Participants: Kate White, Cliff White, Starker White, Michael Garrison, John McInnes (TAC)
Strong Machine Adventure Racing competed as Team Strong Machine (Team #60). See USARA coverage here: http://www.usara.com/eco-challenge-coverage.html |
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THE CALL
My cell phone rang while I was heading out on a run on a cold, dark, snowy evening in Winnick Woods, in South Portland. The number that came in on caller ID was from a strange area code and I didn’t pick up the call. A moment later, the ping of a voicemail message hitting my inbox sounded and I listened to the message. A woman named Ashley was calling from Eco-Challenge. She sounded upbeat.
I continued on with my run, a 4.4-mile loop around some woods bordering on a few subdivisions, thinking about the possibility that we had gotten into the revival of the most famous and renowned adventure race in the world. Eco-Challenge aired for six seasons in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it captivated me as a teenager. My dad and I used to watch it in our living room together, eating ice cream, transfixed at what we thought was the craziest sport we had ever seen on TV.
Eco-Challenge introduced us to adventure racing, as it did to pretty much the entire population of current-day racers. But we had no idea we would ever get the chance to compete in it. After all, the show went off the air in 2001, and it didn’t look like it would ever come back, with its creator, Mark Burnett, going on to much bigger hit shows like Survivor, The Apprentice and Shark Tank.
Entranced by the amazing feats we saw on Eco-Challenge, my dad and I signed up for our first adventure race in 2002 (my dad did it for my high school graduation present), along with my best friend. It was the Hi-Tec series, which took place in urban areas around North America. In the New York City version we took part in (in Orchard Park in the Bronx), we biked about 20 miles, hiked five miles, and paddled an inflatable kayak another four miles, managing a mid-pack finish. We were hooked.
We stopped racing for several years as I moved away from home, finished college, and got a job. In the meantime, I met my now-wife, Kate, and moved around the country for our education and early career opportunities. Seven years ago, we were able to move back closer to my dad in the Midwest, and soon after, we began racing as a team of three. Together, we made the commitment to try longer races and to try to get better at navigation, considered the most critical component of AR.
Despite the difficulties we faced – or perhaps because of them – the three of us formed deep, indelible bonds. We learned to trust each other in tough situations, and believe in our ability to think our way out of trouble – or persevere through it – as a team. We each started taking on different roles within the team – Kate as lead navigator, Starker (my dad) as bike mechanic and gear guru, and myself as team mule and motivator.
Along the way, we got better at the sport. We became faster at hiking off-trail to checkpoints hidden in the woods. We became stronger paddlers as we worked as a team to paddle in sync. And on biking stages, we used drafting and towing techniques to level out the differences in our paces. Most importantly, we became more confident navigators, spending less time stopped and staring at our map and compass and more time moving efficiently toward and between the orange-and-white flags that typically mark an adventure racing course.
The most amazing part of it all was the bonds we formed as a family. The three of us no longer required words, but rather brief glances at our expressions and reactions, to understand how someone was feeling. Starker gave his speech at our wedding about adventure racing (where he famously called Kate “one tough bitch”). Adventure racers talk about the bonds they have with their teammates as being akin to sharing a foxhole during a shelling; having that type of relationship with both my father and my wife was (and remains) something so powerful and so important in my life.
So when the news circulated that Eco-Challenge was being revived and that applications would soon open, of course I took it upon myself to apply on behalf of Starker and Kate. Thinking the show’s producers might find a family-themed team appealing, I also signed up my brother, Luke, who had raced with us during the 2015 Gold Rush AR, a 30-hour race where we had finished second overall but where Luke swore at the finish line he’d kill me if I ever made him do another one.
A couple of weeks after sending in our applications, which consisted of a bunch of questions about our backgrounds and experience, as well as a video, I got that fateful call from the Eco-Challenge producer. I called back once I got home from my run, and Kate and I did a little dance in our kitchen before calling Luke and Starker to give them the news. It was pretty entertaining to hear their reactions. Starker repeated “Are you f’ing kidding me?” about 20 times in a row, with long pauses in between. Luke kept repeating, “I knew it.”
Fast-forward a few months later, and Luke made the difficult decision to bail due to bad timing; the launch of his new company was slated for October, the month after Eco. Fortunately, we were given the OK by the producers to pick a new teammate of our choosing. After much discussion and a few emails, we settled on Michael Garrison, an experienced and talented racer from Indiana, whom we knew from our racing days in the Midwest and from his glowing reputation in the AR community. As a bonus, he brought along his friend and fellow Hoosier John McInnes as our TAC, or crewperson, a position that had long been cut out of adventure racing but which Eco-Challenge was reviving.
Through the summer, we tried to stay abreast of the frequent emails coming from the race organization, which contained a frustratingly paltry amount of actual, usable information. Eventually, we learned that in addition to the standard AR disciplines of trekking and mountain biking, we would be paddleboarding, sailing local boats known as camakaus, outrigger canoeing, whitewater rafting, and doing ropes work including ascending and rappelling. We were required to get a number of certifications, including wilderness first aid (x2), whitewater proficiency, and a climbing cert. Initially, we also had to find a sponsor, but in the middle of summer, we got a one-line email that made our month. Eco-Challenge would be awarding every team a $50,000 stipend for use on the race, in the form of four checks sent to the team captain. Woohoo money! We joked that this got us as close to being professional adventure racers as we would ever be.
Once we booked our flights (through a Hollywood booking firm no less!), it started to feel real. Getting confirmation from Kate’s parents that they would watch our son Wilder cemented the feeling. We were really going to Fiji to compete in Eco-Challenge!
On September 6, at 5 a.m., Kate and I stepped off the plane at the Nadi Airport, cleared customs (a concern given we were each carrying around 200 lb.s of gear), and stepped outside into the greeting of a golden sunrise. We had arrived.
We boarded an Eco-Challenge labeled bus and waited as a bunch of other racers from our flight boarded after us. I recognized Mark and Travis Macy, both adventuring legends. There was a team of hard-core backcountry skiers from Utah. And Jen Segger, Kate’s coach and one of the most badass racers in the sport, sat down near us for a chat.
The ride to the hotel took around 15 minutes. It brought us through downtown Nadi and to a posh, brand-new beachfront hotel, The Pullman Nadi Bay. In the lobby, we found our teammates waiting for us. They had all gotten in the day before and led us to our rooms to drop off our stuff, then we grabbed breakfast at a buffet that was jam-packed with a good portion of the best adventure racers from around the globe. We hadn’t slept much on the plane ride and it definitely felt like we were dreaming when we lined up for a coffee behind Nathan Fa’avae and for eggs behind Mike Kloser.
Over breakfast, we looked over our itinerary for the pre-race tasks we needed to complete. Our skill testing didn’t take place for a couple of days, so we had time to settle in and get a feel for what this experience was going to be like. After the meal, we hopped in our rental van – which would be our official support vehicle for the actual race itself – and drove back into Nadi to do a grocery shop. We had done our homework on where to go and we had found a very decent market, with plenty of options for the variety of calorically dense, nutritionally questionable food we were looking for, from candy bars to ramen noodles to randomly-flavored potato chips (I had a hunch the balsamic vinegar and onion chips would prove to be a hit on day five.)
We got back to the hotel and began to sort it out, then took some time out for a swim and an early dinner at the hotel’s noodle bar. Kate and I hadn’t slept much so we called it an early night.
The next couple of days were filled with gear sorting and resorting, additional trips to the supermarket, team meetings and informal strategy sessions, and a few swims in the pool and ocean. We went out for a great dinner in Nadi and got seated at the table next to the Stray Dogs, the only team that had done every Eco-Challenge thus far and full of legends, including Marshall Ullrich, Adrian Crane, and Dr. Bob Haugh. We were also sitting next to the New Zealand pilots who would be manning the five helicopters providing TV and medical coverage of the race.
The final few days before the race were more scheduled, with skills testing on ropes (very friendly staff and forgiving of my lack of confidence, though my teammates' skills erased any doubts the certifiers may have had that we would be OK) and an informational clinic on sailing and righting the camakaus, the indigenous watercraft that would feature in the race (seemed easy enough once you grasped the theory that the ama or outrigger had to stay to windward). After the clinics, I had my moment of feeling like a reality TV contestant as I was driven to a golf course around 20 minutes away from the resort and interviewed about the team and its goals in front of a five-person television crew. It was pretty nerve-wracking because I couldn’t shake the thought out of my head that anything I said could be broadcast to a television audience of just around 20 million.
On September 8, we had a few final errands to take care of, such as getting our PFDs inspected and cleared on buoyancy and packing our bikes away on the Eco-Challenge trucks that would take them to a remote location, whereabouts unknown. At this point, all we knew was that we would be starting off on the water, and that we had a remote TA where we would only have access to whatever we wanted to pack into a 120-liter dry bag. We got a hot tip from our friends on Team Bones that it would be a good idea to stash lots of food and water in our bike boxes, and so we made a last-minute rush to the boxes to load them full of sundries. Then we had our turn at being fashion models, as we made power poses for a professional photographer taking pictures for the show’s “X-Ray” file (an Amazon extra feature that gives you more information that you’d ever want to know about any television show on the network).
At 6 p.m., the long-awaited race briefing was set to begin in the hotel’s conference hall. We were told to show up in our uniforms, which in our case, were pearly white. We were greeted by a greased-up topless traditional male dancing troupe and a pretty excited group of 66 teams of five wearing t-shirts of every color. Bear Grylls jumped onstage and everyone went wild, and then he gave a motivational speech intended to psych everyone up – not that it was much needed. Bear was followed by Scott Flavelle, the race director, who gave tantalizing hints at some of the course but didn’t reveal much, and then the medical director and Lisa Hennessy, the show’s producer. We left the briefing not much wiser than when we had arrived, but feeling ready for the challenge ahead.
The day before the race was largely spent in the car, as we had to be out of the hotel by 7:30 a.m. and on the road for the six-hour drive across the island to the remote start location. Thankfully, we had our sweet mega-van that John had scored, and so we rode in comfort eastward on the island’s southern coast until we reached the city of Suva. We stopped there for lunch at a gas station, along with a number of other teams, then jumped back in the van for another hour or so until we reached our destination, a village that had been absolutely taken over by television, with scores of Eco-Challenge vehicles parked everywhere, and several separate tent cities set up in the fields all around. We were directed to a spillover camp for the teams with the higher numbers (we were team #60) and we found our tenting spot in a recently cleared sugarcane field in the middle of the blazing sun. Reluctantly, we set up camp, trying in vain to avoid the spokes of sugarcane stumps that were pretty much everywhere. We got John’s massive tent up and then went around and chatted with our neighbors, including the Iron Cowboys, composed of a group of friends including James Lawrence, who had completed 50 Ironmans in 50 days and was featured in a Netflix special, and Sonja Weick, a former professional triathlete. They were incredibly nice and asked for a bunch of tips on how to survive an adventure race – I don’t know if I helped or hurt them with my “advice” but they ended up finishing so I’ll take that as a win. We also chatted with Team Onyx, the first all African-American team in Eco-Challenge, and all amazingly fun and nice people who we enjoyed getting to know both before and after the race.
I wandered over to the main village on the excuse of picking up our tracker, but with the side mission of trying to find some shade, as I was burning quickly in the mid-day sun. The scene in the village was pretty amazing, with teams’ tents set up all around a central pavilion flanked by a stage. I hung out with Checkpoint Zero for a while, chatting with our friends from the U.S. race scene about how cool it was to be at the start line of an Eco-Challenge, a shared dream of pretty much anyone who has ever done an adventure race.
While we hung out, hurried preparations were taking place on the stage and in the grassy space in front of it. As the afternoon dragged on, tiki torches were spiked into the dirt and a podium was placed center-stage. Thirty flagpoles flanked each side of the stage, ready to be strung with each competing nation’s flag. Masses of locals began filing into the open side areas, with some racers sitting down to chat with them or kicking around soccer balls with the hordes of kids there for what must have been billed as the party of the decade for this sleepy Fijian village. I spoke to a couple of women who were sitting down awaiting the festivities and they told me they had walked two hours to get there, and had a two hour walk back in the dark after the show to return home.
Finally, over the loudspeakers mounted around the village square (which now felt more like an amphitheater), team captains were told to head to the stage. Once we filed in, the flags were raised in a a military-like ceremony, and an emcee took over from there, introducing a few individual teams with interesting back stories and asking them getting-to-know-you questions for the benefit of the local audience. As a team captain, I was excited to be on-stage because there was cold water, fresh juice, and some light snacks to be had. Most importantly, it was shady – I had already gotten sunburned while sitting with Checkpoint Zero in the blazing sun, which gave me some slight shivers of fear for how the sun and heat might affect us during the race.
As the sun set, an elaborate cava ceremony began, with oiled-up, bare-chested warriors in grass skirts performing elaborate rituals involving a wooden bowl full of the numbing spirit, which is a big deal in Fiji. That was followed by speeches, including one by a Fijian government minister, who shed a bit of light on why Fiji was chosen as the race’s location. She mentioned that the national government was giving MGM Studios 75 cents back on every dollar it spent on production. Mark Burnett, Eco-Challenge creator and MGM chairman, responded in kind, thanking Fiji for its munificence and praising the Fijian people as “the friendliest on Earth.” Knowing the race was going to go through some remote villages, we were excited and relieved to hear that they might be amenable to us asking them for help with food, water, and potentially shelter. MB ended his speech with an invitation for all in attendance to join him for a feast, and a deep line formed almost immediately for the buffet on the stage. We ate in a bit of a rush, as it was now very dark outside and some mosquitos were making things uncomfortable. We then skedaddled back to our tent, prepped everything for the morning, and set our alarm for a 4:30 a.m. wake-up.
When the alarm went off, it was still pitch dark outside, and very humid. We got dressed and grabbed our prepared breakfast bars, then walked over to the square, where the teams were assembling. We chatted with CP0 and the Yogaslackers for a while, waiting for instructions on what to do next. Then we started a procession down a couple of dirt roads, leading eventually to the outskirts of a grassy field containing a stage of sorts. We had to wait until the sun came up a bit to enter the area so the videographers could get the shot, and there was about 20 minutes of waiting until we could proceed. While we waited, I chatted with Nicholas Mulder of Cyanosis, who I had met at Raid Gallaecia a few years back.
Finally, we were given the go-ahead to enter the arena, and we proceeded slowly into the grassy area, forming a rough semi-circle around the stage, which was adorned with a big screen covered with a red sheet. Apparently, it was the course map.
More waiting ensued. This gave us a good chance to scope out the competition, which included most of the world’s top racers. We sat down next to Thunderbolt AR from Australia and talked for a bit about what to expect out of the first leg, which promised to be a long, hot boat trip somewhere (we still were not sure where we were going). Catching many eyes was the Russian team “The Science of Winning,” which had brought a large posterboard sign with their team name and each teammate had at least a 70-pound expedition-sized pack, filled to the gills with God-knows-what. It was quite silly looking. We didn’t know how they would fit all their gear into the camakaus, which we had been told were incorporated somehow into the first leg of the race.
“They clearly overpacked,” Kate said, in the biggest understatement in AR history.
Soon, helicopters began making the rounds of the arena. Mark Burnett landed a few hundred yards away and began talking with some of the staff. Then, a roar of engines came from the east and five helicopters flying in formation did a fly-by, turned around, and dropped the famous silhouette of Bear Grylls into a nearby field. He came running up to the stage…and the wind from the helicopter rotors blew the red cover off the map. Re-do! Bear ran back to the chopper and they repeated the process. This time, successfully. The map revealed a course that snaked out to sea, back to land, up into the mountains and down a river, then across the southern Fijian island of Viti Levu, from the wet side of the island to the dry side on the west, and out to sea once again for a finish on a remote island.
Bear gave a short speech, with some inspirational tips about footcare and teamwork, echoing his remarks from the race briefing. Then the race director, Kevin Hodder, got onstage and gave us a quick run-down of what to expect out of the races first 12 hours – we would start in our camakaus, heading out to an island off the coast for a trek, followed by more camakau. He wished us good luck, then told us to head to our boats, which were down a short path past the arena, parked in a neat row along a riverbank. On our walk, we passed Mark Burnett, who shook our hands and wished us good luck. It was at this point that we officially declared ourselves Eco-Challengers!
At some point along our walk, Garrison and Kate picked up a scroll of maps and when we got to our assigned boat (#60), almost near the front of the line, they put them down on the ground and began to plot our course while Starker and I readied the boat for departure, unwrapping and rigging the various sailing gear that was tightly lashed down. I had a heck of a time trying to pull up our mooring, which seemed to be cemented to the river bottom, but finally Starker was able to help me yank it up. It wasn’t long before everyone got on-board, with Starker sitting up front in the bow, Garrison, then Kate and I. The boats were pretty comfortable, with nice, deep cockpits and enough storage to make them feel luxurious compared to some of the other contraptions we’ve been forced into for paddling legs of adventure races.
THE RACE BEGINS
We heard a countdown begin and when it hit zero, unexpectedly enough to scare us, a cannon went off. We steered off to the side of the river after Garrison, sagely, suggested we take it easy and let the teams vying for the win get by us. In the tight quarters of the narrow river, the scene quickly devolved into mayhem. There were collisions as some teams forgot their boats were much wider than typical canoes and their ama, or outrigger, jammed into their neighbors. In front of us, we saw the elite French team capsize, not 100 meters into the race. Another quarter-mile down the river and we saw the famous Kiwis themselves, the six-time world champions from Team New Zealand, go boom up and splash into the water. We continued to paddle down the river, with Kate referencing a cloth rag with a handdrawn map containing the first 10 kilometers of the racecourse to the river’s mouth at the Pacific Ocean.
It was around 8 a.m. when we started and already hot, and I know Starker at least was a bit jealous of the folks who had gotten their morning swim. Hundreds and hundreds of locals lined different parts of the banks of the river, especially near the villages we paddled by. Many were cheering, and we cheered back. A couple of miles down the river, we saw our friends from Ireland AR capsize, their bright green jerseys becoming a little less painful on the eye when submerged under blue Fijian river water. We continued on our way, surrounded by other racers, eventually seeing those famous Kiwis, seemingly recovered from their bath, pass us to starboard. Garrison told me to quit my awe-struck staring as I kept inadvertently steering towards them.
After an hour-plus of paddling, we hit the mouth of the river, which widened into a wide, shallow estuarine that we had to paddle around, following navigational posts. Ahead loomed a gigantic camakau, a replica of a historical barge that was used for royal ceremonies, I believe. The ship marked the official point at which we were allowed to raise our sail. From here we had what Kate estimated as a 20-mile paddle north to an island containing CP 1, then another 15 miles to CP 2 on a larger island, which had a 13-mile trek waiting for us, followed by another 30-mile paddle to the end of the camakau section. We assumed that would take us around 24 hours, and we were nearly correct.
After we got the sail up, we spent the next 20-30 minutes drifting to the east, making no headway as we successfully raised the sail, then questioned why we weren’t moving. I forget who said it but it became obvious once it was said: there was no wind. Now it made perfect sense! That was why we had seen the front boats paddling off into the distance without raising their sails.
So, forlornly, we took up our outrigger paddles and began our long paddle, around 15 to 20 miles. It was full heat of day when we finally made it to CP 1, after passing over beautiful azure seas, visible coral reefs, and past a bunch of other camakaus that had gotten ahead of us while we messed around with the sail. Speaking of the sail, we had kept it up to shield us from the intense sun, and it provided enough shade to keep us at least partially sane. After staring at the island in the far distance for many hours, it suddenly got very close very quick, and Kate jumped off to get water, while I got our passport signed and we all took a quick pee break. Then back in the boat for another 3-4 hour paddle to another island further north. At one point, where there was a break in the islands to our east, we actually were able to sail for 10 or so minutes, but passing to the lee of another island, that reverie puffed out. But we still made good time and passed five or so teams, moving from near the back of the field to having at least 15-20 teams behind us by the time we rounded the corner of the island and paddled the last 30 minutes into the TA, where a couple of race staff grabbed our boat and moored it while we waded 100 or so feet ashore, checked in, and headed out for our trek, with about 45 minutes of daylight left, making it around 5:30 p.m.
The trek started on a dirt road – from its appearance and traffic, it was the island’s central thoroughfare. We mostly hiked but sometimes jogged down a long flat stretch south of the TA, catching up to AR Georgia, who we spent much of the rest of the trek with. At one point, a green pickup truck cruised at us slowly as Mark Burnett stuck his head out of the driver’s side window and asked us how we were doing…yet another unforgettable Eco milestone hit! This was dusk, and soon after, it was dark and the headlights went on. After around 10K on the road, winding through a few villages, we turned right after a bridge and headed uphill on a singletrack trail, hitting a manned CP where we passed a few teams that were resting. We then headed uphill on a nice trail tucked behind a friendly Australian team and actually followed flagging marking the path (not sure, but I believe it was because they didn’t want us getting lost and causing trouble by wandering into any village’s property or through their crops). After climbing for about 30-45 minutes (and stopping to purify some water with our Katadyn B-Frees), we topped out on a mountain with a view of the harbor. We saw a team in sleeping bags and wondered what was going on – it was very early in the race to be sleeping – when we saw it was the Yogaslackers. We found out later Daniel Staudigel had gotten heatstroke and they decided to take one of their sleep stops at the manned CP to recover. We began descending down the somewhat muddy slope along with AR Georgia and then with Team Israel. I had gotten to know their team captain when we went back-to-back doing our pre-race interviews and then had to wait for a while to be picked up and driven back to the hotel, and we chatted a bit more, and then I talked with his teammate, who was an Olympic sailor. The team thought she would be their secret weapon in the camakaus, but with no wind, her sailing skills weren’t much use.
We arrived back at the bustling TA and our boats at around 10 p.m. and tried not to waste any time wading back out to our boats, which had been parked and anchored about 100 feet offshore in shallow water. We got underway under a clear sky and waveless, windless conditions – beautiful and safe, but a bit disheartening as we knew now we had another 30 miles of paddling in front of us. But first, we had the freediving challenge to collect our golden medallion, which required the deployment of our own secret weapon – Starker.
In the pre-race briefing, we had been told that there was a metal medallion on each of the five stages of the race that we needed to retrieve and bring with us to the next camp. In order to finish, we needed to collect all five medallions, each with a different theme representing each stage (I believe they were ocean, river, jungle, highlands, and islands). For the first medallion, we were told it was a skin-diving challenge, and Starker, a lifelong swimmer who had set several Wisconsin state records in high school and who literally wears Speedos as underwear – was designated as our pick for retrieving the medallion from 25 feet below the surface of the ocean, in what turned out to be the middle of the night.
We weren’t quite sure what to expect when we pulled up to where the medallion was marked on the map – a buoy in the ocean about 50 feet out from the island hosting CP 1 – but there were three teams hanging out near an eerie light coming from beneath the waves. We went over but right as we were getting close, in a flash, Starker stripped off his clothing, revealed he was wearing a Speedo (this was not surprising), put on a facemask as he slid into the water, took a deep breath, and disappeared. The three of us remaining on the camakau didn’t know what to do. We hadn’t had time to formulate a plan or talk about what Starker was looking for. Twenty long seconds passed. Then 10 more. Finally, we saw bubbles over a darkening silhouhette backlit by the submerged floodlight. Quietly, Starker surfaced, but something was weird. He didn’t respond to our calls of “Did you get it?” and “Do you need help?” He struggled to swim over to the boat, with one side of his body seemingly not functioning and his head tilted askance. I was sure he had had a stroke. Then he lifted his left hand and hefted three medallions into the boat, where they landed with a clang. Lightened of his load, we were able to haul him back onboard, then turn toward the beach to check in at the CP. Starker said he had grabbed three of the metal, 5-lb. medallions to “make sure,” but we decided to leave two with the woman manning the CP, with our apologies. No way we were going to carry three of those heavy bastards around Fiji with us – one was heavy enough!
Starker was a bit chilled from his swim so he got dressed in all his mandatory layers while we pointed our bow to the west and the east coast of Vanua Levu, the main, south island of Fiji. There were a bounty of stars popping out through the clouds and not too many lights to spoil the beautiful view across the water to the islands dotting the coast. On the downside, there were not too many lights by which to navigate. Steering primarily by compass, we entered the weird mental place of paddling on a large body of water where it feels like you’re not moving. But judging from the blinking red lights affixed to every camakau in the race, we were certainly doing better than we had been earlier in the day; it now looked like we were comfortably in the middle of the pack. We sang songs and tried to keep a good rhythm to our strokes, with Starker taking an occasional break to stretch his back out on the plank of wood between the camakau and the ama. We sang and talked and sang and Kate and Garrison occasionally stopped to make a navigational calculation, but all in all we made great time and pulled up at the TA at around 5 a.m., right as the first hint of light began to brighten the Fijian sky.
There must have been at least 10 teams in the TA when we arrived. We found fresh water and filled up, then began eating and prepping for the next stage, which looked like a 30-mile paddleboard north for a few miles along the coast and then west for a ways up a river. Starker and I made our way over to a pile of deflated paddleboards and waited as the “Brazilian Bombshell” team of Eco-Challenge lore, and then the very talented team of Columbia Vidaraid, took turns blowing up their watercraft and selecting paddles. We were surprised to see them as they’re usually toward the front of the pack, but they must have been having some problems (we learned later that a bunch of teams had gotten heatstroke from going out too hard in the hot midday sun the day before).
We blew the paddleboards up to 8 PSI and Starker set to work attached the skegs to the bottoms of the boards. Then we checked out of the TA, made our way down to the water, and set out in that beautiful time of day when it’s light but the sun hasn’t yet risen. We were quickly joined by the Irish team, including our very non-Irish friend Mark Lattanzi. We had a good chat, all trying various novel ways of paddling the boats that might make them move a little faster than molasses. Clearly, none of us residents of the north had had as much time to practice as those living in more tropical climes, as Shubi and the rest of the ”Bombshells” caught up to us and passed us like were standing still.
Following the Brazilians, we spotted the mouth of the river we needed to go up, and we saw a few teams ahead of us struggling with what looked like a swift current. We headed toward a sand bar and dismounted for a bit to lug our boats rather than paddle them. A helicopter came by and started filming the Brazilians fighting to make any headway upstream. Then, remounting my board, I began struggling mightily, with my bow swinging wildly from side to side with each paddle-stroke. I grabbed onto some mangrove roots on the side of the river and I felt under my board; my skeg had disappeared. I must have jarred it loose dragging it on the sand bar. Suddenly, I was the slowest one in the group. And that was saying something because we were hardly moving at all, as we fought against a visible gushing of water moving in the wrong direction.
We looked at the shoreline – all impassible mangrove swamp for at least 100 yards on either direction. It would cost a lot of time and effort to see if there was more level ground further in than that. With no other apparent option, we kept paddling, working our way up the river at a crawl. Then, disaster struck again as Garrison announced his boat was not manoevering and I knew instantly that his skeg had dropped as well. We all stopped again, holding onto the mangrove roots as we made sure the skegs on Kate and Starker’s boards were screwed on tight. But as a team, we were potentially already screwed; with only two working paddleboards, and with the river’s current not abating at all, it was going to be a real challenge to continue.
Improvising, we got out our stretchy tow ropes and slung them from the two working paddleboards to the two deficient ones. Garrison and I manned the front boards with Starker and Kate hanging on the back and steering from their knees. It was still slow, but it was better than before. Unable to stop paddling even for a stroke without losing progress to the current, we continued to work our way upstream. We got passed by several teams we didn’t recognize, and one we did: YogaSlackers, who gave us an update on Dan’s about with heatstroke and their bivvy on top of the mountain.
We continued to work our way slowly up the river, weaving back and forth, partially from the towing and partially in a fruitless attempt to find anyplace where the current was less forceful. It started getting hot. At around noon, it was scorching. Then, like a mirage, we saw a group of young men standing on the side of the river, underneath a bridge. As we got closer, they waived a couple of machetes in the air and started yelling “coconuts!” Unable to resist, paddled over and swilled down three coconuts and were instantly satisfied, the cool milk dripping down our chins. I paid them five Fijian dollars and we moved on. Finally, whether the tide switched or we just got far enough up the river so that its draining force wasn’t as strong, the current started to ebb and we could make faster progress.
The river narrowed and the foliage on either side of the river presented a little more shade on the river, cooling us from roasting down to a slow boil. Kate let us know we had just one kilometer left and we picked up the pace, eager to get off the river and be done with the slow misery of SUPping. But after at least three kilometers of surging around every bend and searching eagle-eyed for the takeout, the peanut gallery began to get grumpy. The many turns in the river had misled Kate into underestimating the distance left, and what we thought should have been 15 minutes tops of paddling turned into more than an hour.
By the time we saw the muddy ramp leading uphill river left into a small village, at around 3:30 p.m., we were more exhausted than ecstatic. Complicating matters was that right as we finished the leg, it began to rain, hard. We got directions from some locals across a floating bridge (where we had a less than friendly encounter with the impatient Costa Rican team, which may or may not have involved me shouting an ironic “Pura Vida” in their direction) to the somewhat hidden TA, where our bike boxes were waiting for us. We dragged them under a small tarp hung outside a house with a porch filled with other teams, and began trying to simultaneously get food and dry clothes, not get soaked from the rain, and assemble our bikes, all while jockeying with another team for precious dry tarp space.
The effort was just too much for me, especially after towing Kate on her broken SUP for 10 hours, and the team graciously dismissed me to the porch while they took turns assembling bikes, as doing more than one at a time was impossible in the limited space. Consequently, a transition that should have taken us 45 minutes to an hour took us more like an hour and a half. We then had to drag our bike boxes all the way up a hill to the drop off point, and feel the disheartening sadness of our nice dry clothes quickly getting soaking wet. But we were excited to be off on the on the next activity, and the hordes of villagers shouting encouraging bula’s, as well as the sun peaking back out in for about 20 minutes of beautiful sunsetting daylight, put some of the wind back in our sails.
The bike ride initially took us on a dirt track ascending and descending some steeply rolling hills, which eventually led us to an improved road. After an hour or so of that, we were reluctantly forced to leave its comforts to take a singletrack route carved out of the jungle. Only a few hundred feet into it, it became unrideable. It seemed like someone had come in with a hose and wet down the entire route. The resulting mud was ankle to knee deep and slippery as ice underfoot. After 30 minutes of mostly walking, we hit a stream and spent a few minutes trying to clean off our bikes. We shouldn’t have bothered. Right after that, we hit a steep uphill that was as slick as a Slip ‘N Slide. The best strategy for ascending was to try to find a little grass to step on for traction, but progress was slow. At one point, we had to form a bucket brigade to haul our bikes up a particularly treacherous section.
Forty-five minutes later, the ascent began to calm a bit as we came out of the jungle and into a grassy area bordering a barbed wire fence. In the distance, we heard dance music and saw lights flashing through the trees. We couldn’t figure out what it was – a surprise TA? Some youngsters partying? But we were walking right toward the sound so we figured we’d find out soon enough. When we popped off the trail, we found ourselves in a village and were immediately overwhelmed by lights and sound. At least 100 local villagers were cheering and dancing, and screaming dozens of questions at us at once. Even though it was past 1 a.m. and at least 30 teams had passed through over the previous 12 hours, it was still a full-on Eco-Challenge party.
“Where are you from?” at least two dozen of them shouted.
“U.S.A.,” Kate responded.
“U.S.A.! Go U.S.A.!” they all began to shout.
The partiers came in for hugs and dancing, took pictures of us with their cell phones, offered us coffee, and literally put delicious hot and fresh sweet rolls in our mouths. Kate got a marriage proposal. It was a wild, magical, spirit-lifting experience, and we were loathe to leave, but we had to keep moving. More villagers greeted us and cheered as we biked through. This was the “bula” experience we had been told about – the warm and heartfelt welcome provided by every Fijian we met on during our time in that very special country.
We ran into a bit more mud on the soft sandy roads leading down the ridge out of town, but managed to make it to a swollen river, and an interesting scene, with some racer tents up on the near riverbank, a bunch of small and long wooden boats lined up on the short, and a steep, muddy embankment on the other side. As we approached the scene, a race volunteer flagged us down and let us know that severe weather had stopped the race. Many teams had been stuck at this spot for hours, he said, but we were now permitted to continue on to the next CP, which for us was Camp 1. We attempted to clean our bikes off in the river, then got in a boat with our bikes, and were transported across the river and deposited in a knee-deep mud pit on the other side. Once again, we had to crawl up a steep muddy slope with our bikes, but it was a short misery as we crested the embankment and laid our bikes down in a thicket as several of us took a bathroom break. We were passed here by Jesse Tubb and Josh Forester’s US military team, but even though I said hi by name, they were in go/zombie mode and I don’t think they recognized us. We got back on our bikes a few moments later, but didn’t make it far, as Starker’s bike experienced a bad chain suck not more than a minute after we got started. We struggled with it for five minutes, then by chance (crazy chance – it was around 2 a.m.), a utility or garbage truck pulled up next to us. We asked them if they had any tools and they just so happened to have a screwdriver that we were able to use to clear the chain without breaking it. We then made solid time down a flat road for a bit, before turning onto a steady climb that killed our pace. We kept expecting to see Camp 1 but it just wouldn’t appear. We began to imagine every light we saw on our right side was the camp, then we’d get closer and see it was just a house. Our weary minds continued to play games for 30 solid minutes before we saw the unmistakable sight of our first Eco-Challenge camp. We should have known it would be obvious and we wouldn’t miss it – hundreds of tents set up, floodlights in certain places, helicopters, and people moving all around camp, despite the late hour. We crossed a bridge over a large river, checked in with the volunteer, admired the wooden leaderboard, and were led by our TAC John into our welcoming campsite, with hot food and cold sodas waiting.
CAMP 1 TO CAMP 2
We were all exhausted, but we all ate cheesy instant potatoes topped with refried beans, and afterwards, I took the time to take a quick rinse in the river while Garrison did maps with Kate and John gave us a race update. Severe flooding had nearly swept away part of the camp; the next stage, a canyoning section, had high water levels and some teams had gotten close to being trapped. A few teams had to retreat back to the camp and were being given a special 6 a.m. start time for the next morning. We were allowed to start at 8 a.m., but we had to be ready to go by then or we would not be allowed to continue. The entire race course was shut down until the 6 a.m. start, so the leaders were hunkered down somewhere ahead on the course. We got to sleep by 3:30, and set a 6:30 a.m. alarm. This would work out perfectly – we would get credit for our first of five mandatory 3-hour rests, and be able to start early enough in the morning so we would make the most of the next day. We went to sleep feeling proud of ourselves for persevering and for putting ourselves in good position to continue to survive the course and the race.
Waking up the next morning, after three hours of sleep following 42 hours of nonstop racing, was not the most pleasant feeling. But we reminded ourselves we were in Eco-Challenge and that got the adrenaline pumping enough to get us out of our sleeping bags. Breakfast was hot and delicious, including coffee and fresh fruit – a rarity in the middle of an adventure race – and we remarked how nice it was to have a TAC to take care of us, but John couldn’t hear us, because he was busy at the river trying to wash the mud out of our shoes and bikes. What a guy. After hitting the port-a-potties, getting lubed up with chamois and sunscreen, and triple-checking to make sure all our gear was packed and ready to go, we headed out.
At 7:59, we hustled to the trailhead, where us and another team (ARGeorgia?) lined up for the restart. We were given the go and pushed ahead into the bush, across some local farms, walking delicately around the plants, and then finding our river, which we had to follow up into the canyon. As we worked our way upstream on a nice footpath, the cliffs on either side got more vertical and dramatic. Not for the first time and not for the last, I wished I had been allowed to bring my camera. Finally, the walls of the canyon forced us up onto one side, and when we came to a six foot drop into the canyon (with crystal clear water, so you could see the depth and know the jump was safe), we realized we were about to get very wet. But we knew it was coming and had prepared our bags so everything was waterproofed – or so we hoped. Starker was the first to jump in and as usual, he looked the most comfortable in the water. I plunged in last and was surprised by how cold the water was for a tropical island. We worked our way upstream, gripping onto the walls of the canyon and pulling ourselves forward against the forceful current. We saw a couple of photographers and they told us the water was running much higher than the day before due to the heavy rain that had come through. But we were still able to make progress up the river, using the occasional up-and-over a rock feature and subsequent cold plunge.
At the top of the canyon, it evened out a bit, and there was a manned CP, as well as the stage’s medallion (river), and ARGeorgia, but by the time we had checked in with the volunteer, they had left. It turned out we were the last team to arrive at this point, as every team behind us was rerouted on a road directly to the bili-bilis ahead (though there was no short-course marked in the final standings).
Garrison and Kate took a few moments here to make sure they got their bearings, as the next section was supposed to travel through thick jungle for five kilometers, and we weren’t sure there would be any trail. When we got going, we found a stream heading in the right direction and followed it for a while, then to another stream junction, when we followed for a bit, then over some easier vegetation, and at this point, I realized we were in the thick Fijian jungle, with only our compasses and Garrison’s keen navigational ability to steer us through. Fortunately, that was more than enough, as he guided us up a reentrant right onto a small trail going in the right direction. It must have originally been a game path, but after being tromped on by at least 150-200 racers ahead of us, it was now a discernable (and very muddy) trail.
We followed it up a bit of a hill, but on the far side, the steepness and muddiness of the trail was a scary sight to behold. Garrison went first and was able to make it look doable, but we all ended up sliding down on our backsides, resulting in intensely unpleasant mud and stick enemas. But while painful, we were seemingly getting the hang of this uniquely Fijian experience when disaster nearly struck. My foot got caught in a root and wrenched back behind my body, severely twisting my ankle. I heard a loud pop and thought my race was over. I yelled in pain and the whole team looked horror-stricken. I writhed in the mud for a bit, trying to move my ankle around and feeling significant pain. After a few more minutes, I tried to stand up and was able to, then tried putting some pressure on the foot and was also able to, again with significant pain. But the relief was palpable – I was able to continue, even as my ankle swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. We kept making our way down the slope, even more gingerly than before.
We ended up in a bit of a valley with a Spanish team which included Antonio de la Rosa, who I knew had paddleboarded across the Atlantic (and soon after Eco, he paddleboarded from San Francisco to Hawaii). We walked with them for a bit before separating and finding our own way up and over one final hill, which led us down into a larger village, where we carefully made our way through crops and between huts to arrive at the river where we would have to build our bili-bilis, one of the signature elements of the Eco-Challenge Fiji experience.
Piles of bamboo were all over the scorching hot beach. Nearby, the CP volunteer sat, under the shade of an umbrella. The volunteer, while signing our passport, openly suggested we pay the locals waiting in the wings to build our bili-bili. Given the official go-ahead, we signaled our interest, and immediately, two different squads set to it – a group of grizzled veterans, and a crew of eager teenagers. While we were waiting on the boats to be build, the Spanish team emerged from the village and crossed the river, then signed in at the TA. More crews set to building bili-bilis and locals who had been spectating from the parking lot behind the beach started to crowd in, causing the scene to become a little bit chaotic. Add in a healthy dose of sleep deprivation and a bit of competitive spirit, and the Spanish team ended up taking the second raft being built by the grizzled veteran group – our pick for the ones who knew what they were doing – and we ended up with one of the rafts built by the eager teenagers. That would turn into a bigger problem in about 12 hours.
Putting into the slow-moving, azure river at around noon, we assumed we would be traveling at around two to three miles per hour, with a helpful current. Even with that wishful thinking, we knew we were in for a long paddle that would take us into the night. We had brought webbed neoprene hand paddles with us to Fiji but had been told before the race we were not allowed to bring them on the river. More specifically, we were forbidden to use anything but bamboo poles as paddles. As we progressed along the river at what a pedestrian might call “elderly person using a walker” pace, we saw and heard locals all along the river calling to us and attempting to sell us improved paddles of all varieties. We politely declined, but we found out later that many teams had accepted, though we weren’t sure the bili-bilis were capable of moving faster than a slow crawl.
Not long into our journey, we heard the familiar buzz of a helicopter nearby, but unlike other times, it stuck around. We came around a bend in the river and saw it hovering over the team in front of us – AR Georgia, we found out later in the day when we caught up to them. Then it was our turn, as the chopper circled above and I did my best impression of John C. McGinley holding up his barbed-wire staff at the end of Platoon, hoisting my bamboo pole in the air and shouting triumphantly. Starker yelled at me the whole time to cut it out, because we were told at the pre-race briefing to act naturally if we ever knew we were being filmed, but I couldn’t help myself and I ignored him. Kate and Garrison were less fortunate, ingloriously getting stuck in a shallow area of the river and having to bail out and push (a scene that ended up making it into the show).
We passed the photographic spotter, who asked for our team number, then stopped for a bit after Starker had the brilliant idea of using our mandatory machete to customize the length of our bamboo stick-paddles. Then we got to work, paddling steadily and making our way cleanly through several riffles and Class I rapids, which provided a nice break to the monotony of traveling slowly down a lazy river.
The sun was out and it was hot on the river. Occasionally we splashed some cool water on our faces, but eventually, it became unnecessary for Starker and I, as our raft slowly began to loosen so that we were sitting in water – first one inch and increasing steadily through our ride. At sundown at 6 p.m., we caught up to AR Georgia, who had loomed for hours in front of us as mysterious figures until we got close enough to identify their signature salmon-colored shirts. We hung loosely with them for a while, reaching the sole checkpoint on the section at nearly the same time. We took a moment for some local kids to help us tighten up our raft, but it became clear they didn’t know what they were doing and so we tried to move on as quickly as possible. This was a common, jarring event throughout our Eco-Challenge – hours of lonely, quiet monotony suddenly interrupted by a dozen screaming, hyper kids, all trying to get a piece of the action, and moving faster than our brains could properly comprehend. You didn’t want to be rude or mean, but you also didn’t want them to accidentally screw up your race because they were trying to be helpful (or more likely, show off to their friends).
Down the river we continued, as fog slowly thickened over the river due to condensation from the cooling temperatures. This caused us to miss a turnoff, and for what must have been a hilarious 20 minutes for Mark Harris watching the tracker, we steered around a lagoon until we noticed the current was pushing against us and we were going upstream. This freaked us out a bit – Garrison most of all – and we then steered a strict compass bearing until we figured out what had happened.
We continued, with Kate and Garrison taking catnaps while Starker and I towed them. We caught back up and passed AR Georgia, who had snuck behind us during our lagoon excursion, and also heard a Mexican folk song being sung in Spanish. I called out and confirmed it was one of the Mexican teams, I think Teenek. We sung for a bit with them and then got too far ahead to hear them, which meant we were lost in our own thoughts on a quiet, foggy, dark river. Starker got very silent and his stick-paddle started doing the telltale dips, revealing he was getting drowsy. This went on for a good five to 10 minutes, then he sat bolt upright and shouted out into the darkness, “Bula!” One of the funniest moments of the race for sure.
That was the beginning of the fun times on the leaky bili. Starker and I started tripping the lights fantastic. The trees above us on either embankment began to morph into anthropogenic figures – a mother and her baby, a teenager skateboarding, John Travolta in Grease. Oddly, Starker and I were seeing the same exact things in the trees, meaning they actually really looked like people or we were having the same weird hallucinations. While we were entertained for at least an hour, Kate and Garrison slowly crept away from us, using their desire to avoid the weirdness to push their effort a little higher and move a bit faster (as much as was possible on the painfully slow-moving boats).
The last hour of the bili-bili was the most painful. We kept shifting our positions from sitting to standing, but the raft was now so loose that each movement had to be intentional and carefully coordinated to be in tandem. No position was comfortable for more than five minutes at a time. Adding to the fun, it starting misting, diminishing visibility and soaking us even more than the sitting in three inches of water had.
At around 1 a.m., we arrived at a shallow section requiring us to get off the rafts and push, and not long after, Kate spotted the TA, up on a hill on river right. Arriving at the beach, we thought we had completed the leg, but when I went up to get our passport signed while the rest of the team got our equipment together, I was told we had to bring our rafts up the hill, which in the rain and with then benefit of at least 30 other teams having trampled it, was now a knee-deep pig slough of mud.
What ensued was the low point of my race, and one of the lowest points of any expedition race I’ve done thus far. I backtracked to the beach and gave the team the news, but I could see Starker and Kate were in no shape to be slogging through the mud with heavy bamboo poles on their backs. I started worrying about them, and wondering why if our raft was already falling apart and made of all-natural materials, why it needed to be lifted up an American gladiator-type obstacle (minus high-speed tennis balls getting shot at us). I’ll admit I got a little emotional and may have tromped around the beach for a moment venting, especially as I saw Kate and Starker struggling to get a single bamboo log up the impossibly slippery hill. And then Garrison grabbed me and tried to talk some sense into me. And being restrained at that exact moment was not at all what I wanted. I told Garrison to let go of me, and then after a moment more of pacing the beach, I tried to put my anger into something productive and started hauling up the bamboo poles along with the rest of the team. It was slow, messy, frustrating work, but eventually, over the course of 40 minutes or so, we got it done.
At the top of the hill, in shoes full of rocks and mud, we got our passport signed and started walking down a dirt road toward a village, where we were told our bikes awaited us. I fell back and had a whine session with Kate about my tiff with Garrison, and Kate patiently lent me her ear, until Starker spotted a shiny tree in a schoolhouse patio up ahead. As we got closer, we saw a bunch of the medallions we assumed were for teams who didn’t travel the canyon. Since we already had one, Kate, Garrison, and I ignored the treasure, but Starker was lured in, and after a brief inspection, he started walking backwards toward us. Perhaps it a heavy, waterlogged backpack, or maybe stiff muscles after 12 hours of immobilization on the bili-bili, or perhaps it just one of those simple mistakes that people make, but Starker stepped backwards off a six-inch curb and landed awkwardly, sending a shivering ripple through his leg. He howled in pain and as ran back to him, quizzing him intensely him about where it hurt. Starker had suffered through both Achilles tendonitis and plantar fasciitis that had worsened during his intensive training in the weeks and months before the race; this incident woke both dormant pains and all of a sudden, he could barely walk. He cursed loudly and often as we hobbled toward the TA, giving us all a big worry about what sudden and debilitating injury could mean for our race.
We got to our boxes, stacked by a huge wooden bike rack in the town’s main square. We began transitioning and it was clear we were not moving fast at all. Middle of the night, tensions and injuries flaring, Garrison wisely suggested we take our second sleep card punch of the race, and that immediately lowered the simmering intensity we had been feeling, as we were now off the clock. With three hours to recover, we got some fun snacks out, headed over to a covered area, cleaned up as best we could in some nasty, nasty bathrooms, and Kate and Starker laid down to rest. Garrison and I got our bikes out of their boxes and assembled, Garrison gave each chain and deraillieur a solid cleaning and lube, and then broke out the maps to study the bike ride ahead. With just the two of us awake, we took the chance to talk through our tensions and work things out. This is how it goes with new teammates sometimes; it takes a while to learn how to deal best with each other’s foibles. Thankfully, from my perspective at least, we were able to have an adult conversation and get back on a good, happy, productive team-first footing that would stay with us for the rest of the race.
At around 5 a.m., we woke up Kate and Starker, and by first light we were riding out of the TA on a 40-kilometer mountain bike to Camp 2. The bike started on some dirt farm roads, then graduated up to a paved road that would through some villages and then up along a highland ridge. As usual, the riding was straight up and straight down. By 8 a.m., the road was busy with school buses and other commuter vehicles used for mass transit, and we were greeted by constant choruses of “Bula” from hordes of uniformed primary school kids and, more occasionally, by adults boarding communal buses to head off to work. We bula’d back and continued on our way, ticking off steady progress. At around 11 a.m., we arrived at the sprawling Camp 2, checked in, glanced at the big wooden leaderboard, and were wearily led by our energetic and purpose-driven TAC John into our tent for hot food, clean clothes, a clean-up in the nearby stream, and eventually, four hours of blissful, dreamless, twitchy, deep-REM sleep.
CAMP 2 TO CAMP 3
Waking up in the middle of an expedition race is always a bit of a strange experience, and for Starker, who was just doing his second-ever XPD, it was almost comical to watch him jump out of the tent and swear he never fell asleep, even though we’d all heard him snoring as loud as a crew of workmen drilling two-by-fours with a power saw. Even when John, who’d been mending some of our gear and taking care of other tasks as we slept, vouched that he had checked on Starker numerous times and personally guaranteed he had been asleep for at least 3.5 hours, Starker remained dubious.
Starker was clearly still pretty tired, because he then proceeded to put on Garrison’s bike shorts. Garrison spent about 10 minutes looking for them until he noticed Starker wearing them. Starker, however, insisted they were his (they weren’t) and it took way too long of a time to sort out this situation than it should have, but it was worth it for the comedy it provided the team for hours and days afterwards. We rolled out of camp at around 5:30 p.m., knowing we had only around 30 minutes of daylight left to work with.
The first part of the ride was more rolling dirt roads, often requiring a hike up and a careful descent down, as our packs were pretty fully loaded, having just started out on a leg that would see us bike 60k, hike 10k, whitewater raft 30k, and then hike 50k. We saw a few Fijians here and there, but it was mostly a quiet ride until we arrived at Namuamua Village and another CP, where dozens of film crew were scrambling around and klieg lights lit up the village square. The map showed that this village was the end-point of the whitewater rafting section, and some of the top teams were probably just coming through and heading out on the long hike at this point. But we had to cross the river and start heading uphill, and after a successful fjord that dipped us into thigh-deep water, we were able to mount up and ride efficiently for a bit. Then, the road started turning a little mushy. As we climbed on a gentle upward incline, the road continued to get mushier. We worked our way into higher jungle, away from human habitation, where there seemed to be no lights at all, until in front of us, we saw a team stopped on the side of the road. It was the Belgian Team To-Get-Ther and our friend Debbie, who we had gotten to know at the Nordic Islands Adventure Race a few months prior. We had a great reunion but the Belgians had a big problem with one of their bikes – a long tear in one of their tire sidewalls. They seemed to have a good strategy to fix it and we couldn’t do anything to help other than offer words of encouragement, so we soon set out to continue our ride, wishing them luck and hoping we would see them down the road.
At this point, we were often having to jump off our bikes and walk up steeper slopes, and we felt like we were up on a ridgeline, with a cool wind blowing on us from both sides of the mountain spine we were ascending. Garrison was great on the navigation, so we were equal parts frustrated and amused by the “Eco-Challenge Bikes this Way” signs clearly marking the route at every intersection. We hooked a left at one of these signs up what felt like the final upward push to a kind of summit, but we were surprised that after a short climb, the path leveled off, and even more surprised to find the sometimes-squishy road turned suddenly into pure peanut butter mud. For the first 30 minutes, we kept expecting our situation to improve, and for the road to turn back into its regular annoying but mostly rideable squishy state. But after an hour, we started to get an ominous feeling that we were in for an indefinite period of suffering. At this point, we had all crashed at least once, and Starker had taken three especially rough tumbles, losing his front headlight on one of them. The mud was slick if you had any momentum, but horribly sticky otherwise, gumming up every crevice of our bikes until they literally wouldn’t move any more. We each picked out “mud sticks” we would employ every 20 steps or so to ice-pick the mud out from our tires and front forks, and this became our mode of travel for the next nine hours.
Given our pace of travel, the relative quiet of the night, and the lack of anything else to talk about, naturally we created quite a few theories about what exactly we were doing on this “bike ride.” It wasn’t clear if the race directors had intended this section to be as disastrously crushing as it was. There were what looked like snowbanks of mud on either side of the road – sometimes as high as six or eight feet tall – that had clearly been plowed by some kind of industrial-grade equipment. We weren’t sure if anyone had gotten through before it got this muddy, and we speculated we were losing horrendous amounts of time to those in front of us. We tried to theorize more efficient means of travel, such as spending 15 minutes cleaning our bikes of mud and then strapping them to our backpacks and simply hauling them, but the distance that remained in the stage seemed too far and we didn’t want to risk destroying our backs. We thought and discussed many more things that night, but most of them I want to leave to that place and time, as not many of them were very pleasant. At some point in the night, we passed a team bivouacked on the side of the trail; one person was sitting awake and watched us go by but didn’t say anything. A few hours later, we decided to take a 15-minute break for some food at what ostensibly was a nice overlook over a pitch-black valley – we couldn’t see anything but at least the breeze felt good – and the team we had passed tromped past us. We caught up to them soon after and spent the next four or five hours leapfrogging them. After a little conversation, we found out they were Team Flying J, and I recognized their captain’s name when she told me she was Diannette Wells – she had been in/on a couple of the original Eco-Challenges (Borneo and Fiji, I think?). Pretty neat to be racing right along with an Eco-Challenge legend, though their team seemed pretty intense/military and didn’t like it when we passed them, usually speeding up and passing us back a few moments later. They were fortunate to be close to us at one point, though, when we found a metal tube popping out of the ground and spouting clean, fresh water, which had been impossible to find on the ridgeline. We all filled up, even though the flow from the pipe was slow, and we were glad we did when we found ourselves still hike-a-biking away as the sun rose at 6 a.m. and we knew from the maps we still had a long way to go.
The sun coming up was a relief in that we could see where we were going, but it was also terribly depressing, because we felt like we hadn’t made any progress even with an all-night push. We began to get that horrible feeling in adventure race, when you’re positively convinced the end of the stage is just around the next bend, and then you turn the bend and there’s just more ridiculously muddy road. We did that over and over again until it drove us all mad. Garrison said he would push on ahead to see what he could find, and he came back around 45 minutes later to tell us that it was just more of the same ahead. It was getting hot and now we were all sweating profusely. Then we hit a big, steep uphill. Our minds and bodies gave out at that point and we all sat down in the jungle on the side of the road for an impromptu break, which was really a breakdown – our team’s lowest point in the race thus far. Starker and Kate were really struggling and I honestly worried if they would be able to make it through the next bit without my help. And I knew I didn’t have enough in my tank to be able to help them. They were going to have to do it themselves, or we were going to have to quit.
Then, Starker just racked his bike on his pack and started chugging uphill. It was so inspiring. He was relentless. And then Kate did the same thing. And I was left, standing listlessly behind them, watching them disappear over the next crest in the road. And I realized I had to get moving to keep up! I finagled my bike onto my back via some straps that were definitely not meant to carry the 40 lbs. or so of weight from the bike and the mud clinging to it, and grappled and shimmied my way up the hill, sliding down back down half of each step I took. This went on for hours, though time seemed pretty meaningless at this point. All I know is that eventually, I saw a photographer ahead of us, and it was only at that point that I was pretty sure we were near the end. I definitely was crying out loud, which I don’t ever usually do. I was really hoping that photographer didn’t take pictures of me sobbing as I walked past him, trying not to make eye contact. We had been on the bike leg for 18 hours.
We popped out onto a bitumen doubletrack jeep road and remounted our bikes, the mud starting flying off in all directions as we headed steeply downhill. As if we hadn’t had enough drama, my front tire sprung a loud leak and started spraying Stan’s at least a foot in the air with every tire revolution. I started freaking out – we were only two kilometers from the TA and I didn’t want to have to do more hike-a-bike! Fortunately, it sealed, though the drama continued when Starker nearly slammed into an Eco-Challenge truck coming up the steep and windy road. At around noon, we rolled into the TA, which was just a field with some bamboo bike racks, where our bikes were waiting for us, along with a water truck with an attached power washer. Even with the spartan accommodations, we couldn’t have been happier to have made it out of the jungle, still alive and in the race.
Starker and Garrison got busy cleaning the bikes, while I checked in with passport control and Kate began sorting out the bike boxes. The TA had no shade whatsoever and it was very hot in the midday sun. We were thankful for Team Bones’ advice that we stock our bike boxes with food and water as we dipped into those stores to replenish our supply of both. Starker came over with his bike to let us know they were all ready, and we immediately noticed a large red welt on his shin. He had tried to clean the mud off his shoes with the power washer, he said, and had taken a good chunk of skin off in the process, underestimating just how powerful it was.
Our time crunch for making it to the river as fast as possible to beat the 6 p.m. darkzone on the water forced us to put Starker’s injury in the back of our minds for the moment. We rushed to get our bikes packed away and then hiked off on a dirt/gravel road, accompanied by a score of local kids. Along the way, we ran into three or four teams that we went back and forth with for the 10 kilometers of road up to the paddle put-in, and we were destined to play bumper boats with them on our journey down the river as well. They included Meridianoraid of Spain, the Dutch team (friends of our Belgian friends), Flying J, and Team Curl. We got to the paddle put-in behind all of them and were told the top teams had taken four hours to make it down the river. After hiking down the river and finding a brand-spankin’ new whitewater raft waiting for us, I realized we had forgotten a bag of stuff at the CP, so I ran back to get it. While I was there, the staff at the CP asked me if I minded taking the passport of Team Peak Pursuit down the river – they had accidentally left it behind. I said sure and hustled back to the river. The time was 1:50 p.m., meaning we had to move as fast as Team New Zealand if we wanted to beat the cutoff.
We started out immediately hitting some very tight canyons and Class II-III whitewater. We had been given a diagram with directions for successfully running the rapids, but it was pretty near useless as it was hard to tell which rapid we were in based on the birds-eye view vantage point of the schematics. Garrison and I had a few difficult moments where each of us thought we were steering, but once we got this figured out, we settled into an efficient and effective paddling technique that kept us moving downstream while giving us a little more brainspace to enjoy the river.
The black volcanic rock canyon was stunning. It was just absolutely one of the most beautiful places any of us had ever been. Picturesque waterfalls emptied onto our heads, the water was a clear turquoise and clear to the bottom. There were long vertical lines on each side of the canyon tilting slightly upwards, and the resulting illusion tricked our brains into thinking we were paddling down a 30-degree slope. We all took off our shoes and took turns stretching a little bit, enjoying the free miles courtesy of the steady but gentle current. However, two things shook us out of our reverie: giant slabs of rock pockmarked the river like pinball bumpers, making constant steering necessary. And our watches told a story of precious minutes lost to idleness, or at least less-than-maximal effort.
We dealt with one problem at a time. In the first few hours of paddling, we hit several short stretches of river that were nearly impossible to pass through cleanly. While we tried to be careful, we still got wedged and stuck several times, but we were able to use our whitewater skills (acquired from the mandatory course Eco had required) to free ourselves with relative ease. But eventually, the inevitable happened when we careened against a rock and Garrison found out the hard way just how slippery new whitewater rafts are after he was tossed out of the boat like bacon out of a non-stick skillet. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt, and I ended up suffering the same fate a little further down the river. Overall, we were having a lot of fun, and combined with our lack of sleep, it got pretty silly – if we weren’t fighting a cutoff, we would have taken more time to laugh.
In the lower half of the river, the current was still strong enough to cause rapids at each of the many snaking turns we were forced to navigate, but it had widened enough so we could push at a sustained pace. We began to paddle hard and were able to pass several of the teams who had set out before us. But when the clock hit 5 p.m., Kate estimated we still had 8 kilometers left to go, and we knew we were going to have to put in an all-out effort not to spend the night darkzoned on the riverbank. The next hour was the hardest I’ve ever paddled – the joints in my fingers hurt badly for days afterwards. In between fighting some fun waves on each bend in the river, we talked strategy. We didn’t know the penalty for not making the darkzone. We didn’t know how close anyone was paying attention to tracking and we had seen plenty of rule violations that hadn’t been penalized. We knew it didn’t get fully dark until 6:30 p.m. or thereabouts. And we knew there was a village at the TA with a good chance for hot food and a hut to sleep in.
When the clock ticked over to 6 p.m., Kate let us know we were two kilometers from the takeout. There were three other teams in boats around in a line in front of us in the river, and all of them continued on. We arrived in a group at around 6:25 p.m., hauled our boats up on shore, and waited in line to check in at the TA. While we waited, a member of the Canadian team came down and gratefully reclaimed their passport. It sounded like they were prepared to start on the next challenge, a 50-kilometer hike through the jungle, and we were impressed by how well they were doing considering it was their first-ever adventure race.
At 6:45 p.m., as the last gray light drained from the sky, we began to plead our case with the volunteer manning the TA. She was very nice but said she had to check in about our late arrival. Together, we listened on the radio as our sentence was read aloud: darkzoned at the TA until 6 a.m., plus a three-hour penalty to be served at the next camp. We pleaded that we had lost time delivering the passport, but it was a weak excuse. If the rules had been more explicit about whether we could have carried the raft on the road next to the river, we would have considered it. But we weren’t overly bothered by the penalty. We were well ahead of the course cutoffs and the three-hour penalty would just mean more sleep for us later on. And the 11 hours of forced stoppage would give us a good excuse to get a great rest in town after what had been a very long day.
Still wet and getting a bit cold, we scanned around for a way across the river to the village, Namuamua, which we had been at the night before when all the front teams had been coming through and there were cameras everywhere. Now, instead of cameras, we were greeted by a single local in a long boat, who invited us onboard and ferried us across the river. Then, as we disembarked and hesitatingly looked around, clearly intent on stopping rather than advancing on the course, he asked if we needed a place to spend the night. Jackpot! Adrey took us to his hut, let us hang our dripping-wet clothes up to dry and get changed, and began cooking for us as we went to the village center to pick up some food from the vendors and the Leg 3 medallion from a big ceremonial bowl in front of the village chief’s house. A camera crew asked Kate and I whether we would mind doing an interview, and we gave him five minutes or so of rehashing how the last 24 hours had gone for us. Then we retreated back to Adrey’s house, where he had laid out a scrumptious spread of bread with peanut butter, cookies, and as the piece de resistance, he brought out four bowls of hot chicken soup! We supplemented with cold sodas and some chickpea-filled masala crepes from the makeshift café set up in the village square, and feasted.
Looking back on it, this was one of our favorite moments of the race. Off the clock, we were able to enjoy the food, the company, the culture, the experience. Knowing how hard we had worked and struggled and suffered to arrive at this spot, and how lucky we were to have even had the chance to do so, sunk in deep. This was what we had heard so many stories of – the true specialness of Eco-Challenge. Closing my eyes now, I can still easily slip back into the feeling of that moment, sitting on mats on the floor of the one-room hut, warmed by the food and the friendship, feeling thankful for everything. A beautiful time.
Of course, after eating, we realized how exhausted we were. Adrey laid out soft foam mattresses in the living room, which Kate, Starker, and I claimed, and Garrison was led into Adrey’s own bedroom. Adrey himself came back into the main room and sat in a chair in the corner, selflessly sacrificing his own night of sleep for his guests. As I sat back and prepared to drift off, I noticed three very large spiders on the ceiling.
“Don’t worry about them,” Adrey said. “They are our friends.”
It was the last thing I remember until the alarm went off at 5:30 a.m.
It was still mostly dark when our alarms went off, and Adrey immediately rose and began to prepare us coffee and breakfast – more bread and peanut butter. It wasn’t easy to get back into race mode after such a wonderful, stress-free evening, especially as our race clothes were all still wet. So we dawdled a bit too much over our coffee and a discussion about a provision in the race guidebook that said we were allowed to hire local guides and porters for the next section of the race. We saw a couple teams walk out of town and realized we should probably do the same, and so we said our goodbyes to Adrey (and paid him what we later found out was a month’s wage in rural Fiji) and headed out of town, aided by two local guides hired by Garrison, one of whom shouldered Starker’s pack.
The sun came out and it was beautiful walking up a hill and along a ridge through a second village, where we switched guides to two younger kids, who took us up and down some more hills, encountering the occasional deep mud-pit with lots of treaded-out footprints – a clear sign we were on the right trail. Three hours into our hike, and a few more villages later, we crossed a shallow river and knew the next 10k would be on a dirt road, so when we were offered a horse rental, we took it, and mounted Starker up, along with all our backpacks. The road was smooth and quick to travel on, but it was scorching hot with no shade, so we made sure to keep up with our salts. Drenched in sweat, we arrived at the end of the road, marked by a few houses and three other teams, and took a midday break at a makeshift restaurant set up by an entrepreneurial woman in her 40s, who lured us in with the promise of freshly prepared food. We took off our shoes and sat down on the floor of a comfortably cool room, and within a few minutes, we were feted with some crispy curry bites and some kind of crunchy ramen treat. Both were delicious. We got to leaf through the guestbook and saw a long entry from Jason Magness of Yogaslackers, now more than two days ahead of us. We were amazed that they could have made such significant progress upwards in the rankings and still have time to write such a detailed note!
While we ate, Garrison had negotiated the next round of guide/horse combo, but with so many teams in the area, the price was steep: $400 Fijian, or $200 U.S. We joked about the mini-economy that had popped up around the race, and laughed about how an executive from Amazon had told us they had actually worried that all the money being pumped into the country as a result of the race would cause a national inflationary financial crisis. Having no other choice, we agreed to the terms, and set off after refilling our water bladders in the nearby stream.
We followed the stream for a bit, then moved into the jungle along a muddy path. Starker was once again mounted up and the white horse he was riding also had carried all of our backpacks. We moved methodically for hours, only stopping once for a 15-minute break for the horse to rest. At dusk, we encountered a steep muddy downhill, forcing Starker to dismount while the guide, who spoke very little English, led the horse using the reins. In a scary moment, the horse toppled over, sliding on his side for about 10 feet. He was OK, but everyone was a bit shaken up for a few minutes. We continued on into the night, donning our headlights as we made our way through a unique feature of the trail, where it had eroded into the hillside and became a tunnel of dirt for a few hundred feet. We were still making solid progress but this leg, we knew, would feel interminable before it was through.
On the way out of the jungle, in a descent to a village by a larger river, which we would eventually follow all the way into Camp 3, the poor horse had another mishap when it snagged its saddle on some barbed wire. It was on a slippery descent and we all had trouble negotiating ourselves into a position where we could help, but eventually Kate saved the day by calming the horse and then methodically working to back him up and untangling the cloth saddle from the wire. But after this, the guide told Starker he had to walk, and we all agreed that was probably best for the horse.
We reached the village and despite the late hour (it was around 10 or 11 p.m. at this time) and the fact that at least 30 teams had already passed through in front of us over the past two days, dozens of villagers were still out to greet us. Over the first few days of the race, it had always been an adrenaline rush to reach a village, where we soaked up the energy and enthusiasm of the locals and reenergized ourselves to renew our battle with the course. But by the night of day six, reaching this village felt a bit exhausting, as we were bombarded with questions about where we were from and whether we liked Fiji. We bought a few bananas, tried to be as polite and friendly as we could muster, cleaned out our shoes, and kept moving.
After the village, the river crossings became a constant, with the trail indecisively and incomprehensibly moving from one side of the riverbank to the other. This frustrated and confused us but we were following a clear trail and that made us hold our tongues. The water wasn’t unbearably cold, but the frequent ins and outs up to knee and occasionally hip level weren’t exactly pleasant. In the middle of one of these, our guide’s light went out. He managed to get to the other side of the river and we gave him our spare headlight. Little did we know, but he was blasting it on full power, and it ran out in less than an hour. We had no more lights to share with him, so he just walked on in the dark. Barefoot. Mostly walking on pebbly, slippery trails and rocky river bottoms. Man, those Fijians are tough.
At a little past one in the morning, we left the river for good, climbed up one last hill, and saw the lights of Camp 3 glimmering below us. Three pylons with gas-fueled fires greeted us as we passed through the entrance to the camp, and John was waiting with a big smile. We had no cash left so Garrison asked John to round up the money we owed, which amazingly, he was able to do, and we invited the guide to eat some food with us after leading his horse to pasture (where many other horses were already happily munching on grass and resting after their long return trips through the jungle). John had a sumptuous feast of hot cheesy beans and tortillas waiting for us, which we washed down with cold sodas, and while Garrison and Kate did a bit of initial mapwork to determine what gear we needed and what we faced in the morning, Starker got to sleep. I soon followed. We decided on a 7 a.m. wake-up, giving us a good five ours of sleep to work with.
In the morning, it was overcast and a bit drizzly. We got ready quickly and were heading out of camp by 8 a.m. As we were leaving, we saw the Macys and Team Endure come into Camp 3, with Mark riding a horse and looking pretty beat up. We silently wished them our best, checked out with the volunteer, and started heading up the road. Two locals began following us and asked us if we wanted to hire them as guides. They clearly knew where we were going, as the next five hours would see us hiking up to Vuwa Falls, where the supposedly epic ropes section began. The locals warned us that a few teams had gotten badly lost on the way up, including the Japanese of Team East Wind, who by this time had been off-track for 48 hours. The locals knew exactly where the Japanese were and what mistake they had made, and promised us that for $100 Fijian, they would take us on the fastest route to the falls. Not seeing anything in the rules forbidding it, and knowing that at the very least, Starker would benefit from having someone take his pack, we agreed and began following our (once again barefoot) guides up the trail.
The trail headed mostly uphill, with some pauses to cross streams and rivers of various widths and depths. Garrison and I got deep into a discussion about the future of USARA (without any idea of knowing what it would eventually spawn), while Kate and Starker settled in behind. On about our 17th river crossing, and at least the 50th of the past 24 hours, the guide decided on taking the high route along a set of rocks that were all about a perfect step apart from one another, barring one rock that was a bit of a hop. I made the hop, then Garrison behind me, and while most of my brain was still focused on how to make USARA better, a tiny alarm bell went off in my head. That hop was just a bit long, and the rock we landed on was just a bit slippery. I began to ask Garrison if we should tell Starker and Kate to choose a different route when Starker leapt for the rock, had his foot slip off, bashed his knee into the rock, and then tumbled into the river. Before we could catch our breath, he had pulled himself out and was sitting on the rock, but he was grimacing and holding his knee to his chest. Then he looked at me, shook his head, and I knew this was it. The guides manhandled him over to the riverbank, where he tried to put a little weight on the knee and collapsed to the ground.
“I think it’s broken,” he said.
Our race was over.
GETTING OUT
We all donned an extra layer to keep warm, and then Garrison broke out the radio and made the call to HQ (a call that made it onto the TV show). The kind woman on the other end of the line said a helicopter with medics would be arriving shortly. Apparently, she also must have gotten on the radio with all the camera crews, as after about 20 minutes of waiting around, a camera guy dressed in all black who was following the Indian team Khukuri Warriors dropped off the trail and came over to where we were sitting for a short interview. He then jumped on his radio, holstered on his backpack, to report he had successfully rendezvoused with Team #60 and completed an interview. The medical helicopter landed soon after, coming in over the river and touching down expertly on a small sand bar on the other side of the river. The doctor was accompanied by a senior producer from the show, and both struggled to cross the slippery rocks in the river, but made it across partly by belly-sliding their way through, then made their way up to us on the far bank. The doctor, who like all the other medical staff for the race had an impressive Scottish accent, confirmed Starker had likely broken his leg and that he needed to be evacuated. Then he got a twinkle in his eye as he looked up at the producer. They were going to use the lobster pot – a cargo-net contraption we had been introduced to at the pre-race briefing.
We had some downtime while we waited for the rescue heli (and a third chopper to shoot video) got airborne and arrived on-scene. We spent the time talking up the producer, a nice guy who gave us some insight into the executive team’s hopes for the show (a three-year run, with the next year’s race to take place in Patagonia). Then we were told to evacuate the area, and they popped a helmet on Starker while we made our way to the other side of the river near the first helicopter. We watched in awe as two choppers hovered overhead, one lowering the lobster pot to within a few feet of Starker and the medic. The doctor loaded Starker into the netting, climbed in himself, and then they lifted off. Kate turned to me and said, “Wow, your dad is literally being flown away on a rope hanging from a helicopter right now.” And she was right, it was a pretty cool sight.
We turned to start walking back down the trail we had come up, but the Eco producer stopped us.
“Wait, where are you guys going?” he asked. “Don’t you want a ride?”
Why yes, yes we would. Kate got shotgun and Garrison and I crawled into the back seat, which was tight but comfortable. And we took off out of the narrow canyon and the pilot, perhaps wanting to show off or perhaps just comfortable flying in tight spaces, pointed the nose of the craft down the canyon and we swept over the river leaving a huge whoosh of trembling tropical trees in our wake. It was a short flight down to Camp 3, no more than five minutes, but we got to circle the camp once before landing, and Kate’s mind was thoroughly blown, having experienced her first ride in a helicopter. John greeted us with a sad smile, and told us he had already started packing up the camp, along with his coterie of TAC buddies, so we could hit the road ASAP to bring Starker to the hospital in Suva.
By the time we got our bearings, a group of Eco staff had already gathered up Starker and transported him on a gurney to the medical tent, where he had been placed on a cot with his leg propped up. We asked him how his ride was – he was exposed to the elements and getting pulled at what must have been closed to or in excess of 100 miles per hour. But he didn’t have much to say other than how pissed he was about injuring himself. Since the injury, he had alternated between quick bursts of anger at himself and calm resignation. He kept apologizing to us about ending our race. We kept telling him that it was a freak accident, that there was nothing he could have done, and I told him I felt bad about not getting my warning about the slippery rock to him a second earlier. These spasms of anger, grief, and resignation would continue for the following days, weeks, and months. It’s no easy thing to get knocked out of your dream race by a chance injury.
After an hour in the medical tent, and another round of interviews for the camera, it was time to go. As we were leaving, Team Stray Dogs appeared in camp, and we hung out with Marshall and Heather for a bit, debriefing on our races, as John and Garrison helped load Starker into the van. Then we headed off down the road, updating John about the injury and the rescue and he updating us about the race and the group of TACs he had organized into a mutual support group.
We headed into Suva, about two hours down the road, and as night fell, we began our wait at the emergency room of the local hospital, which was actually more like a walk-in emergency care clinic. The check-in process was a bit complicated and involved cash payments, but despite the waiting room full of would-be patients and their relatives, Starker was able to get x-rays and an initial diagnosis in around three hours. It was good news! The doctor had not seen a break in the x-rays. We got back in the van and headed to a funky hotel on the outskirts of Suva, where we showered (Starker struggled but ultimately succeeded in this task), changed into clean clothes, and sat down on the back porch for a late dinner of delicious curry. Then sleep, blessed, sweet sleep, deep and sustained until the alarm went off the next morning.
The next morning, Starker spoke with Joe Rowles, the race’s chief medical officer (also sporting a sweet accent, but not Scottish) via John’s cheap burner phone the race provided, and he requested we meet him at his hotel, which was about halfway back to Nadi on the Queen’s Highway. We had a very satisfying breakfast at the hotel, with plenty of fried eggs and fruit – two things I always crave after adventure races – and then piled back in the van for the four-hour drive to the good doctor’s hotel. We arrived at the luxury resort and the doctor met us nearly immediately, grabbed the x-rays, and went off to study them for a bit and do a consult. In the meantime, as we were sitting at a table in the hotel lobby, we saw a familiar face walk by – Mark Harris of Adventure Enablers. What!? He recognized us the same moment we recognized him, though he was less surprised, as he had supplied the tracking for the race and knew we had been evacuated the day before. We chatted for a bit until Dr. Joe reentered the scene, bearing a slight grimace on his countenance. The doctors at the clinic has missed a disturbing dark spot on the images; he was pretty sure Starker had indeed broken his tibia where it joins the knee joint, but wanted to see more x-rays to be sure. He ordered us to go to Nadi, where there clinic was of a higher quality and we were likely to get some better pictures of the knee.
By mid-afternoon, we had completed the drive to Nadi (with a quick stop for some roadside corn-on -the-cob), and we took Starker to the specialist x-ray clinic in Nadi. The additional x-rays confirmed the break, and then Starker was wheeled into a room to get a temporary cast put in place to stabilize his leg. But the nurses paused before they began to form the cast, looking with horror at the seeping, pustulant wound on Starker’s ankle where he had pressure-blasted the skin off a half-dollar sized piece of flesh. None of us had realized the wound was as bad as it was; it could have easily cost us the race in a few more days, especially as we heard the paddleboard section later on in Leg 4 took racers through knee-deep mudholes of cow poo. The nurses cleaned out the wound, and obviously dealing with a nasty infection, Starker was put on a course of antibiotics.
That night, like Dr. Joe, we ended up at a pretty swank hotel ourselves, at the Sheraton on Denarau Island, the home base of luxury hotels in Fiji. Kate and I used our credit card points and got a suite with an ocean view…totally worth it! We all went out to a fun team dinner at a fun little restaurant where many toasts were given, then crashed pretty hard at the hotel, still resting up from intense race experience.
In the morning, after an immense buffet breakfast with a horde of equally immense Australian tourists, we loaded Starker up for his trip to the airport and home. Eco-Challenge had bought him an expensive (really expensive, we later found out) first-class ticket back to Chicago via Auckland, New Zealand. As we waited in line to check in, we noticed a couple of very familiar faces in line next to us – Nathan Fa’avae and Stu Lynch of Team New Zealand, who had won the race (and at least six world championships before it). I couldn’t resist the opportunity to chat them up, so I wheeled Starker over and poked some questions at them. Both Stu and Nathan were very friendly and generous with their time – we must have chatted for at least 20 minutes – and I learned a lot about their race. Starker thought it was highly amusing, borderline astonishing, that they weren’t sticking around for the award ceremony. They both said they had familial obligations to attend to, but after they headed off for security, I told Starker that I thought they had won enough races in their day where podiums just weren’t that big of a deal to them anymore.
We sent Starker off on his way, wishing him the best, and got back in the van, heading back to the hotel. We spent a lazy day there, mostly on the beach. Kate and I went out for a fancy dinner at the hotel restaurant that night.
The next day, we headed back to the Pullman to start sorting through our gear. That was a stanky, messy process, made worse by the fact that we were dealing not just with our own stuff, but with Starker’s too. Upon the recommendation of the race staff, we gave away a lot of our stuff, like our outrigger paddles, our snorkel and fins, and other athletic gear that wasn’t in atrocious condition, to the locals who had worked for the race. They seemed pretty excited to have the stuff and we were pretty excited not to have to haul it all the way back to Maine.
In the afternoon, Kate and I went over to the concierge and booked a couple of daylong excursions – one to scuba dive in the Yasawa Islands, and another surfing on the southern coast. Right after we had paid in full, Ashley Holt from Competitor Relations came up to us and asked us if we would do another on-camera interview. It was really bad timing and we felt really torn. Ultimately, we decided to do our excursions, as we were likely never going to return to Fiji. Both were worth it, but we still wonder whether we would have gotten a little more screen time if we had decided to do the interview instead. Regardless, Ashley was very nice about understanding that we wished to have a bit of a vacation from our vacation.
The last night before our flight home was the awards ceremony and big Eco Challenge post-race party. The ceremony was fun, with Bear giving a speech and Chris Forne and Sophie Hart also offering some words from the wise. Then we all headed down the beach, where a big tent, open bars, and stations with food truck-style food were waiting for us, along with a stage and live music featuring a local rock band. We had a great time chatting with all our friends, from the Estonians (dressed in brand matching blue Fijian-style shirts), to the Belgians, the Irish and our good friend Ivan Park, Cyanosis from South Africa, the Swedes including NIAR RD Staffan, Mark Harris, Mark Lattanzi (who had raced with Team Ireland), Jen Segger and the rest of Bones, Checkpoint Zero, AR Georgia, and our new friends from Onyx and Stray Dogs. It was a special night, surrounded by AR heros and legends, many of whom we now considered our friends.
Our trip home is worthy of its own race report, but to summarize, it involved an unexpected overnight spent on the concrete outside of Honolulu Airport with Ryan Atkins and the Yogaslackers. It was one last crazy chapter in our unforgettable journey to Fiji.
Getting home was equal parts relief, joy and melancholy. Kate’s family was waiting for us as our bus from Logan arrived in Portland, and it was so great to see our kiddo Wilder and our pooch Mose (thank you, thank you, thank you to Laurie, John, Will and Emily for watching them both while we were gone!). But it also meant the end of what could turn out to be the experience of our lives. That’s a big statement to make, but it will be hard to top Eco-Challenge Fiji. However, that doesn’t mean we won’t try.
Looking back, initially we all suffered a lot of anguish at not being able to finish the race. We all felt ourselves capable of doing so barring the injury. The race’s crux, after the climbing section, was a swimming section and we had smartly packed neoprene tops that we were excited to deploy. We were all sad to have missed the ropes sections, Starker especially. We were bummed and angry and wishing we could go back and change time so Starker didn’t get injured.
But over time, that anguish has morphed slowly into pride. Sure, we didn’t finish. But we had seven days of incredible, unforgettable adventure together, getting to become great friends with two incredible guys, Michael Garrison and John McInnes, and having an experience as a family few others can get close to touching. We arrived in Fiji fit and ready to race, and capable of finishing. It’s a waste of time to stay upset about bad luck. Most other adventure racers (and there are a lot more out there since the show aired in August 2020) would have given anything to have been on that start line. And that’s where my mind goes when I think back on the race – to the start, to knowing we had made that moment possible, and that everything after that, even if it was only a paddle stroke, was already a victory.
My cell phone rang while I was heading out on a run on a cold, dark, snowy evening in Winnick Woods, in South Portland. The number that came in on caller ID was from a strange area code and I didn’t pick up the call. A moment later, the ping of a voicemail message hitting my inbox sounded and I listened to the message. A woman named Ashley was calling from Eco-Challenge. She sounded upbeat.
I continued on with my run, a 4.4-mile loop around some woods bordering on a few subdivisions, thinking about the possibility that we had gotten into the revival of the most famous and renowned adventure race in the world. Eco-Challenge aired for six seasons in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it captivated me as a teenager. My dad and I used to watch it in our living room together, eating ice cream, transfixed at what we thought was the craziest sport we had ever seen on TV.
Eco-Challenge introduced us to adventure racing, as it did to pretty much the entire population of current-day racers. But we had no idea we would ever get the chance to compete in it. After all, the show went off the air in 2001, and it didn’t look like it would ever come back, with its creator, Mark Burnett, going on to much bigger hit shows like Survivor, The Apprentice and Shark Tank.
Entranced by the amazing feats we saw on Eco-Challenge, my dad and I signed up for our first adventure race in 2002 (my dad did it for my high school graduation present), along with my best friend. It was the Hi-Tec series, which took place in urban areas around North America. In the New York City version we took part in (in Orchard Park in the Bronx), we biked about 20 miles, hiked five miles, and paddled an inflatable kayak another four miles, managing a mid-pack finish. We were hooked.
We stopped racing for several years as I moved away from home, finished college, and got a job. In the meantime, I met my now-wife, Kate, and moved around the country for our education and early career opportunities. Seven years ago, we were able to move back closer to my dad in the Midwest, and soon after, we began racing as a team of three. Together, we made the commitment to try longer races and to try to get better at navigation, considered the most critical component of AR.
Despite the difficulties we faced – or perhaps because of them – the three of us formed deep, indelible bonds. We learned to trust each other in tough situations, and believe in our ability to think our way out of trouble – or persevere through it – as a team. We each started taking on different roles within the team – Kate as lead navigator, Starker (my dad) as bike mechanic and gear guru, and myself as team mule and motivator.
Along the way, we got better at the sport. We became faster at hiking off-trail to checkpoints hidden in the woods. We became stronger paddlers as we worked as a team to paddle in sync. And on biking stages, we used drafting and towing techniques to level out the differences in our paces. Most importantly, we became more confident navigators, spending less time stopped and staring at our map and compass and more time moving efficiently toward and between the orange-and-white flags that typically mark an adventure racing course.
The most amazing part of it all was the bonds we formed as a family. The three of us no longer required words, but rather brief glances at our expressions and reactions, to understand how someone was feeling. Starker gave his speech at our wedding about adventure racing (where he famously called Kate “one tough bitch”). Adventure racers talk about the bonds they have with their teammates as being akin to sharing a foxhole during a shelling; having that type of relationship with both my father and my wife was (and remains) something so powerful and so important in my life.
So when the news circulated that Eco-Challenge was being revived and that applications would soon open, of course I took it upon myself to apply on behalf of Starker and Kate. Thinking the show’s producers might find a family-themed team appealing, I also signed up my brother, Luke, who had raced with us during the 2015 Gold Rush AR, a 30-hour race where we had finished second overall but where Luke swore at the finish line he’d kill me if I ever made him do another one.
A couple of weeks after sending in our applications, which consisted of a bunch of questions about our backgrounds and experience, as well as a video, I got that fateful call from the Eco-Challenge producer. I called back once I got home from my run, and Kate and I did a little dance in our kitchen before calling Luke and Starker to give them the news. It was pretty entertaining to hear their reactions. Starker repeated “Are you f’ing kidding me?” about 20 times in a row, with long pauses in between. Luke kept repeating, “I knew it.”
Fast-forward a few months later, and Luke made the difficult decision to bail due to bad timing; the launch of his new company was slated for October, the month after Eco. Fortunately, we were given the OK by the producers to pick a new teammate of our choosing. After much discussion and a few emails, we settled on Michael Garrison, an experienced and talented racer from Indiana, whom we knew from our racing days in the Midwest and from his glowing reputation in the AR community. As a bonus, he brought along his friend and fellow Hoosier John McInnes as our TAC, or crewperson, a position that had long been cut out of adventure racing but which Eco-Challenge was reviving.
Through the summer, we tried to stay abreast of the frequent emails coming from the race organization, which contained a frustratingly paltry amount of actual, usable information. Eventually, we learned that in addition to the standard AR disciplines of trekking and mountain biking, we would be paddleboarding, sailing local boats known as camakaus, outrigger canoeing, whitewater rafting, and doing ropes work including ascending and rappelling. We were required to get a number of certifications, including wilderness first aid (x2), whitewater proficiency, and a climbing cert. Initially, we also had to find a sponsor, but in the middle of summer, we got a one-line email that made our month. Eco-Challenge would be awarding every team a $50,000 stipend for use on the race, in the form of four checks sent to the team captain. Woohoo money! We joked that this got us as close to being professional adventure racers as we would ever be.
Once we booked our flights (through a Hollywood booking firm no less!), it started to feel real. Getting confirmation from Kate’s parents that they would watch our son Wilder cemented the feeling. We were really going to Fiji to compete in Eco-Challenge!
On September 6, at 5 a.m., Kate and I stepped off the plane at the Nadi Airport, cleared customs (a concern given we were each carrying around 200 lb.s of gear), and stepped outside into the greeting of a golden sunrise. We had arrived.
We boarded an Eco-Challenge labeled bus and waited as a bunch of other racers from our flight boarded after us. I recognized Mark and Travis Macy, both adventuring legends. There was a team of hard-core backcountry skiers from Utah. And Jen Segger, Kate’s coach and one of the most badass racers in the sport, sat down near us for a chat.
The ride to the hotel took around 15 minutes. It brought us through downtown Nadi and to a posh, brand-new beachfront hotel, The Pullman Nadi Bay. In the lobby, we found our teammates waiting for us. They had all gotten in the day before and led us to our rooms to drop off our stuff, then we grabbed breakfast at a buffet that was jam-packed with a good portion of the best adventure racers from around the globe. We hadn’t slept much on the plane ride and it definitely felt like we were dreaming when we lined up for a coffee behind Nathan Fa’avae and for eggs behind Mike Kloser.
Over breakfast, we looked over our itinerary for the pre-race tasks we needed to complete. Our skill testing didn’t take place for a couple of days, so we had time to settle in and get a feel for what this experience was going to be like. After the meal, we hopped in our rental van – which would be our official support vehicle for the actual race itself – and drove back into Nadi to do a grocery shop. We had done our homework on where to go and we had found a very decent market, with plenty of options for the variety of calorically dense, nutritionally questionable food we were looking for, from candy bars to ramen noodles to randomly-flavored potato chips (I had a hunch the balsamic vinegar and onion chips would prove to be a hit on day five.)
We got back to the hotel and began to sort it out, then took some time out for a swim and an early dinner at the hotel’s noodle bar. Kate and I hadn’t slept much so we called it an early night.
The next couple of days were filled with gear sorting and resorting, additional trips to the supermarket, team meetings and informal strategy sessions, and a few swims in the pool and ocean. We went out for a great dinner in Nadi and got seated at the table next to the Stray Dogs, the only team that had done every Eco-Challenge thus far and full of legends, including Marshall Ullrich, Adrian Crane, and Dr. Bob Haugh. We were also sitting next to the New Zealand pilots who would be manning the five helicopters providing TV and medical coverage of the race.
The final few days before the race were more scheduled, with skills testing on ropes (very friendly staff and forgiving of my lack of confidence, though my teammates' skills erased any doubts the certifiers may have had that we would be OK) and an informational clinic on sailing and righting the camakaus, the indigenous watercraft that would feature in the race (seemed easy enough once you grasped the theory that the ama or outrigger had to stay to windward). After the clinics, I had my moment of feeling like a reality TV contestant as I was driven to a golf course around 20 minutes away from the resort and interviewed about the team and its goals in front of a five-person television crew. It was pretty nerve-wracking because I couldn’t shake the thought out of my head that anything I said could be broadcast to a television audience of just around 20 million.
On September 8, we had a few final errands to take care of, such as getting our PFDs inspected and cleared on buoyancy and packing our bikes away on the Eco-Challenge trucks that would take them to a remote location, whereabouts unknown. At this point, all we knew was that we would be starting off on the water, and that we had a remote TA where we would only have access to whatever we wanted to pack into a 120-liter dry bag. We got a hot tip from our friends on Team Bones that it would be a good idea to stash lots of food and water in our bike boxes, and so we made a last-minute rush to the boxes to load them full of sundries. Then we had our turn at being fashion models, as we made power poses for a professional photographer taking pictures for the show’s “X-Ray” file (an Amazon extra feature that gives you more information that you’d ever want to know about any television show on the network).
At 6 p.m., the long-awaited race briefing was set to begin in the hotel’s conference hall. We were told to show up in our uniforms, which in our case, were pearly white. We were greeted by a greased-up topless traditional male dancing troupe and a pretty excited group of 66 teams of five wearing t-shirts of every color. Bear Grylls jumped onstage and everyone went wild, and then he gave a motivational speech intended to psych everyone up – not that it was much needed. Bear was followed by Scott Flavelle, the race director, who gave tantalizing hints at some of the course but didn’t reveal much, and then the medical director and Lisa Hennessy, the show’s producer. We left the briefing not much wiser than when we had arrived, but feeling ready for the challenge ahead.
The day before the race was largely spent in the car, as we had to be out of the hotel by 7:30 a.m. and on the road for the six-hour drive across the island to the remote start location. Thankfully, we had our sweet mega-van that John had scored, and so we rode in comfort eastward on the island’s southern coast until we reached the city of Suva. We stopped there for lunch at a gas station, along with a number of other teams, then jumped back in the van for another hour or so until we reached our destination, a village that had been absolutely taken over by television, with scores of Eco-Challenge vehicles parked everywhere, and several separate tent cities set up in the fields all around. We were directed to a spillover camp for the teams with the higher numbers (we were team #60) and we found our tenting spot in a recently cleared sugarcane field in the middle of the blazing sun. Reluctantly, we set up camp, trying in vain to avoid the spokes of sugarcane stumps that were pretty much everywhere. We got John’s massive tent up and then went around and chatted with our neighbors, including the Iron Cowboys, composed of a group of friends including James Lawrence, who had completed 50 Ironmans in 50 days and was featured in a Netflix special, and Sonja Weick, a former professional triathlete. They were incredibly nice and asked for a bunch of tips on how to survive an adventure race – I don’t know if I helped or hurt them with my “advice” but they ended up finishing so I’ll take that as a win. We also chatted with Team Onyx, the first all African-American team in Eco-Challenge, and all amazingly fun and nice people who we enjoyed getting to know both before and after the race.
I wandered over to the main village on the excuse of picking up our tracker, but with the side mission of trying to find some shade, as I was burning quickly in the mid-day sun. The scene in the village was pretty amazing, with teams’ tents set up all around a central pavilion flanked by a stage. I hung out with Checkpoint Zero for a while, chatting with our friends from the U.S. race scene about how cool it was to be at the start line of an Eco-Challenge, a shared dream of pretty much anyone who has ever done an adventure race.
While we hung out, hurried preparations were taking place on the stage and in the grassy space in front of it. As the afternoon dragged on, tiki torches were spiked into the dirt and a podium was placed center-stage. Thirty flagpoles flanked each side of the stage, ready to be strung with each competing nation’s flag. Masses of locals began filing into the open side areas, with some racers sitting down to chat with them or kicking around soccer balls with the hordes of kids there for what must have been billed as the party of the decade for this sleepy Fijian village. I spoke to a couple of women who were sitting down awaiting the festivities and they told me they had walked two hours to get there, and had a two hour walk back in the dark after the show to return home.
Finally, over the loudspeakers mounted around the village square (which now felt more like an amphitheater), team captains were told to head to the stage. Once we filed in, the flags were raised in a a military-like ceremony, and an emcee took over from there, introducing a few individual teams with interesting back stories and asking them getting-to-know-you questions for the benefit of the local audience. As a team captain, I was excited to be on-stage because there was cold water, fresh juice, and some light snacks to be had. Most importantly, it was shady – I had already gotten sunburned while sitting with Checkpoint Zero in the blazing sun, which gave me some slight shivers of fear for how the sun and heat might affect us during the race.
As the sun set, an elaborate cava ceremony began, with oiled-up, bare-chested warriors in grass skirts performing elaborate rituals involving a wooden bowl full of the numbing spirit, which is a big deal in Fiji. That was followed by speeches, including one by a Fijian government minister, who shed a bit of light on why Fiji was chosen as the race’s location. She mentioned that the national government was giving MGM Studios 75 cents back on every dollar it spent on production. Mark Burnett, Eco-Challenge creator and MGM chairman, responded in kind, thanking Fiji for its munificence and praising the Fijian people as “the friendliest on Earth.” Knowing the race was going to go through some remote villages, we were excited and relieved to hear that they might be amenable to us asking them for help with food, water, and potentially shelter. MB ended his speech with an invitation for all in attendance to join him for a feast, and a deep line formed almost immediately for the buffet on the stage. We ate in a bit of a rush, as it was now very dark outside and some mosquitos were making things uncomfortable. We then skedaddled back to our tent, prepped everything for the morning, and set our alarm for a 4:30 a.m. wake-up.
When the alarm went off, it was still pitch dark outside, and very humid. We got dressed and grabbed our prepared breakfast bars, then walked over to the square, where the teams were assembling. We chatted with CP0 and the Yogaslackers for a while, waiting for instructions on what to do next. Then we started a procession down a couple of dirt roads, leading eventually to the outskirts of a grassy field containing a stage of sorts. We had to wait until the sun came up a bit to enter the area so the videographers could get the shot, and there was about 20 minutes of waiting until we could proceed. While we waited, I chatted with Nicholas Mulder of Cyanosis, who I had met at Raid Gallaecia a few years back.
Finally, we were given the go-ahead to enter the arena, and we proceeded slowly into the grassy area, forming a rough semi-circle around the stage, which was adorned with a big screen covered with a red sheet. Apparently, it was the course map.
More waiting ensued. This gave us a good chance to scope out the competition, which included most of the world’s top racers. We sat down next to Thunderbolt AR from Australia and talked for a bit about what to expect out of the first leg, which promised to be a long, hot boat trip somewhere (we still were not sure where we were going). Catching many eyes was the Russian team “The Science of Winning,” which had brought a large posterboard sign with their team name and each teammate had at least a 70-pound expedition-sized pack, filled to the gills with God-knows-what. It was quite silly looking. We didn’t know how they would fit all their gear into the camakaus, which we had been told were incorporated somehow into the first leg of the race.
“They clearly overpacked,” Kate said, in the biggest understatement in AR history.
Soon, helicopters began making the rounds of the arena. Mark Burnett landed a few hundred yards away and began talking with some of the staff. Then, a roar of engines came from the east and five helicopters flying in formation did a fly-by, turned around, and dropped the famous silhouette of Bear Grylls into a nearby field. He came running up to the stage…and the wind from the helicopter rotors blew the red cover off the map. Re-do! Bear ran back to the chopper and they repeated the process. This time, successfully. The map revealed a course that snaked out to sea, back to land, up into the mountains and down a river, then across the southern Fijian island of Viti Levu, from the wet side of the island to the dry side on the west, and out to sea once again for a finish on a remote island.
Bear gave a short speech, with some inspirational tips about footcare and teamwork, echoing his remarks from the race briefing. Then the race director, Kevin Hodder, got onstage and gave us a quick run-down of what to expect out of the races first 12 hours – we would start in our camakaus, heading out to an island off the coast for a trek, followed by more camakau. He wished us good luck, then told us to head to our boats, which were down a short path past the arena, parked in a neat row along a riverbank. On our walk, we passed Mark Burnett, who shook our hands and wished us good luck. It was at this point that we officially declared ourselves Eco-Challengers!
At some point along our walk, Garrison and Kate picked up a scroll of maps and when we got to our assigned boat (#60), almost near the front of the line, they put them down on the ground and began to plot our course while Starker and I readied the boat for departure, unwrapping and rigging the various sailing gear that was tightly lashed down. I had a heck of a time trying to pull up our mooring, which seemed to be cemented to the river bottom, but finally Starker was able to help me yank it up. It wasn’t long before everyone got on-board, with Starker sitting up front in the bow, Garrison, then Kate and I. The boats were pretty comfortable, with nice, deep cockpits and enough storage to make them feel luxurious compared to some of the other contraptions we’ve been forced into for paddling legs of adventure races.
THE RACE BEGINS
We heard a countdown begin and when it hit zero, unexpectedly enough to scare us, a cannon went off. We steered off to the side of the river after Garrison, sagely, suggested we take it easy and let the teams vying for the win get by us. In the tight quarters of the narrow river, the scene quickly devolved into mayhem. There were collisions as some teams forgot their boats were much wider than typical canoes and their ama, or outrigger, jammed into their neighbors. In front of us, we saw the elite French team capsize, not 100 meters into the race. Another quarter-mile down the river and we saw the famous Kiwis themselves, the six-time world champions from Team New Zealand, go boom up and splash into the water. We continued to paddle down the river, with Kate referencing a cloth rag with a handdrawn map containing the first 10 kilometers of the racecourse to the river’s mouth at the Pacific Ocean.
It was around 8 a.m. when we started and already hot, and I know Starker at least was a bit jealous of the folks who had gotten their morning swim. Hundreds and hundreds of locals lined different parts of the banks of the river, especially near the villages we paddled by. Many were cheering, and we cheered back. A couple of miles down the river, we saw our friends from Ireland AR capsize, their bright green jerseys becoming a little less painful on the eye when submerged under blue Fijian river water. We continued on our way, surrounded by other racers, eventually seeing those famous Kiwis, seemingly recovered from their bath, pass us to starboard. Garrison told me to quit my awe-struck staring as I kept inadvertently steering towards them.
After an hour-plus of paddling, we hit the mouth of the river, which widened into a wide, shallow estuarine that we had to paddle around, following navigational posts. Ahead loomed a gigantic camakau, a replica of a historical barge that was used for royal ceremonies, I believe. The ship marked the official point at which we were allowed to raise our sail. From here we had what Kate estimated as a 20-mile paddle north to an island containing CP 1, then another 15 miles to CP 2 on a larger island, which had a 13-mile trek waiting for us, followed by another 30-mile paddle to the end of the camakau section. We assumed that would take us around 24 hours, and we were nearly correct.
After we got the sail up, we spent the next 20-30 minutes drifting to the east, making no headway as we successfully raised the sail, then questioned why we weren’t moving. I forget who said it but it became obvious once it was said: there was no wind. Now it made perfect sense! That was why we had seen the front boats paddling off into the distance without raising their sails.
So, forlornly, we took up our outrigger paddles and began our long paddle, around 15 to 20 miles. It was full heat of day when we finally made it to CP 1, after passing over beautiful azure seas, visible coral reefs, and past a bunch of other camakaus that had gotten ahead of us while we messed around with the sail. Speaking of the sail, we had kept it up to shield us from the intense sun, and it provided enough shade to keep us at least partially sane. After staring at the island in the far distance for many hours, it suddenly got very close very quick, and Kate jumped off to get water, while I got our passport signed and we all took a quick pee break. Then back in the boat for another 3-4 hour paddle to another island further north. At one point, where there was a break in the islands to our east, we actually were able to sail for 10 or so minutes, but passing to the lee of another island, that reverie puffed out. But we still made good time and passed five or so teams, moving from near the back of the field to having at least 15-20 teams behind us by the time we rounded the corner of the island and paddled the last 30 minutes into the TA, where a couple of race staff grabbed our boat and moored it while we waded 100 or so feet ashore, checked in, and headed out for our trek, with about 45 minutes of daylight left, making it around 5:30 p.m.
The trek started on a dirt road – from its appearance and traffic, it was the island’s central thoroughfare. We mostly hiked but sometimes jogged down a long flat stretch south of the TA, catching up to AR Georgia, who we spent much of the rest of the trek with. At one point, a green pickup truck cruised at us slowly as Mark Burnett stuck his head out of the driver’s side window and asked us how we were doing…yet another unforgettable Eco milestone hit! This was dusk, and soon after, it was dark and the headlights went on. After around 10K on the road, winding through a few villages, we turned right after a bridge and headed uphill on a singletrack trail, hitting a manned CP where we passed a few teams that were resting. We then headed uphill on a nice trail tucked behind a friendly Australian team and actually followed flagging marking the path (not sure, but I believe it was because they didn’t want us getting lost and causing trouble by wandering into any village’s property or through their crops). After climbing for about 30-45 minutes (and stopping to purify some water with our Katadyn B-Frees), we topped out on a mountain with a view of the harbor. We saw a team in sleeping bags and wondered what was going on – it was very early in the race to be sleeping – when we saw it was the Yogaslackers. We found out later Daniel Staudigel had gotten heatstroke and they decided to take one of their sleep stops at the manned CP to recover. We began descending down the somewhat muddy slope along with AR Georgia and then with Team Israel. I had gotten to know their team captain when we went back-to-back doing our pre-race interviews and then had to wait for a while to be picked up and driven back to the hotel, and we chatted a bit more, and then I talked with his teammate, who was an Olympic sailor. The team thought she would be their secret weapon in the camakaus, but with no wind, her sailing skills weren’t much use.
We arrived back at the bustling TA and our boats at around 10 p.m. and tried not to waste any time wading back out to our boats, which had been parked and anchored about 100 feet offshore in shallow water. We got underway under a clear sky and waveless, windless conditions – beautiful and safe, but a bit disheartening as we knew now we had another 30 miles of paddling in front of us. But first, we had the freediving challenge to collect our golden medallion, which required the deployment of our own secret weapon – Starker.
In the pre-race briefing, we had been told that there was a metal medallion on each of the five stages of the race that we needed to retrieve and bring with us to the next camp. In order to finish, we needed to collect all five medallions, each with a different theme representing each stage (I believe they were ocean, river, jungle, highlands, and islands). For the first medallion, we were told it was a skin-diving challenge, and Starker, a lifelong swimmer who had set several Wisconsin state records in high school and who literally wears Speedos as underwear – was designated as our pick for retrieving the medallion from 25 feet below the surface of the ocean, in what turned out to be the middle of the night.
We weren’t quite sure what to expect when we pulled up to where the medallion was marked on the map – a buoy in the ocean about 50 feet out from the island hosting CP 1 – but there were three teams hanging out near an eerie light coming from beneath the waves. We went over but right as we were getting close, in a flash, Starker stripped off his clothing, revealed he was wearing a Speedo (this was not surprising), put on a facemask as he slid into the water, took a deep breath, and disappeared. The three of us remaining on the camakau didn’t know what to do. We hadn’t had time to formulate a plan or talk about what Starker was looking for. Twenty long seconds passed. Then 10 more. Finally, we saw bubbles over a darkening silhouhette backlit by the submerged floodlight. Quietly, Starker surfaced, but something was weird. He didn’t respond to our calls of “Did you get it?” and “Do you need help?” He struggled to swim over to the boat, with one side of his body seemingly not functioning and his head tilted askance. I was sure he had had a stroke. Then he lifted his left hand and hefted three medallions into the boat, where they landed with a clang. Lightened of his load, we were able to haul him back onboard, then turn toward the beach to check in at the CP. Starker said he had grabbed three of the metal, 5-lb. medallions to “make sure,” but we decided to leave two with the woman manning the CP, with our apologies. No way we were going to carry three of those heavy bastards around Fiji with us – one was heavy enough!
Starker was a bit chilled from his swim so he got dressed in all his mandatory layers while we pointed our bow to the west and the east coast of Vanua Levu, the main, south island of Fiji. There were a bounty of stars popping out through the clouds and not too many lights to spoil the beautiful view across the water to the islands dotting the coast. On the downside, there were not too many lights by which to navigate. Steering primarily by compass, we entered the weird mental place of paddling on a large body of water where it feels like you’re not moving. But judging from the blinking red lights affixed to every camakau in the race, we were certainly doing better than we had been earlier in the day; it now looked like we were comfortably in the middle of the pack. We sang songs and tried to keep a good rhythm to our strokes, with Starker taking an occasional break to stretch his back out on the plank of wood between the camakau and the ama. We sang and talked and sang and Kate and Garrison occasionally stopped to make a navigational calculation, but all in all we made great time and pulled up at the TA at around 5 a.m., right as the first hint of light began to brighten the Fijian sky.
There must have been at least 10 teams in the TA when we arrived. We found fresh water and filled up, then began eating and prepping for the next stage, which looked like a 30-mile paddleboard north for a few miles along the coast and then west for a ways up a river. Starker and I made our way over to a pile of deflated paddleboards and waited as the “Brazilian Bombshell” team of Eco-Challenge lore, and then the very talented team of Columbia Vidaraid, took turns blowing up their watercraft and selecting paddles. We were surprised to see them as they’re usually toward the front of the pack, but they must have been having some problems (we learned later that a bunch of teams had gotten heatstroke from going out too hard in the hot midday sun the day before).
We blew the paddleboards up to 8 PSI and Starker set to work attached the skegs to the bottoms of the boards. Then we checked out of the TA, made our way down to the water, and set out in that beautiful time of day when it’s light but the sun hasn’t yet risen. We were quickly joined by the Irish team, including our very non-Irish friend Mark Lattanzi. We had a good chat, all trying various novel ways of paddling the boats that might make them move a little faster than molasses. Clearly, none of us residents of the north had had as much time to practice as those living in more tropical climes, as Shubi and the rest of the ”Bombshells” caught up to us and passed us like were standing still.
Following the Brazilians, we spotted the mouth of the river we needed to go up, and we saw a few teams ahead of us struggling with what looked like a swift current. We headed toward a sand bar and dismounted for a bit to lug our boats rather than paddle them. A helicopter came by and started filming the Brazilians fighting to make any headway upstream. Then, remounting my board, I began struggling mightily, with my bow swinging wildly from side to side with each paddle-stroke. I grabbed onto some mangrove roots on the side of the river and I felt under my board; my skeg had disappeared. I must have jarred it loose dragging it on the sand bar. Suddenly, I was the slowest one in the group. And that was saying something because we were hardly moving at all, as we fought against a visible gushing of water moving in the wrong direction.
We looked at the shoreline – all impassible mangrove swamp for at least 100 yards on either direction. It would cost a lot of time and effort to see if there was more level ground further in than that. With no other apparent option, we kept paddling, working our way up the river at a crawl. Then, disaster struck again as Garrison announced his boat was not manoevering and I knew instantly that his skeg had dropped as well. We all stopped again, holding onto the mangrove roots as we made sure the skegs on Kate and Starker’s boards were screwed on tight. But as a team, we were potentially already screwed; with only two working paddleboards, and with the river’s current not abating at all, it was going to be a real challenge to continue.
Improvising, we got out our stretchy tow ropes and slung them from the two working paddleboards to the two deficient ones. Garrison and I manned the front boards with Starker and Kate hanging on the back and steering from their knees. It was still slow, but it was better than before. Unable to stop paddling even for a stroke without losing progress to the current, we continued to work our way upstream. We got passed by several teams we didn’t recognize, and one we did: YogaSlackers, who gave us an update on Dan’s about with heatstroke and their bivvy on top of the mountain.
We continued to work our way slowly up the river, weaving back and forth, partially from the towing and partially in a fruitless attempt to find anyplace where the current was less forceful. It started getting hot. At around noon, it was scorching. Then, like a mirage, we saw a group of young men standing on the side of the river, underneath a bridge. As we got closer, they waived a couple of machetes in the air and started yelling “coconuts!” Unable to resist, paddled over and swilled down three coconuts and were instantly satisfied, the cool milk dripping down our chins. I paid them five Fijian dollars and we moved on. Finally, whether the tide switched or we just got far enough up the river so that its draining force wasn’t as strong, the current started to ebb and we could make faster progress.
The river narrowed and the foliage on either side of the river presented a little more shade on the river, cooling us from roasting down to a slow boil. Kate let us know we had just one kilometer left and we picked up the pace, eager to get off the river and be done with the slow misery of SUPping. But after at least three kilometers of surging around every bend and searching eagle-eyed for the takeout, the peanut gallery began to get grumpy. The many turns in the river had misled Kate into underestimating the distance left, and what we thought should have been 15 minutes tops of paddling turned into more than an hour.
By the time we saw the muddy ramp leading uphill river left into a small village, at around 3:30 p.m., we were more exhausted than ecstatic. Complicating matters was that right as we finished the leg, it began to rain, hard. We got directions from some locals across a floating bridge (where we had a less than friendly encounter with the impatient Costa Rican team, which may or may not have involved me shouting an ironic “Pura Vida” in their direction) to the somewhat hidden TA, where our bike boxes were waiting for us. We dragged them under a small tarp hung outside a house with a porch filled with other teams, and began trying to simultaneously get food and dry clothes, not get soaked from the rain, and assemble our bikes, all while jockeying with another team for precious dry tarp space.
The effort was just too much for me, especially after towing Kate on her broken SUP for 10 hours, and the team graciously dismissed me to the porch while they took turns assembling bikes, as doing more than one at a time was impossible in the limited space. Consequently, a transition that should have taken us 45 minutes to an hour took us more like an hour and a half. We then had to drag our bike boxes all the way up a hill to the drop off point, and feel the disheartening sadness of our nice dry clothes quickly getting soaking wet. But we were excited to be off on the on the next activity, and the hordes of villagers shouting encouraging bula’s, as well as the sun peaking back out in for about 20 minutes of beautiful sunsetting daylight, put some of the wind back in our sails.
The bike ride initially took us on a dirt track ascending and descending some steeply rolling hills, which eventually led us to an improved road. After an hour or so of that, we were reluctantly forced to leave its comforts to take a singletrack route carved out of the jungle. Only a few hundred feet into it, it became unrideable. It seemed like someone had come in with a hose and wet down the entire route. The resulting mud was ankle to knee deep and slippery as ice underfoot. After 30 minutes of mostly walking, we hit a stream and spent a few minutes trying to clean off our bikes. We shouldn’t have bothered. Right after that, we hit a steep uphill that was as slick as a Slip ‘N Slide. The best strategy for ascending was to try to find a little grass to step on for traction, but progress was slow. At one point, we had to form a bucket brigade to haul our bikes up a particularly treacherous section.
Forty-five minutes later, the ascent began to calm a bit as we came out of the jungle and into a grassy area bordering a barbed wire fence. In the distance, we heard dance music and saw lights flashing through the trees. We couldn’t figure out what it was – a surprise TA? Some youngsters partying? But we were walking right toward the sound so we figured we’d find out soon enough. When we popped off the trail, we found ourselves in a village and were immediately overwhelmed by lights and sound. At least 100 local villagers were cheering and dancing, and screaming dozens of questions at us at once. Even though it was past 1 a.m. and at least 30 teams had passed through over the previous 12 hours, it was still a full-on Eco-Challenge party.
“Where are you from?” at least two dozen of them shouted.
“U.S.A.,” Kate responded.
“U.S.A.! Go U.S.A.!” they all began to shout.
The partiers came in for hugs and dancing, took pictures of us with their cell phones, offered us coffee, and literally put delicious hot and fresh sweet rolls in our mouths. Kate got a marriage proposal. It was a wild, magical, spirit-lifting experience, and we were loathe to leave, but we had to keep moving. More villagers greeted us and cheered as we biked through. This was the “bula” experience we had been told about – the warm and heartfelt welcome provided by every Fijian we met on during our time in that very special country.
We ran into a bit more mud on the soft sandy roads leading down the ridge out of town, but managed to make it to a swollen river, and an interesting scene, with some racer tents up on the near riverbank, a bunch of small and long wooden boats lined up on the short, and a steep, muddy embankment on the other side. As we approached the scene, a race volunteer flagged us down and let us know that severe weather had stopped the race. Many teams had been stuck at this spot for hours, he said, but we were now permitted to continue on to the next CP, which for us was Camp 1. We attempted to clean our bikes off in the river, then got in a boat with our bikes, and were transported across the river and deposited in a knee-deep mud pit on the other side. Once again, we had to crawl up a steep muddy slope with our bikes, but it was a short misery as we crested the embankment and laid our bikes down in a thicket as several of us took a bathroom break. We were passed here by Jesse Tubb and Josh Forester’s US military team, but even though I said hi by name, they were in go/zombie mode and I don’t think they recognized us. We got back on our bikes a few moments later, but didn’t make it far, as Starker’s bike experienced a bad chain suck not more than a minute after we got started. We struggled with it for five minutes, then by chance (crazy chance – it was around 2 a.m.), a utility or garbage truck pulled up next to us. We asked them if they had any tools and they just so happened to have a screwdriver that we were able to use to clear the chain without breaking it. We then made solid time down a flat road for a bit, before turning onto a steady climb that killed our pace. We kept expecting to see Camp 1 but it just wouldn’t appear. We began to imagine every light we saw on our right side was the camp, then we’d get closer and see it was just a house. Our weary minds continued to play games for 30 solid minutes before we saw the unmistakable sight of our first Eco-Challenge camp. We should have known it would be obvious and we wouldn’t miss it – hundreds of tents set up, floodlights in certain places, helicopters, and people moving all around camp, despite the late hour. We crossed a bridge over a large river, checked in with the volunteer, admired the wooden leaderboard, and were led by our TAC John into our welcoming campsite, with hot food and cold sodas waiting.
CAMP 1 TO CAMP 2
We were all exhausted, but we all ate cheesy instant potatoes topped with refried beans, and afterwards, I took the time to take a quick rinse in the river while Garrison did maps with Kate and John gave us a race update. Severe flooding had nearly swept away part of the camp; the next stage, a canyoning section, had high water levels and some teams had gotten close to being trapped. A few teams had to retreat back to the camp and were being given a special 6 a.m. start time for the next morning. We were allowed to start at 8 a.m., but we had to be ready to go by then or we would not be allowed to continue. The entire race course was shut down until the 6 a.m. start, so the leaders were hunkered down somewhere ahead on the course. We got to sleep by 3:30, and set a 6:30 a.m. alarm. This would work out perfectly – we would get credit for our first of five mandatory 3-hour rests, and be able to start early enough in the morning so we would make the most of the next day. We went to sleep feeling proud of ourselves for persevering and for putting ourselves in good position to continue to survive the course and the race.
Waking up the next morning, after three hours of sleep following 42 hours of nonstop racing, was not the most pleasant feeling. But we reminded ourselves we were in Eco-Challenge and that got the adrenaline pumping enough to get us out of our sleeping bags. Breakfast was hot and delicious, including coffee and fresh fruit – a rarity in the middle of an adventure race – and we remarked how nice it was to have a TAC to take care of us, but John couldn’t hear us, because he was busy at the river trying to wash the mud out of our shoes and bikes. What a guy. After hitting the port-a-potties, getting lubed up with chamois and sunscreen, and triple-checking to make sure all our gear was packed and ready to go, we headed out.
At 7:59, we hustled to the trailhead, where us and another team (ARGeorgia?) lined up for the restart. We were given the go and pushed ahead into the bush, across some local farms, walking delicately around the plants, and then finding our river, which we had to follow up into the canyon. As we worked our way upstream on a nice footpath, the cliffs on either side got more vertical and dramatic. Not for the first time and not for the last, I wished I had been allowed to bring my camera. Finally, the walls of the canyon forced us up onto one side, and when we came to a six foot drop into the canyon (with crystal clear water, so you could see the depth and know the jump was safe), we realized we were about to get very wet. But we knew it was coming and had prepared our bags so everything was waterproofed – or so we hoped. Starker was the first to jump in and as usual, he looked the most comfortable in the water. I plunged in last and was surprised by how cold the water was for a tropical island. We worked our way upstream, gripping onto the walls of the canyon and pulling ourselves forward against the forceful current. We saw a couple of photographers and they told us the water was running much higher than the day before due to the heavy rain that had come through. But we were still able to make progress up the river, using the occasional up-and-over a rock feature and subsequent cold plunge.
At the top of the canyon, it evened out a bit, and there was a manned CP, as well as the stage’s medallion (river), and ARGeorgia, but by the time we had checked in with the volunteer, they had left. It turned out we were the last team to arrive at this point, as every team behind us was rerouted on a road directly to the bili-bilis ahead (though there was no short-course marked in the final standings).
Garrison and Kate took a few moments here to make sure they got their bearings, as the next section was supposed to travel through thick jungle for five kilometers, and we weren’t sure there would be any trail. When we got going, we found a stream heading in the right direction and followed it for a while, then to another stream junction, when we followed for a bit, then over some easier vegetation, and at this point, I realized we were in the thick Fijian jungle, with only our compasses and Garrison’s keen navigational ability to steer us through. Fortunately, that was more than enough, as he guided us up a reentrant right onto a small trail going in the right direction. It must have originally been a game path, but after being tromped on by at least 150-200 racers ahead of us, it was now a discernable (and very muddy) trail.
We followed it up a bit of a hill, but on the far side, the steepness and muddiness of the trail was a scary sight to behold. Garrison went first and was able to make it look doable, but we all ended up sliding down on our backsides, resulting in intensely unpleasant mud and stick enemas. But while painful, we were seemingly getting the hang of this uniquely Fijian experience when disaster nearly struck. My foot got caught in a root and wrenched back behind my body, severely twisting my ankle. I heard a loud pop and thought my race was over. I yelled in pain and the whole team looked horror-stricken. I writhed in the mud for a bit, trying to move my ankle around and feeling significant pain. After a few more minutes, I tried to stand up and was able to, then tried putting some pressure on the foot and was also able to, again with significant pain. But the relief was palpable – I was able to continue, even as my ankle swelled up to the size of a grapefruit. We kept making our way down the slope, even more gingerly than before.
We ended up in a bit of a valley with a Spanish team which included Antonio de la Rosa, who I knew had paddleboarded across the Atlantic (and soon after Eco, he paddleboarded from San Francisco to Hawaii). We walked with them for a bit before separating and finding our own way up and over one final hill, which led us down into a larger village, where we carefully made our way through crops and between huts to arrive at the river where we would have to build our bili-bilis, one of the signature elements of the Eco-Challenge Fiji experience.
Piles of bamboo were all over the scorching hot beach. Nearby, the CP volunteer sat, under the shade of an umbrella. The volunteer, while signing our passport, openly suggested we pay the locals waiting in the wings to build our bili-bili. Given the official go-ahead, we signaled our interest, and immediately, two different squads set to it – a group of grizzled veterans, and a crew of eager teenagers. While we were waiting on the boats to be build, the Spanish team emerged from the village and crossed the river, then signed in at the TA. More crews set to building bili-bilis and locals who had been spectating from the parking lot behind the beach started to crowd in, causing the scene to become a little bit chaotic. Add in a healthy dose of sleep deprivation and a bit of competitive spirit, and the Spanish team ended up taking the second raft being built by the grizzled veteran group – our pick for the ones who knew what they were doing – and we ended up with one of the rafts built by the eager teenagers. That would turn into a bigger problem in about 12 hours.
Putting into the slow-moving, azure river at around noon, we assumed we would be traveling at around two to three miles per hour, with a helpful current. Even with that wishful thinking, we knew we were in for a long paddle that would take us into the night. We had brought webbed neoprene hand paddles with us to Fiji but had been told before the race we were not allowed to bring them on the river. More specifically, we were forbidden to use anything but bamboo poles as paddles. As we progressed along the river at what a pedestrian might call “elderly person using a walker” pace, we saw and heard locals all along the river calling to us and attempting to sell us improved paddles of all varieties. We politely declined, but we found out later that many teams had accepted, though we weren’t sure the bili-bilis were capable of moving faster than a slow crawl.
Not long into our journey, we heard the familiar buzz of a helicopter nearby, but unlike other times, it stuck around. We came around a bend in the river and saw it hovering over the team in front of us – AR Georgia, we found out later in the day when we caught up to them. Then it was our turn, as the chopper circled above and I did my best impression of John C. McGinley holding up his barbed-wire staff at the end of Platoon, hoisting my bamboo pole in the air and shouting triumphantly. Starker yelled at me the whole time to cut it out, because we were told at the pre-race briefing to act naturally if we ever knew we were being filmed, but I couldn’t help myself and I ignored him. Kate and Garrison were less fortunate, ingloriously getting stuck in a shallow area of the river and having to bail out and push (a scene that ended up making it into the show).
We passed the photographic spotter, who asked for our team number, then stopped for a bit after Starker had the brilliant idea of using our mandatory machete to customize the length of our bamboo stick-paddles. Then we got to work, paddling steadily and making our way cleanly through several riffles and Class I rapids, which provided a nice break to the monotony of traveling slowly down a lazy river.
The sun was out and it was hot on the river. Occasionally we splashed some cool water on our faces, but eventually, it became unnecessary for Starker and I, as our raft slowly began to loosen so that we were sitting in water – first one inch and increasing steadily through our ride. At sundown at 6 p.m., we caught up to AR Georgia, who had loomed for hours in front of us as mysterious figures until we got close enough to identify their signature salmon-colored shirts. We hung loosely with them for a while, reaching the sole checkpoint on the section at nearly the same time. We took a moment for some local kids to help us tighten up our raft, but it became clear they didn’t know what they were doing and so we tried to move on as quickly as possible. This was a common, jarring event throughout our Eco-Challenge – hours of lonely, quiet monotony suddenly interrupted by a dozen screaming, hyper kids, all trying to get a piece of the action, and moving faster than our brains could properly comprehend. You didn’t want to be rude or mean, but you also didn’t want them to accidentally screw up your race because they were trying to be helpful (or more likely, show off to their friends).
Down the river we continued, as fog slowly thickened over the river due to condensation from the cooling temperatures. This caused us to miss a turnoff, and for what must have been a hilarious 20 minutes for Mark Harris watching the tracker, we steered around a lagoon until we noticed the current was pushing against us and we were going upstream. This freaked us out a bit – Garrison most of all – and we then steered a strict compass bearing until we figured out what had happened.
We continued, with Kate and Garrison taking catnaps while Starker and I towed them. We caught back up and passed AR Georgia, who had snuck behind us during our lagoon excursion, and also heard a Mexican folk song being sung in Spanish. I called out and confirmed it was one of the Mexican teams, I think Teenek. We sung for a bit with them and then got too far ahead to hear them, which meant we were lost in our own thoughts on a quiet, foggy, dark river. Starker got very silent and his stick-paddle started doing the telltale dips, revealing he was getting drowsy. This went on for a good five to 10 minutes, then he sat bolt upright and shouted out into the darkness, “Bula!” One of the funniest moments of the race for sure.
That was the beginning of the fun times on the leaky bili. Starker and I started tripping the lights fantastic. The trees above us on either embankment began to morph into anthropogenic figures – a mother and her baby, a teenager skateboarding, John Travolta in Grease. Oddly, Starker and I were seeing the same exact things in the trees, meaning they actually really looked like people or we were having the same weird hallucinations. While we were entertained for at least an hour, Kate and Garrison slowly crept away from us, using their desire to avoid the weirdness to push their effort a little higher and move a bit faster (as much as was possible on the painfully slow-moving boats).
The last hour of the bili-bili was the most painful. We kept shifting our positions from sitting to standing, but the raft was now so loose that each movement had to be intentional and carefully coordinated to be in tandem. No position was comfortable for more than five minutes at a time. Adding to the fun, it starting misting, diminishing visibility and soaking us even more than the sitting in three inches of water had.
At around 1 a.m., we arrived at a shallow section requiring us to get off the rafts and push, and not long after, Kate spotted the TA, up on a hill on river right. Arriving at the beach, we thought we had completed the leg, but when I went up to get our passport signed while the rest of the team got our equipment together, I was told we had to bring our rafts up the hill, which in the rain and with then benefit of at least 30 other teams having trampled it, was now a knee-deep pig slough of mud.
What ensued was the low point of my race, and one of the lowest points of any expedition race I’ve done thus far. I backtracked to the beach and gave the team the news, but I could see Starker and Kate were in no shape to be slogging through the mud with heavy bamboo poles on their backs. I started worrying about them, and wondering why if our raft was already falling apart and made of all-natural materials, why it needed to be lifted up an American gladiator-type obstacle (minus high-speed tennis balls getting shot at us). I’ll admit I got a little emotional and may have tromped around the beach for a moment venting, especially as I saw Kate and Starker struggling to get a single bamboo log up the impossibly slippery hill. And then Garrison grabbed me and tried to talk some sense into me. And being restrained at that exact moment was not at all what I wanted. I told Garrison to let go of me, and then after a moment more of pacing the beach, I tried to put my anger into something productive and started hauling up the bamboo poles along with the rest of the team. It was slow, messy, frustrating work, but eventually, over the course of 40 minutes or so, we got it done.
At the top of the hill, in shoes full of rocks and mud, we got our passport signed and started walking down a dirt road toward a village, where we were told our bikes awaited us. I fell back and had a whine session with Kate about my tiff with Garrison, and Kate patiently lent me her ear, until Starker spotted a shiny tree in a schoolhouse patio up ahead. As we got closer, we saw a bunch of the medallions we assumed were for teams who didn’t travel the canyon. Since we already had one, Kate, Garrison, and I ignored the treasure, but Starker was lured in, and after a brief inspection, he started walking backwards toward us. Perhaps it a heavy, waterlogged backpack, or maybe stiff muscles after 12 hours of immobilization on the bili-bili, or perhaps it just one of those simple mistakes that people make, but Starker stepped backwards off a six-inch curb and landed awkwardly, sending a shivering ripple through his leg. He howled in pain and as ran back to him, quizzing him intensely him about where it hurt. Starker had suffered through both Achilles tendonitis and plantar fasciitis that had worsened during his intensive training in the weeks and months before the race; this incident woke both dormant pains and all of a sudden, he could barely walk. He cursed loudly and often as we hobbled toward the TA, giving us all a big worry about what sudden and debilitating injury could mean for our race.
We got to our boxes, stacked by a huge wooden bike rack in the town’s main square. We began transitioning and it was clear we were not moving fast at all. Middle of the night, tensions and injuries flaring, Garrison wisely suggested we take our second sleep card punch of the race, and that immediately lowered the simmering intensity we had been feeling, as we were now off the clock. With three hours to recover, we got some fun snacks out, headed over to a covered area, cleaned up as best we could in some nasty, nasty bathrooms, and Kate and Starker laid down to rest. Garrison and I got our bikes out of their boxes and assembled, Garrison gave each chain and deraillieur a solid cleaning and lube, and then broke out the maps to study the bike ride ahead. With just the two of us awake, we took the chance to talk through our tensions and work things out. This is how it goes with new teammates sometimes; it takes a while to learn how to deal best with each other’s foibles. Thankfully, from my perspective at least, we were able to have an adult conversation and get back on a good, happy, productive team-first footing that would stay with us for the rest of the race.
At around 5 a.m., we woke up Kate and Starker, and by first light we were riding out of the TA on a 40-kilometer mountain bike to Camp 2. The bike started on some dirt farm roads, then graduated up to a paved road that would through some villages and then up along a highland ridge. As usual, the riding was straight up and straight down. By 8 a.m., the road was busy with school buses and other commuter vehicles used for mass transit, and we were greeted by constant choruses of “Bula” from hordes of uniformed primary school kids and, more occasionally, by adults boarding communal buses to head off to work. We bula’d back and continued on our way, ticking off steady progress. At around 11 a.m., we arrived at the sprawling Camp 2, checked in, glanced at the big wooden leaderboard, and were wearily led by our energetic and purpose-driven TAC John into our tent for hot food, clean clothes, a clean-up in the nearby stream, and eventually, four hours of blissful, dreamless, twitchy, deep-REM sleep.
CAMP 2 TO CAMP 3
Waking up in the middle of an expedition race is always a bit of a strange experience, and for Starker, who was just doing his second-ever XPD, it was almost comical to watch him jump out of the tent and swear he never fell asleep, even though we’d all heard him snoring as loud as a crew of workmen drilling two-by-fours with a power saw. Even when John, who’d been mending some of our gear and taking care of other tasks as we slept, vouched that he had checked on Starker numerous times and personally guaranteed he had been asleep for at least 3.5 hours, Starker remained dubious.
Starker was clearly still pretty tired, because he then proceeded to put on Garrison’s bike shorts. Garrison spent about 10 minutes looking for them until he noticed Starker wearing them. Starker, however, insisted they were his (they weren’t) and it took way too long of a time to sort out this situation than it should have, but it was worth it for the comedy it provided the team for hours and days afterwards. We rolled out of camp at around 5:30 p.m., knowing we had only around 30 minutes of daylight left to work with.
The first part of the ride was more rolling dirt roads, often requiring a hike up and a careful descent down, as our packs were pretty fully loaded, having just started out on a leg that would see us bike 60k, hike 10k, whitewater raft 30k, and then hike 50k. We saw a few Fijians here and there, but it was mostly a quiet ride until we arrived at Namuamua Village and another CP, where dozens of film crew were scrambling around and klieg lights lit up the village square. The map showed that this village was the end-point of the whitewater rafting section, and some of the top teams were probably just coming through and heading out on the long hike at this point. But we had to cross the river and start heading uphill, and after a successful fjord that dipped us into thigh-deep water, we were able to mount up and ride efficiently for a bit. Then, the road started turning a little mushy. As we climbed on a gentle upward incline, the road continued to get mushier. We worked our way into higher jungle, away from human habitation, where there seemed to be no lights at all, until in front of us, we saw a team stopped on the side of the road. It was the Belgian Team To-Get-Ther and our friend Debbie, who we had gotten to know at the Nordic Islands Adventure Race a few months prior. We had a great reunion but the Belgians had a big problem with one of their bikes – a long tear in one of their tire sidewalls. They seemed to have a good strategy to fix it and we couldn’t do anything to help other than offer words of encouragement, so we soon set out to continue our ride, wishing them luck and hoping we would see them down the road.
At this point, we were often having to jump off our bikes and walk up steeper slopes, and we felt like we were up on a ridgeline, with a cool wind blowing on us from both sides of the mountain spine we were ascending. Garrison was great on the navigation, so we were equal parts frustrated and amused by the “Eco-Challenge Bikes this Way” signs clearly marking the route at every intersection. We hooked a left at one of these signs up what felt like the final upward push to a kind of summit, but we were surprised that after a short climb, the path leveled off, and even more surprised to find the sometimes-squishy road turned suddenly into pure peanut butter mud. For the first 30 minutes, we kept expecting our situation to improve, and for the road to turn back into its regular annoying but mostly rideable squishy state. But after an hour, we started to get an ominous feeling that we were in for an indefinite period of suffering. At this point, we had all crashed at least once, and Starker had taken three especially rough tumbles, losing his front headlight on one of them. The mud was slick if you had any momentum, but horribly sticky otherwise, gumming up every crevice of our bikes until they literally wouldn’t move any more. We each picked out “mud sticks” we would employ every 20 steps or so to ice-pick the mud out from our tires and front forks, and this became our mode of travel for the next nine hours.
Given our pace of travel, the relative quiet of the night, and the lack of anything else to talk about, naturally we created quite a few theories about what exactly we were doing on this “bike ride.” It wasn’t clear if the race directors had intended this section to be as disastrously crushing as it was. There were what looked like snowbanks of mud on either side of the road – sometimes as high as six or eight feet tall – that had clearly been plowed by some kind of industrial-grade equipment. We weren’t sure if anyone had gotten through before it got this muddy, and we speculated we were losing horrendous amounts of time to those in front of us. We tried to theorize more efficient means of travel, such as spending 15 minutes cleaning our bikes of mud and then strapping them to our backpacks and simply hauling them, but the distance that remained in the stage seemed too far and we didn’t want to risk destroying our backs. We thought and discussed many more things that night, but most of them I want to leave to that place and time, as not many of them were very pleasant. At some point in the night, we passed a team bivouacked on the side of the trail; one person was sitting awake and watched us go by but didn’t say anything. A few hours later, we decided to take a 15-minute break for some food at what ostensibly was a nice overlook over a pitch-black valley – we couldn’t see anything but at least the breeze felt good – and the team we had passed tromped past us. We caught up to them soon after and spent the next four or five hours leapfrogging them. After a little conversation, we found out they were Team Flying J, and I recognized their captain’s name when she told me she was Diannette Wells – she had been in/on a couple of the original Eco-Challenges (Borneo and Fiji, I think?). Pretty neat to be racing right along with an Eco-Challenge legend, though their team seemed pretty intense/military and didn’t like it when we passed them, usually speeding up and passing us back a few moments later. They were fortunate to be close to us at one point, though, when we found a metal tube popping out of the ground and spouting clean, fresh water, which had been impossible to find on the ridgeline. We all filled up, even though the flow from the pipe was slow, and we were glad we did when we found ourselves still hike-a-biking away as the sun rose at 6 a.m. and we knew from the maps we still had a long way to go.
The sun coming up was a relief in that we could see where we were going, but it was also terribly depressing, because we felt like we hadn’t made any progress even with an all-night push. We began to get that horrible feeling in adventure race, when you’re positively convinced the end of the stage is just around the next bend, and then you turn the bend and there’s just more ridiculously muddy road. We did that over and over again until it drove us all mad. Garrison said he would push on ahead to see what he could find, and he came back around 45 minutes later to tell us that it was just more of the same ahead. It was getting hot and now we were all sweating profusely. Then we hit a big, steep uphill. Our minds and bodies gave out at that point and we all sat down in the jungle on the side of the road for an impromptu break, which was really a breakdown – our team’s lowest point in the race thus far. Starker and Kate were really struggling and I honestly worried if they would be able to make it through the next bit without my help. And I knew I didn’t have enough in my tank to be able to help them. They were going to have to do it themselves, or we were going to have to quit.
Then, Starker just racked his bike on his pack and started chugging uphill. It was so inspiring. He was relentless. And then Kate did the same thing. And I was left, standing listlessly behind them, watching them disappear over the next crest in the road. And I realized I had to get moving to keep up! I finagled my bike onto my back via some straps that were definitely not meant to carry the 40 lbs. or so of weight from the bike and the mud clinging to it, and grappled and shimmied my way up the hill, sliding down back down half of each step I took. This went on for hours, though time seemed pretty meaningless at this point. All I know is that eventually, I saw a photographer ahead of us, and it was only at that point that I was pretty sure we were near the end. I definitely was crying out loud, which I don’t ever usually do. I was really hoping that photographer didn’t take pictures of me sobbing as I walked past him, trying not to make eye contact. We had been on the bike leg for 18 hours.
We popped out onto a bitumen doubletrack jeep road and remounted our bikes, the mud starting flying off in all directions as we headed steeply downhill. As if we hadn’t had enough drama, my front tire sprung a loud leak and started spraying Stan’s at least a foot in the air with every tire revolution. I started freaking out – we were only two kilometers from the TA and I didn’t want to have to do more hike-a-bike! Fortunately, it sealed, though the drama continued when Starker nearly slammed into an Eco-Challenge truck coming up the steep and windy road. At around noon, we rolled into the TA, which was just a field with some bamboo bike racks, where our bikes were waiting for us, along with a water truck with an attached power washer. Even with the spartan accommodations, we couldn’t have been happier to have made it out of the jungle, still alive and in the race.
Starker and Garrison got busy cleaning the bikes, while I checked in with passport control and Kate began sorting out the bike boxes. The TA had no shade whatsoever and it was very hot in the midday sun. We were thankful for Team Bones’ advice that we stock our bike boxes with food and water as we dipped into those stores to replenish our supply of both. Starker came over with his bike to let us know they were all ready, and we immediately noticed a large red welt on his shin. He had tried to clean the mud off his shoes with the power washer, he said, and had taken a good chunk of skin off in the process, underestimating just how powerful it was.
Our time crunch for making it to the river as fast as possible to beat the 6 p.m. darkzone on the water forced us to put Starker’s injury in the back of our minds for the moment. We rushed to get our bikes packed away and then hiked off on a dirt/gravel road, accompanied by a score of local kids. Along the way, we ran into three or four teams that we went back and forth with for the 10 kilometers of road up to the paddle put-in, and we were destined to play bumper boats with them on our journey down the river as well. They included Meridianoraid of Spain, the Dutch team (friends of our Belgian friends), Flying J, and Team Curl. We got to the paddle put-in behind all of them and were told the top teams had taken four hours to make it down the river. After hiking down the river and finding a brand-spankin’ new whitewater raft waiting for us, I realized we had forgotten a bag of stuff at the CP, so I ran back to get it. While I was there, the staff at the CP asked me if I minded taking the passport of Team Peak Pursuit down the river – they had accidentally left it behind. I said sure and hustled back to the river. The time was 1:50 p.m., meaning we had to move as fast as Team New Zealand if we wanted to beat the cutoff.
We started out immediately hitting some very tight canyons and Class II-III whitewater. We had been given a diagram with directions for successfully running the rapids, but it was pretty near useless as it was hard to tell which rapid we were in based on the birds-eye view vantage point of the schematics. Garrison and I had a few difficult moments where each of us thought we were steering, but once we got this figured out, we settled into an efficient and effective paddling technique that kept us moving downstream while giving us a little more brainspace to enjoy the river.
The black volcanic rock canyon was stunning. It was just absolutely one of the most beautiful places any of us had ever been. Picturesque waterfalls emptied onto our heads, the water was a clear turquoise and clear to the bottom. There were long vertical lines on each side of the canyon tilting slightly upwards, and the resulting illusion tricked our brains into thinking we were paddling down a 30-degree slope. We all took off our shoes and took turns stretching a little bit, enjoying the free miles courtesy of the steady but gentle current. However, two things shook us out of our reverie: giant slabs of rock pockmarked the river like pinball bumpers, making constant steering necessary. And our watches told a story of precious minutes lost to idleness, or at least less-than-maximal effort.
We dealt with one problem at a time. In the first few hours of paddling, we hit several short stretches of river that were nearly impossible to pass through cleanly. While we tried to be careful, we still got wedged and stuck several times, but we were able to use our whitewater skills (acquired from the mandatory course Eco had required) to free ourselves with relative ease. But eventually, the inevitable happened when we careened against a rock and Garrison found out the hard way just how slippery new whitewater rafts are after he was tossed out of the boat like bacon out of a non-stick skillet. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt, and I ended up suffering the same fate a little further down the river. Overall, we were having a lot of fun, and combined with our lack of sleep, it got pretty silly – if we weren’t fighting a cutoff, we would have taken more time to laugh.
In the lower half of the river, the current was still strong enough to cause rapids at each of the many snaking turns we were forced to navigate, but it had widened enough so we could push at a sustained pace. We began to paddle hard and were able to pass several of the teams who had set out before us. But when the clock hit 5 p.m., Kate estimated we still had 8 kilometers left to go, and we knew we were going to have to put in an all-out effort not to spend the night darkzoned on the riverbank. The next hour was the hardest I’ve ever paddled – the joints in my fingers hurt badly for days afterwards. In between fighting some fun waves on each bend in the river, we talked strategy. We didn’t know the penalty for not making the darkzone. We didn’t know how close anyone was paying attention to tracking and we had seen plenty of rule violations that hadn’t been penalized. We knew it didn’t get fully dark until 6:30 p.m. or thereabouts. And we knew there was a village at the TA with a good chance for hot food and a hut to sleep in.
When the clock ticked over to 6 p.m., Kate let us know we were two kilometers from the takeout. There were three other teams in boats around in a line in front of us in the river, and all of them continued on. We arrived in a group at around 6:25 p.m., hauled our boats up on shore, and waited in line to check in at the TA. While we waited, a member of the Canadian team came down and gratefully reclaimed their passport. It sounded like they were prepared to start on the next challenge, a 50-kilometer hike through the jungle, and we were impressed by how well they were doing considering it was their first-ever adventure race.
At 6:45 p.m., as the last gray light drained from the sky, we began to plead our case with the volunteer manning the TA. She was very nice but said she had to check in about our late arrival. Together, we listened on the radio as our sentence was read aloud: darkzoned at the TA until 6 a.m., plus a three-hour penalty to be served at the next camp. We pleaded that we had lost time delivering the passport, but it was a weak excuse. If the rules had been more explicit about whether we could have carried the raft on the road next to the river, we would have considered it. But we weren’t overly bothered by the penalty. We were well ahead of the course cutoffs and the three-hour penalty would just mean more sleep for us later on. And the 11 hours of forced stoppage would give us a good excuse to get a great rest in town after what had been a very long day.
Still wet and getting a bit cold, we scanned around for a way across the river to the village, Namuamua, which we had been at the night before when all the front teams had been coming through and there were cameras everywhere. Now, instead of cameras, we were greeted by a single local in a long boat, who invited us onboard and ferried us across the river. Then, as we disembarked and hesitatingly looked around, clearly intent on stopping rather than advancing on the course, he asked if we needed a place to spend the night. Jackpot! Adrey took us to his hut, let us hang our dripping-wet clothes up to dry and get changed, and began cooking for us as we went to the village center to pick up some food from the vendors and the Leg 3 medallion from a big ceremonial bowl in front of the village chief’s house. A camera crew asked Kate and I whether we would mind doing an interview, and we gave him five minutes or so of rehashing how the last 24 hours had gone for us. Then we retreated back to Adrey’s house, where he had laid out a scrumptious spread of bread with peanut butter, cookies, and as the piece de resistance, he brought out four bowls of hot chicken soup! We supplemented with cold sodas and some chickpea-filled masala crepes from the makeshift café set up in the village square, and feasted.
Looking back on it, this was one of our favorite moments of the race. Off the clock, we were able to enjoy the food, the company, the culture, the experience. Knowing how hard we had worked and struggled and suffered to arrive at this spot, and how lucky we were to have even had the chance to do so, sunk in deep. This was what we had heard so many stories of – the true specialness of Eco-Challenge. Closing my eyes now, I can still easily slip back into the feeling of that moment, sitting on mats on the floor of the one-room hut, warmed by the food and the friendship, feeling thankful for everything. A beautiful time.
Of course, after eating, we realized how exhausted we were. Adrey laid out soft foam mattresses in the living room, which Kate, Starker, and I claimed, and Garrison was led into Adrey’s own bedroom. Adrey himself came back into the main room and sat in a chair in the corner, selflessly sacrificing his own night of sleep for his guests. As I sat back and prepared to drift off, I noticed three very large spiders on the ceiling.
“Don’t worry about them,” Adrey said. “They are our friends.”
It was the last thing I remember until the alarm went off at 5:30 a.m.
It was still mostly dark when our alarms went off, and Adrey immediately rose and began to prepare us coffee and breakfast – more bread and peanut butter. It wasn’t easy to get back into race mode after such a wonderful, stress-free evening, especially as our race clothes were all still wet. So we dawdled a bit too much over our coffee and a discussion about a provision in the race guidebook that said we were allowed to hire local guides and porters for the next section of the race. We saw a couple teams walk out of town and realized we should probably do the same, and so we said our goodbyes to Adrey (and paid him what we later found out was a month’s wage in rural Fiji) and headed out of town, aided by two local guides hired by Garrison, one of whom shouldered Starker’s pack.
The sun came out and it was beautiful walking up a hill and along a ridge through a second village, where we switched guides to two younger kids, who took us up and down some more hills, encountering the occasional deep mud-pit with lots of treaded-out footprints – a clear sign we were on the right trail. Three hours into our hike, and a few more villages later, we crossed a shallow river and knew the next 10k would be on a dirt road, so when we were offered a horse rental, we took it, and mounted Starker up, along with all our backpacks. The road was smooth and quick to travel on, but it was scorching hot with no shade, so we made sure to keep up with our salts. Drenched in sweat, we arrived at the end of the road, marked by a few houses and three other teams, and took a midday break at a makeshift restaurant set up by an entrepreneurial woman in her 40s, who lured us in with the promise of freshly prepared food. We took off our shoes and sat down on the floor of a comfortably cool room, and within a few minutes, we were feted with some crispy curry bites and some kind of crunchy ramen treat. Both were delicious. We got to leaf through the guestbook and saw a long entry from Jason Magness of Yogaslackers, now more than two days ahead of us. We were amazed that they could have made such significant progress upwards in the rankings and still have time to write such a detailed note!
While we ate, Garrison had negotiated the next round of guide/horse combo, but with so many teams in the area, the price was steep: $400 Fijian, or $200 U.S. We joked about the mini-economy that had popped up around the race, and laughed about how an executive from Amazon had told us they had actually worried that all the money being pumped into the country as a result of the race would cause a national inflationary financial crisis. Having no other choice, we agreed to the terms, and set off after refilling our water bladders in the nearby stream.
We followed the stream for a bit, then moved into the jungle along a muddy path. Starker was once again mounted up and the white horse he was riding also had carried all of our backpacks. We moved methodically for hours, only stopping once for a 15-minute break for the horse to rest. At dusk, we encountered a steep muddy downhill, forcing Starker to dismount while the guide, who spoke very little English, led the horse using the reins. In a scary moment, the horse toppled over, sliding on his side for about 10 feet. He was OK, but everyone was a bit shaken up for a few minutes. We continued on into the night, donning our headlights as we made our way through a unique feature of the trail, where it had eroded into the hillside and became a tunnel of dirt for a few hundred feet. We were still making solid progress but this leg, we knew, would feel interminable before it was through.
On the way out of the jungle, in a descent to a village by a larger river, which we would eventually follow all the way into Camp 3, the poor horse had another mishap when it snagged its saddle on some barbed wire. It was on a slippery descent and we all had trouble negotiating ourselves into a position where we could help, but eventually Kate saved the day by calming the horse and then methodically working to back him up and untangling the cloth saddle from the wire. But after this, the guide told Starker he had to walk, and we all agreed that was probably best for the horse.
We reached the village and despite the late hour (it was around 10 or 11 p.m. at this time) and the fact that at least 30 teams had already passed through in front of us over the past two days, dozens of villagers were still out to greet us. Over the first few days of the race, it had always been an adrenaline rush to reach a village, where we soaked up the energy and enthusiasm of the locals and reenergized ourselves to renew our battle with the course. But by the night of day six, reaching this village felt a bit exhausting, as we were bombarded with questions about where we were from and whether we liked Fiji. We bought a few bananas, tried to be as polite and friendly as we could muster, cleaned out our shoes, and kept moving.
After the village, the river crossings became a constant, with the trail indecisively and incomprehensibly moving from one side of the riverbank to the other. This frustrated and confused us but we were following a clear trail and that made us hold our tongues. The water wasn’t unbearably cold, but the frequent ins and outs up to knee and occasionally hip level weren’t exactly pleasant. In the middle of one of these, our guide’s light went out. He managed to get to the other side of the river and we gave him our spare headlight. Little did we know, but he was blasting it on full power, and it ran out in less than an hour. We had no more lights to share with him, so he just walked on in the dark. Barefoot. Mostly walking on pebbly, slippery trails and rocky river bottoms. Man, those Fijians are tough.
At a little past one in the morning, we left the river for good, climbed up one last hill, and saw the lights of Camp 3 glimmering below us. Three pylons with gas-fueled fires greeted us as we passed through the entrance to the camp, and John was waiting with a big smile. We had no cash left so Garrison asked John to round up the money we owed, which amazingly, he was able to do, and we invited the guide to eat some food with us after leading his horse to pasture (where many other horses were already happily munching on grass and resting after their long return trips through the jungle). John had a sumptuous feast of hot cheesy beans and tortillas waiting for us, which we washed down with cold sodas, and while Garrison and Kate did a bit of initial mapwork to determine what gear we needed and what we faced in the morning, Starker got to sleep. I soon followed. We decided on a 7 a.m. wake-up, giving us a good five ours of sleep to work with.
In the morning, it was overcast and a bit drizzly. We got ready quickly and were heading out of camp by 8 a.m. As we were leaving, we saw the Macys and Team Endure come into Camp 3, with Mark riding a horse and looking pretty beat up. We silently wished them our best, checked out with the volunteer, and started heading up the road. Two locals began following us and asked us if we wanted to hire them as guides. They clearly knew where we were going, as the next five hours would see us hiking up to Vuwa Falls, where the supposedly epic ropes section began. The locals warned us that a few teams had gotten badly lost on the way up, including the Japanese of Team East Wind, who by this time had been off-track for 48 hours. The locals knew exactly where the Japanese were and what mistake they had made, and promised us that for $100 Fijian, they would take us on the fastest route to the falls. Not seeing anything in the rules forbidding it, and knowing that at the very least, Starker would benefit from having someone take his pack, we agreed and began following our (once again barefoot) guides up the trail.
The trail headed mostly uphill, with some pauses to cross streams and rivers of various widths and depths. Garrison and I got deep into a discussion about the future of USARA (without any idea of knowing what it would eventually spawn), while Kate and Starker settled in behind. On about our 17th river crossing, and at least the 50th of the past 24 hours, the guide decided on taking the high route along a set of rocks that were all about a perfect step apart from one another, barring one rock that was a bit of a hop. I made the hop, then Garrison behind me, and while most of my brain was still focused on how to make USARA better, a tiny alarm bell went off in my head. That hop was just a bit long, and the rock we landed on was just a bit slippery. I began to ask Garrison if we should tell Starker and Kate to choose a different route when Starker leapt for the rock, had his foot slip off, bashed his knee into the rock, and then tumbled into the river. Before we could catch our breath, he had pulled himself out and was sitting on the rock, but he was grimacing and holding his knee to his chest. Then he looked at me, shook his head, and I knew this was it. The guides manhandled him over to the riverbank, where he tried to put a little weight on the knee and collapsed to the ground.
“I think it’s broken,” he said.
Our race was over.
GETTING OUT
We all donned an extra layer to keep warm, and then Garrison broke out the radio and made the call to HQ (a call that made it onto the TV show). The kind woman on the other end of the line said a helicopter with medics would be arriving shortly. Apparently, she also must have gotten on the radio with all the camera crews, as after about 20 minutes of waiting around, a camera guy dressed in all black who was following the Indian team Khukuri Warriors dropped off the trail and came over to where we were sitting for a short interview. He then jumped on his radio, holstered on his backpack, to report he had successfully rendezvoused with Team #60 and completed an interview. The medical helicopter landed soon after, coming in over the river and touching down expertly on a small sand bar on the other side of the river. The doctor was accompanied by a senior producer from the show, and both struggled to cross the slippery rocks in the river, but made it across partly by belly-sliding their way through, then made their way up to us on the far bank. The doctor, who like all the other medical staff for the race had an impressive Scottish accent, confirmed Starker had likely broken his leg and that he needed to be evacuated. Then he got a twinkle in his eye as he looked up at the producer. They were going to use the lobster pot – a cargo-net contraption we had been introduced to at the pre-race briefing.
We had some downtime while we waited for the rescue heli (and a third chopper to shoot video) got airborne and arrived on-scene. We spent the time talking up the producer, a nice guy who gave us some insight into the executive team’s hopes for the show (a three-year run, with the next year’s race to take place in Patagonia). Then we were told to evacuate the area, and they popped a helmet on Starker while we made our way to the other side of the river near the first helicopter. We watched in awe as two choppers hovered overhead, one lowering the lobster pot to within a few feet of Starker and the medic. The doctor loaded Starker into the netting, climbed in himself, and then they lifted off. Kate turned to me and said, “Wow, your dad is literally being flown away on a rope hanging from a helicopter right now.” And she was right, it was a pretty cool sight.
We turned to start walking back down the trail we had come up, but the Eco producer stopped us.
“Wait, where are you guys going?” he asked. “Don’t you want a ride?”
Why yes, yes we would. Kate got shotgun and Garrison and I crawled into the back seat, which was tight but comfortable. And we took off out of the narrow canyon and the pilot, perhaps wanting to show off or perhaps just comfortable flying in tight spaces, pointed the nose of the craft down the canyon and we swept over the river leaving a huge whoosh of trembling tropical trees in our wake. It was a short flight down to Camp 3, no more than five minutes, but we got to circle the camp once before landing, and Kate’s mind was thoroughly blown, having experienced her first ride in a helicopter. John greeted us with a sad smile, and told us he had already started packing up the camp, along with his coterie of TAC buddies, so we could hit the road ASAP to bring Starker to the hospital in Suva.
By the time we got our bearings, a group of Eco staff had already gathered up Starker and transported him on a gurney to the medical tent, where he had been placed on a cot with his leg propped up. We asked him how his ride was – he was exposed to the elements and getting pulled at what must have been closed to or in excess of 100 miles per hour. But he didn’t have much to say other than how pissed he was about injuring himself. Since the injury, he had alternated between quick bursts of anger at himself and calm resignation. He kept apologizing to us about ending our race. We kept telling him that it was a freak accident, that there was nothing he could have done, and I told him I felt bad about not getting my warning about the slippery rock to him a second earlier. These spasms of anger, grief, and resignation would continue for the following days, weeks, and months. It’s no easy thing to get knocked out of your dream race by a chance injury.
After an hour in the medical tent, and another round of interviews for the camera, it was time to go. As we were leaving, Team Stray Dogs appeared in camp, and we hung out with Marshall and Heather for a bit, debriefing on our races, as John and Garrison helped load Starker into the van. Then we headed off down the road, updating John about the injury and the rescue and he updating us about the race and the group of TACs he had organized into a mutual support group.
We headed into Suva, about two hours down the road, and as night fell, we began our wait at the emergency room of the local hospital, which was actually more like a walk-in emergency care clinic. The check-in process was a bit complicated and involved cash payments, but despite the waiting room full of would-be patients and their relatives, Starker was able to get x-rays and an initial diagnosis in around three hours. It was good news! The doctor had not seen a break in the x-rays. We got back in the van and headed to a funky hotel on the outskirts of Suva, where we showered (Starker struggled but ultimately succeeded in this task), changed into clean clothes, and sat down on the back porch for a late dinner of delicious curry. Then sleep, blessed, sweet sleep, deep and sustained until the alarm went off the next morning.
The next morning, Starker spoke with Joe Rowles, the race’s chief medical officer (also sporting a sweet accent, but not Scottish) via John’s cheap burner phone the race provided, and he requested we meet him at his hotel, which was about halfway back to Nadi on the Queen’s Highway. We had a very satisfying breakfast at the hotel, with plenty of fried eggs and fruit – two things I always crave after adventure races – and then piled back in the van for the four-hour drive to the good doctor’s hotel. We arrived at the luxury resort and the doctor met us nearly immediately, grabbed the x-rays, and went off to study them for a bit and do a consult. In the meantime, as we were sitting at a table in the hotel lobby, we saw a familiar face walk by – Mark Harris of Adventure Enablers. What!? He recognized us the same moment we recognized him, though he was less surprised, as he had supplied the tracking for the race and knew we had been evacuated the day before. We chatted for a bit until Dr. Joe reentered the scene, bearing a slight grimace on his countenance. The doctors at the clinic has missed a disturbing dark spot on the images; he was pretty sure Starker had indeed broken his tibia where it joins the knee joint, but wanted to see more x-rays to be sure. He ordered us to go to Nadi, where there clinic was of a higher quality and we were likely to get some better pictures of the knee.
By mid-afternoon, we had completed the drive to Nadi (with a quick stop for some roadside corn-on -the-cob), and we took Starker to the specialist x-ray clinic in Nadi. The additional x-rays confirmed the break, and then Starker was wheeled into a room to get a temporary cast put in place to stabilize his leg. But the nurses paused before they began to form the cast, looking with horror at the seeping, pustulant wound on Starker’s ankle where he had pressure-blasted the skin off a half-dollar sized piece of flesh. None of us had realized the wound was as bad as it was; it could have easily cost us the race in a few more days, especially as we heard the paddleboard section later on in Leg 4 took racers through knee-deep mudholes of cow poo. The nurses cleaned out the wound, and obviously dealing with a nasty infection, Starker was put on a course of antibiotics.
That night, like Dr. Joe, we ended up at a pretty swank hotel ourselves, at the Sheraton on Denarau Island, the home base of luxury hotels in Fiji. Kate and I used our credit card points and got a suite with an ocean view…totally worth it! We all went out to a fun team dinner at a fun little restaurant where many toasts were given, then crashed pretty hard at the hotel, still resting up from intense race experience.
In the morning, after an immense buffet breakfast with a horde of equally immense Australian tourists, we loaded Starker up for his trip to the airport and home. Eco-Challenge had bought him an expensive (really expensive, we later found out) first-class ticket back to Chicago via Auckland, New Zealand. As we waited in line to check in, we noticed a couple of very familiar faces in line next to us – Nathan Fa’avae and Stu Lynch of Team New Zealand, who had won the race (and at least six world championships before it). I couldn’t resist the opportunity to chat them up, so I wheeled Starker over and poked some questions at them. Both Stu and Nathan were very friendly and generous with their time – we must have chatted for at least 20 minutes – and I learned a lot about their race. Starker thought it was highly amusing, borderline astonishing, that they weren’t sticking around for the award ceremony. They both said they had familial obligations to attend to, but after they headed off for security, I told Starker that I thought they had won enough races in their day where podiums just weren’t that big of a deal to them anymore.
We sent Starker off on his way, wishing him the best, and got back in the van, heading back to the hotel. We spent a lazy day there, mostly on the beach. Kate and I went out for a fancy dinner at the hotel restaurant that night.
The next day, we headed back to the Pullman to start sorting through our gear. That was a stanky, messy process, made worse by the fact that we were dealing not just with our own stuff, but with Starker’s too. Upon the recommendation of the race staff, we gave away a lot of our stuff, like our outrigger paddles, our snorkel and fins, and other athletic gear that wasn’t in atrocious condition, to the locals who had worked for the race. They seemed pretty excited to have the stuff and we were pretty excited not to have to haul it all the way back to Maine.
In the afternoon, Kate and I went over to the concierge and booked a couple of daylong excursions – one to scuba dive in the Yasawa Islands, and another surfing on the southern coast. Right after we had paid in full, Ashley Holt from Competitor Relations came up to us and asked us if we would do another on-camera interview. It was really bad timing and we felt really torn. Ultimately, we decided to do our excursions, as we were likely never going to return to Fiji. Both were worth it, but we still wonder whether we would have gotten a little more screen time if we had decided to do the interview instead. Regardless, Ashley was very nice about understanding that we wished to have a bit of a vacation from our vacation.
The last night before our flight home was the awards ceremony and big Eco Challenge post-race party. The ceremony was fun, with Bear giving a speech and Chris Forne and Sophie Hart also offering some words from the wise. Then we all headed down the beach, where a big tent, open bars, and stations with food truck-style food were waiting for us, along with a stage and live music featuring a local rock band. We had a great time chatting with all our friends, from the Estonians (dressed in brand matching blue Fijian-style shirts), to the Belgians, the Irish and our good friend Ivan Park, Cyanosis from South Africa, the Swedes including NIAR RD Staffan, Mark Harris, Mark Lattanzi (who had raced with Team Ireland), Jen Segger and the rest of Bones, Checkpoint Zero, AR Georgia, and our new friends from Onyx and Stray Dogs. It was a special night, surrounded by AR heros and legends, many of whom we now considered our friends.
Our trip home is worthy of its own race report, but to summarize, it involved an unexpected overnight spent on the concrete outside of Honolulu Airport with Ryan Atkins and the Yogaslackers. It was one last crazy chapter in our unforgettable journey to Fiji.
Getting home was equal parts relief, joy and melancholy. Kate’s family was waiting for us as our bus from Logan arrived in Portland, and it was so great to see our kiddo Wilder and our pooch Mose (thank you, thank you, thank you to Laurie, John, Will and Emily for watching them both while we were gone!). But it also meant the end of what could turn out to be the experience of our lives. That’s a big statement to make, but it will be hard to top Eco-Challenge Fiji. However, that doesn’t mean we won’t try.
Looking back, initially we all suffered a lot of anguish at not being able to finish the race. We all felt ourselves capable of doing so barring the injury. The race’s crux, after the climbing section, was a swimming section and we had smartly packed neoprene tops that we were excited to deploy. We were all sad to have missed the ropes sections, Starker especially. We were bummed and angry and wishing we could go back and change time so Starker didn’t get injured.
But over time, that anguish has morphed slowly into pride. Sure, we didn’t finish. But we had seven days of incredible, unforgettable adventure together, getting to become great friends with two incredible guys, Michael Garrison and John McInnes, and having an experience as a family few others can get close to touching. We arrived in Fiji fit and ready to race, and capable of finishing. It’s a waste of time to stay upset about bad luck. Most other adventure racers (and there are a lot more out there since the show aired in August 2020) would have given anything to have been on that start line. And that’s where my mind goes when I think back on the race – to the start, to knowing we had made that moment possible, and that everything after that, even if it was only a paddle stroke, was already a victory.
