Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25125
" ... THE SUCCESS OF THESE TEAMS The race started on the shores of Lake Espejo in northern Patagonia's lake district. The 208 athletes made final preparations, moving t~eir kayaks into the pristine, mist-shrouded mountain lake. Their breath curled and rose in the cool air. In the distance, snow-covered Andean peaks caught the morning sun. As the mist burned off, race director Mark Burnett shouted "Go!" and competitors surged forward in a wave of Gore-Tex and Lycra. Over the next 12 days, athletes endured a nearly sleepless marathon of pain, discomfort and deprivation. Some were sidelined by injuries. Kristina Strode- Penny of Team Maplnfo (New Zealand) was thrown from her horse and broke a bone in her foot. She remounted and rode on into the night, but medical attendants at PC4 deemed her too severely injured to continue. Other teams became lost and radioed for assistance. Others were hampered by their own pride: Team Haiti (Finland) claimed to have memorized their maps and had put them away to challenge themselves. Despite being lost for three hours early in the race they bragged that they would not use the maps for the rest of the expedition. Three nights into the race, bad weather arrived without warning, forcing some teams to drop out altogether. Winds raged in the mountains, where the lead teams found themselves under siege by gusts of over 100 miles per hour. By morning, heavy snows had blanketed the Andes. Local climbers have a pet name for this country when the weather turns foul. They call it Puta-gonia. Emma Roca from Team Sierra Nevada (Spain) recalled the night of the storm with tears in her eyes. "We were so cold and all four of us were very close together for warmth. You are in the mountains, alone, and if you don't make it to the PC, you feel you may die. It was the worst night I ever had." Much of the race was set in Parque National Nahuel Huapi, in the Bariloche region of Patagonia. The competitors raced across glacial lakes, over windswept pampas on horseback and through nearly impenetrable bamboo thickets. They forded the frigid waters of the Rio Limay. Days into the race, the athletes faced the dauntingly steep 3,000-foot Agostini Wall, a series of cliffs that brought them away from the lakes and pampas and into the highlands. They made their way along snow-covered ridges where the jagged Cathedral Spires stand like sentinels in the clouds. From this height they could look down on Argentina and Chile or watch condors circle above. They negotiated the Class III and IV Tobagan Rapids, where Lake Mascardi narrows into a very difficult passage. Some teams chose to portage their inflatable rafts rather than risk a dunk in the icy river. Drawing nearer to the finish, they summited Mt Tronador, a massive 3,554-meter peak whose Spanish name, meaning Thunderer, was inspired by the frequent sound of glacial ice crashing thousands of feet down the mountain. Before the start of the race, Burnett had addressed the athletes, saying ominously, " It is a race that rewards the very flexible. The rigid will break. " The lead teams must have listened. The top four teams finished within hours of each other. Team Greenpeace (New Zealand) came first, followed by Team Sierra Nevada (Spain), Team Condor (Argentina), then Team Atlas Snowshoes-Rubicon (USA). The last two teams fi n ished five days later. Team Greenpeace, who won with a record time of five days, 33 minutes, attributes much of its success to an effective sleep- management strategy: each racer had only 9.5 hours of sleep over the span of five days. The team captain, John Howard, explained that for this strategy to work, the race could take no more than five days: " If it was a seven- or eight-day race, you couldn't go on with so little sleep." Burnett said the success of these teams depends on their being hardy, outdoor, adventure-see.king people who don't start whining when they're uncomfortable, stay calm, don't waste valuable energy arguing, are extremely organized and don't come merely to win. The winning teams had chosen their members wisely. Teams who were out on the course longer displayed definite signs of wear. Exhausted and sleep-deprived, some members seemed 40