the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

.�..i need oxygen to run) and the terrible weather, which the organizers hadn't taken into account. Midway through the Raid, the organizers realized "Jesus Christ. less than a quarter of the teams will even be able to fin­ ish." That's when they wound up busing people. They had never done that before. The official explanation was "safety reasons." But my team had just finished the "dangerous" section, and when we got to the next checkpoint there were 11 or more teams ahead of us that weren't ahead of us before. We went from 20th to 31st, or even lower. The buses picked up the back of the pack that never would have made it. These teams were all in front of us now. And they weren't given a penalty. At the end they wound up busing teams all the way to the ocean to paddle half a mile to the finish. I've heard that only three or four teams actually completed the course unaided, the rest were bused but the official results say 23 teams finished. It was also the little things that were missed. At - _ '- • . ; .f" • past Raids you got a metal dogtag that identified you and your host country. That was gone. This time we got a colored plastic wrist band. _ There used to be a unique trophy designed by a French sculptor with _ a different color for each Raid. No trophies this year, just little ceramic • discs. There weren't enough contingency plans in case -,things went wrong. I think the organizers realize that. Three months later they announced that the Raid .����{i��lndia. Immediately a red flag went up for me. It will be another altitude III now be held every one and a half years. And the next one will be he most spectacular-a tenth anniversary race in China, Nepal and �����race, and in three countries that don't get along very well. After what I st went through in Ecuador, I don't know if that's a race I want to be involved in. I don't know if I trust them to have the necessary infra­ structure and political safety. I feel like the race lost its spirit. It lost its passion. .�:'-� "\....::.� .�-- ,�-. ,.-- BLUE: WHAT WERE SOME OF THE CRUXES OF THE RACE? JG: Well, on the first day at 1AM after 16 hours of trekking, unable to pinpoint checkpoint five with dense fog rolling in, we had to set up camp-all five of us in a two-person tent. Our original plan was to not stop and sleep, so we took the minimum two-person tent not expecting to have to use it. But the weather was so piss poor some nights-you could be 20 meters from a checkpoint and you couldn't see it. You would only know it was there from the map or radio. That first night it turned out we were only 800 meters from the checkpoint. But the terrain was so difficult-riddled with these craggy fissures that looked like brain tissue-it took us an hour to go less than a kilometer. We couldn't walk a straight line. We had to follow the terrain, the contour line, and the contours were sidewinding up and down hills. There were so many days of cold, wet slogging that took a great toll. On the second day the mud was sometimes waist deep. It was total limb-sucking mud. It was unbelievable; like quicksand. And it was on an incline. You had to grasp at things to pull yourself up but other teams had been there before us so there weren't much roots, grass, or anything else left to grab. At one point there was a switchback and I thought I'd take a shortcut and cut across a trail. I ended up flying down through four switch­ backs, doing a Michael Douglas Romancing the Stone slide down to the bottom of the hill. On the third day, teams had been bused ahead of us by the time we got to the horseback riding checkpoint. We got one good horse. One was actually a pony and looked like it was making a pit stop on the way to the glue factory. We didn't even put a pack on him. That caused us to miss the cutoff time for that leg by 30 minutes and immediately disqualified us for the rankings. But we chose to continue the course. We had to make the painful admission that, as great as our packs are, they can't do it all. So we invented one that could. Introducing the Speed Series, packs designed to run fifty miles of desert, swim the raging torrent, carve across the glacier, and pedal all day long. No frills, no bells, and certainly no whistles. Just how far it goes, and how fast, is up to you.

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