CP.

Our navigator, John Markez, is doing the familiar "it looks like it should be here, but maybe it's here, was there a turnoff on the road to the left?" self-doubt routine. The other teams are in varied states of despair, from incipient to on-the-edge, and our attempts at collective intelligence are probably yielding net lower IQs all around.

At the edge of consciousness, a helicopter rises above a distant mesa, thrumming in our direction.

It makes a looping flyover.

"Great," I think, "They're shooting footage for the blooper reel of lost teams riding around aimlessly. Am I wearing recognizable clothing?"

Another helo pops up and begins circling. Someone inside is gesturing and pointing. The copters seem to be trying to herd us and other teams. We oblige like cattle, and the chopper sets down on a level patch nearby. Out pops Rich Brazeau with a couple of cases of water and a box of Nuun electrolyte tablets.

"It's really hot out here," says the vision that doubles as PQ CEO, "And we could see by the GPS tracking that you guys were really struggling."

Some ungrateful wretch amongst our company suggests that the CP is misplotted or misplaced. Rich doesn't say that it's in the wrong place, but he doesn't say it's in the right place either.

It is best not to argue with a man in possession of water, a helicopter, and your race entry.

Brazeau generously offers to hover over the actual CP26 location, so that even we can find it. We do.

We level our kvetching at CP Captain Kris Richard, who obligingly notes that many other teams had trouble finding CP26 as well. Although, he adds pointedly, not Nike PowerBlast or Merrell/Wigwam.  Retired race legend John Howard was out here with a GPS and confirmed the location of this checkpoint, he points out.

"Well, what does John Howard know," one of the Kiwis demands. "These newcomers think they know everything!"

Pride restored, and scapegoats scaped, we push off for CP27.  As we near the ridge line above CP26, we see the helicopter landing again.  In the same place.

Being a god is busy business.

While it is too early to predict a winner for this year's Primal Quest, it is certain that they will cross the finish line sometime tonight.  Will it be Merrell/Wigwam, who led the race for so long?  Or GoLite/Timberland, a mostly-Kiwi squad that has quietly lurked for five days?  Most bets at PQ headquarters are on Nike PowerBlast — three-time defending champions and strategic masters.

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