Posted on 06/05/08 9:04 PM| by team-admin
Enjoy, a Northern California magazine (www.enjoymagazine.net), published the article below in their June issue. We would like to thank the author, Kerri Regan and the photographer, Kara Stewart, as well as the Enjoy editors, for publicizing our story in their magazine.
ON A QUEST
2008 PRIMAL QUEST MONTANA:
THE WORLD’S MOST CHALLENGING HUMAN ENDURANCE COMPETITION
You wouldn’t believe the way some folks spend their vacations. Take Tom Thomas, for example.
In 2006, the Redding anesthesiologist trekked 420 miles in searing heat through the wilds of Utah. He dined on instant mashed potatoes that he warmed up by sandwiching the plastic bag between his backpack and his body. He caught Z’s an hour at a time, often in wet clothes, mosquito-bitten from head to toe. Sleep deprivation made for some pretty psychedelic visions, he admits. “I was paddling down the Green River at about 1 am and I saw castles and dragons.”
And he can’t wait to take his friends with him when he does it again in a few weeks.
Thomas is the captain of Team NutraMendz/SOAR, which will compete in the 2008 Primal Quest expedition adventure race in Montana from June 21-July 2. The race filled up in the first 10 hours of sign-ups – despite the required $12,500 entry fee. Joining Thomas will be 44-year-old daycare provider Tracy Evans; Bryan Thompson, a 47-year-old nurse; and Kevin Clair, 37, a stone fabricator. Naomi Haslam, 42, a nurse, is the alternate team member.
Thomas says building the team wasn’t about just finding the area’s toughest, strongest athletes. It was about finding people with the drive to blast through the toughest physical and emotional tests of their lives – and the synergy to do it as a team.
“These are the people that I knew had it,” Thomas says.
Primal Quest isn’t a relay. Everybody races together – if someone falters, their teammates will tow them, carry their packs, whatever it takes to keep moving. By the time they’re done, they will have spent 10 days traversing 500 miles and climbing 100,000 feet in elevation.
Course details are kept under wraps until race day, but in 2006, the teams received more than 30 topographical maps, plot points and a race handbook. Teams must navigate to each checkpoint, in order.
And they won’t travel lightly. The five-page mandatory gear list includes backpacks, water purification tablets, all sorts of clothing, compasses, a three-season tent, a medical kit and bear spray. (You never know.)
They do know they can look forward to bicycling on tough, tight, technical singletrack, some of the best in the west. They’ll careen down whitewater rivers fed by snow melt. They’ll ascend, rappel and traverse fixed ropes in the breathtaking alpine forest. The North State is the perfect place to train – they’ve been kayaking and swimming in the icy Trinity River, mountaineering on Mt. Shasta, climbing Lassen Peak and Castle Crags, and traversing the wilderness of Whiskeytown.
Their minds also need conditioning, and they’ve developed rules to guide their decisions when they’re too tired and hungry to think straight. A sample rule: A racer must accept help when two or more teammates offer it; that teammate will soon have a chance to help another.
Most teams that drop out of Primal Quest are defeated by their own team dynamics, Thomas says. The remedy? Humor – and there’s no shortage on this team. One winter day, as they sat in the mud and snow trying to change a flat bicycle tire with frozen hands, Thomas and Evans dissolved into a giggling fit that left them “incapacitated with laughter” for 30 minutes, Thomas says. “It’s easier to laugh than cry.”
They know they’ll need that levity. During the 2006 race, Thomas recalled traversing a 19-mile ridge that was “just knife-edge. And we did it all night in a howling rainstorm,” he says. Altitude sickness made him dry-heave for hours, and the cabin in the distance with hot chili on the stove was just a hallucination.
“You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be race savvy, and you need excellent navigation,” Thomas says. You can spend two hours climbing the wrong ridge, and you need the mental toughness to turn around and try again. “Every team gets lost. Every team gets off course. One team went in circles for 17 hours,” Thomas says.
Team NutraMendz/SOAR is optimistic for a strong finish. “The only thing between us and the finish line is an injury. Not a minor one, but a debilitating injury,” Evans said. “And the bears will have to catch us.”
Adds Thompson: “I’m going to strive to always be in race mode and never in survival mode.”
Regardless of the outcome, they’re sure the experience will be unparalleled.
“All the other things in life you face seem less difficult,” Evans says. “When life throws something at you, it’s like, ‘Is that the best you’ve got?’”
Besides, adds Clair: “What else is there to do?
