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PrimalQuest Sufferfest

Guest post by: Jeff Evans

Article Overview: Through hardship and suffering an adventurer was able to find clarity and strength

PrimalQuest Sufferfest

I will always think of PrimalQuest as my own personal nine- day tribute to suffering. The backcountry competition formerly known as the Eco-Challenge was infamous for the extreme strain it places on the human body and will, and we weren’t disappointed. Erik, Rob, Cammy, and I were one of the hundred teams to enter the 460-mile race taking place around Lake Tahoe and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Although we’d been disqualified in Greenland, we were optimistic that we’d make a good showing.

The first morning started out well enough. We needed to navigate our way around Lake Tahoe in a pair of kayaks, successfully passing checkpoints laid out on the way. The setting was idyllic, with a serene dawn sky and water smooth as glass. We rowed at a good pace, each of us moving in synch with the other like a freshly tuned engine. Our smooth launch was quickly interrupted. A few hours after daybreak, the wind picked up and the water beneath us unsettled itself. Our small boats drifted side-to-side as we tried to maintain a straight course. Our efforts were useless. The surface became more and more choppy until waves were rising above our heads and crashing down upon us. Erik and I paddled furiously just to keep the kayak from capsizing. It was hard to find any direction, much less speed. It was the first morning of a race that would take us over a week, and we were already fighting to survive; finding our way and finishing the race were secondary concerns by then. We simply worked our paddles into the angry water and hoped we were staying on course toward dry ground. Luckily, our path led us to shore in time to enter the next stage.

Exhausted from six hours of trying not to drown, we crawled on to the next in a long string of horrors. The remainder of the first day sent us on a run up Donner Pass, the site of the infamous early-American tragedy. Even in summer, the trail was cold and thick. As tiring as it was to climb uphill, I consoled myself with the fact that it was at least on dry ground. When we had finished the run, just after one a.m., we were rewarded with a mountain bike ride on the old Pony Express. The rocky trail had been somewhat preserved by off-road racers, but it wasn’t in any shape for biking. Erik and I, trying to fight our way through the broken road on a tandem bike, weren’t able to make the final stretch, a two-mile course that rose up sharply to a peak near the first camp. So, with Erik following behind me, I carried the nearly 50-pound bicycle on my shoulders. In that moment, it dawned on me quickly and clearly how stupid adventure racing was. It was to be the last lucid thought I’d have for nearly a week.

When we’d finally reached the peak, we could see other teams ahead of us. Relieved, we decided to follow them into the first checkpoint. After a half-mile jaunt through the rough terrain on the other side of the hill we pulled up to a camp… or so we thought. We’d expected a collection of tents and the trailer that our support team packed with food and supplies. As bad as the first day had been, at least some warm food and a few hours’ rest were in order. Instead, what we found was a collection of a couple dozen racers scattered around the area, most of them lying on the open ground. I walked to the closest, a young woman sitting with her face in her hands. I could hear her weeping, and when I asked what was wrong she simply pointed ahead. I took a few more steps and then understood her pain. Where the camp should have been, there was only a tall barbed wire fence. They’d gotten lost, and we’d followed them. Worse than being lost was realizing the only way out was back up the hill we’d just come down. Our team was too tired to even move, much less carry bikes up hill for an hour or more. We quickly huddled up and made the decision, as the other teams had, to simply spend the night at this spot and pick it up again in the morning. There was no room for sleeping bags while we were biking, so our only protection from the elements were the small foil blankets we’d brought for emergencies. The four of us, tucked into the metallic sheets that looked like pop tart wrappers, arranged ourselves into a small dog pile. We were seven or eight thousand feet up, all of us in wet lycra, and the night air was biting. So, for the first (and hopefully last) time, I spooned a grown man. Between Erik and I, there is an ongoing debate on who spooned who. Aside from the uncomfortable questions about my sexuality, the warmth allowed us to get a solid 90 minutes of sleep before we’d have to get up and race again. After the nap, we woke as the sun was cresting over the surrounding peaks. Ninety minutes wasn’t much time to sleep, but it gave us a chance to gather our strength for the sunrise assault. As we rose into the frosty morning, the only way to keep warm was to charge up the hill we’d put off with the bike on my back. Two hours later we rolled into camp to prepare for the next stage.

The second and third days were all about biking. At first, we took the tandem through heavily-forested alpine trails. Those eventually turned into actual backcountry roads, which we followed for more than a hundred miles. While the pavement was a welcome change, the lack of sleep was beginning to have profound effects on our minds and bodies. I was the first to begin hallucinating, seeing gnomes and elves that would scurry beside the road and hide behind trees. This was followed by images of snakes slithering across the trail. I knew they couldn’t really be there, but still I was petrified they’d bite me if I stepped or rode on top of them. I wasn’t alone in my delusions. Erik was conjuring up memories of his fifth grade class, urging him on and telling him he couldn’t quit. I found out later that hallucinations are a common part of the struggle for adventure racers. Seeing things was only the beginning. It quickly became clear why sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. My head pounded and felt constantly light as we went on and on. We’d stocked ourselves with enough caffeine drinks to last a year, but they weren’t helping. Each sip seemed more of an effort to get to our mouths than it rewarded in extra fuel. Erik and I had resorted to heavy tactics to keep each other awake. We’d run through all of the jokes we knew, talked about the race and mountains we’d been on, and finally, just punched each other to stay awake. After one such pounding in the back, Erik had been telling me some stories from his school. We were making good time, doing 40 miles per hour down a paved stretch. At one point, he got quiet and I wondered if he was choked up thinking about his students. I tried to reassure him. “It’s okay man, let it go.” Still there was no answer. “Erik?” He didn’t reply. Without further warning, the bike lurched to the left. It was almost as if 170 pounds of dead weight had tilted to one side. I started screaming at Erik as loudly as I could. After a few shouts the bike lurched again, this time to the right. “Did you just fall asleep at forty miles per hour?” I screamed at him. “I guess so,” he replied. His nap had nearly killed us, causing our flimsy tandem bike to jump left and then right at high speed, but I couldn’t be upset. I was on the edge of collapse myself, terrified I’d nod off and send us into a neck-breaking accident. Luckily, rest wasn’t far off. We got to camp twenty minutes later for an hour of deep sleep.

The fifth day brought an orienteering course. With nothing more than a map and our sleep-deprived brains, we had to navigate ourselves to a flag buried dozens of miles into some wild bush country. The hike was pure misery, punctuated by a run-in with a wasps’ nest and an impromptu hug with a poison ivy bush. Our team was starting to look a bit ragged, and I was wondering if we would make it to our checkpoints in time. With only a few minutes to spare, we pulled into camp on the sixth morning for an hour’s rest. We were preparing for the next day’s segment, whitewater rafting, when medical problems began to appear. For days we had been drinking lots of Gatorade rather than water. The sugar from the drink, sitting in our dry mouths, was beginning to form painful ulcers. Erik’s feet were bleeding, Cammy was looking at a sprained ankle, and I had poison ivy in my Fruit of the Looms. Still, we knew we only had to make it two more days, and we were determined to finish. After a short rest, we threw ourselves into the river for a whitewater rafting trial. Rob, who was a stronger paddler, got in a boat with Erik, while I got in with Cammy. Then, we set off for the five-hour trip down river. It was during the whitewater section that fatigue nearly killed me. We had already made our way through the more difficult parts of the rush and I had become complacent. As Cammy and I worked our way through and around the rapids, our small kayak got stuck against two rocks. We were lodged sideway against the stones, with about three feet between them. Wanting to free the boat, I put one leg out on the upriver side taking a moment to note the shallow water, but moving quickly. The kayak was firmly pinned against the rocks. Without thinking, I put my other leg out on the same side and almost immediately after my foot touched the rushing water the force of the tide swept my legs right out from under me. I hung on from under the boat, my chest barely above water. Cammy threw her hand out to stop me from being dragged under, but wasn’t able to support my weight against the tide. I didn’t know what was on the other side of the boat hidden beneath the water, but I wasn’t eager to find out. There could be an opening, but there could just as easily have been another stone that I’d smash my head against. I struggled for several seconds, trying desperately to pull myself back up into the boat, but I was falling farther underneath, and I knew it. Finally, my hands slipped off the side of the boat and I was dragged under. The second or two it took me to pass through the water seemed like an eternity. A million thoughts passed through my mind, and yet it was also completely still. When I came out through the other side there was no rock, only an open space in the water. I was able to crawl to my feet and dislodge the boat. As anyone who has narrowly escaped death can tell you, the feeling is beyond description. In that moment, my fatigue melted away and I was overcome with joy. I felt such gratitude to be alive and able to have the experience of the race.

At last, we reached the last stage of the competition, another row through Lake Tahoe. Cold and numb, we climbed into the small watercraft and began to make our way through the water in the dark. We were nearly finished, the feeling of relief beginning to wash over us, when we saw lights in the distance, both ahead and behind. The end of the course was a half-mile ahead, but a couple-hundred yards behind us were the boats of another team. We hadn’t seen another party for several hours, believing the teams behind us had all been disqualified. But here was one more, and they were trying to catch us. Rob, Cammy, Erik, and I looked at each other; no words were needed. After nine days of suffering, we were not going to finish last. We picked up our paddling, but the other boat still gained. They were clearly in a mad dash, as we were, not to be the final finishers. Our arms and shoulders were rubbery and enflamed, but still we tore into the water with every last ounce of strength we could find. When we reached the shore, the other team was no more than a hundred yards behind us. We wept like children, overcome with fatigue and elation in our small win. After sixteen hours of sleep in nine days, I worried we might collapse on the spot, but we managed to hold on a few minutes to congratulate each other and the other final competitors. I think PrimalQuest was a major point of growth for us, even though it might not seem that way to the outside world. After all, we didn’t win a single thing. We’d finished nearly dead last and taken almost twice as long as the winning team. But we did press ourselves to the absolute edge of exhaustion, and still found the will to compete. We’d come to prove we could finish, and we did.

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Article Tags: american tragedy, cammy, checkpoints, dawn sky, daybreak, eco challenge, human body, kayaks, lake tahoe, launch, paddles, primalquest, secondary concerns, sierra nevada, sierra nevada mountains, six hours, small boats, smooth as glass, straight course, synch



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