Posts Tagged ‘Team GearJunkie’
Part 1: “Pregnancy, Patagonia and Perspective”
Team Member Chelsey Reporting:
Exactly a month ago today, my teammates and I were standing on a beach in Tierra De Fuego. We were lined up with 52 other athletes, all of whom had gone through much to be there, at the start of the Patagonian Adventure Race. I looked around, still shocked that we’d made it here as well. As the YogaSlackers, we’ve been known to forget passports before international travel, of having our gear “lost” in transit, but getting to this particular race had topped them all.
The Patagonian Expedition Race is known as one of the world’s hardest and most remote adventure races. I’d been physically and mentally gearing up for it since the minute I was given the opportunity to join Team GearJunkie – six months before. Two days before I was due to catch a plane to South America, I found myself in the emergency room crying as a doctor told me that I could kiss Patagonia goodbye. In the span of two minutes I learned the following:
My I.U.D. had failed.
I was 16 weeks pregnant.
I was having a miscarriage.
My insurance had been canceled.
As my body was racked with the searing pains of contractions, my mind was numb.
Jason (my boyfriend and teammate) and I had had no idea. For the past 4 months I’d done 3 races and taught 2 advanced AcroYoga Immersions without even knowing. I’d felt off at times – heavy, naseaous, sluggish and moody – but I always attributed these symptoms to other causes. I’d spent most of Christmas holidays treating myself for an ulcer as I experienced what I now know was morning sickness.
The next morning, the worst had passed, and I had a new doctor. She’d take the time to visit our website, read through our blogs and had a better idea of what my life was about. “I can’t recommend that you do this,” she said “but after reading what you are capable of, I won’t say that it isn’t possible.”
In that moment I was torn. I knew that it was a long shot that I’d be ready physically or emotionally, but having my doctor and nurse tell me that they were inspired by my strength and energy was profound. Their comments left me relieved yet torn, because now it was my decision.
In the two days leading up to the race, I was going back and forth between competing and not competing. My body still had significant healing to go through and my emotions were all over the place. I felt weak, and scared and very much alone.
It wasn’t until we had dinner with a local woman who was a possible sub for me that a switch went off in my head. In some primal way, I think the subconscious competition gave my will a kickstart. Wait a second, this girl is going to compete with my team? Shes gonna be dirty and exhausted, huddled up in a tiny tent with my boyfriend? And I am going to be sitting in a hotel room, missing out on something I love?
Something clicked.
The next morning, after passing our remaining skill tests, the guys on the team asked what my decision was. “We’re going to race!” I said, smiling for the first time in over a week.
Part 2: Breakfast of Champions- “White bread and Jam”
On the morning of the race, we woke up to a breakfast for champions: white bread and jam with instant coffee. … we headed for the bus that would take us to the start of the race at the “end of the world.” 4 hours later, after driving 2 hours and taking a ferry across the Magelean Straight (kayaking across it was canceled due to 50 mph crosswinds) we arrived at the starting line.
The barren rocky beach looked like it belonged in a scene from the post-apocalyptic film, “The Road”. The austere desolation was not without a wild beauty. Race officials gathered the teams for the final briefing. They warned us in their non-native english – “you must stay on beach until until checkpoint one. Up on grass it look nicer, yes, but there are booms. And no eating fish, deadly muscles.” As we stood confused, trying to make sense of the important cautions we’d just recieved, the race director shouted “Welcome to Patagonia!” and fired the gun. (Turns out there were old land mines littering the shoreline right off the beach, and it was the time of year called “red tide” so mussels were poisonous to eat…)
The first 36 hours were windy, frustrating and hungry. The landscape of Northern Tierra De Fuego is a lot like North Dakota, only with stronger winds. I literally got blown off my bike at one point, and had to crawl across a ridgeline another time because the winds were so crazy. At the 2nd checkpoint, our food and new maps hadn’t arrived. For the next 18 hours, we subsisted off of the support crew’s food donations as we struggled to find the final trekking check point without the right map. Navigating off trail with the 1: 200,000 overview map was something akin to finding a little brown needle in a large brown haystack.
Physically, I was feeling weak and Stephen had carried my entire pack the first 13 miles. Emotionally I was frusterated at my weakness. By the time we finally got to the checkpoint, we ravished through the food bag, put our bikes together and were off. Oh, the bliss of using new muscle groups and having food! I was a happy girl, and was starting to feel my “zen” zone come.
The start of this long bike was amazing. We followed rough muddy trails downhill for miles, racing against the quickly coming darkness. When the shadows started playing games with us and our eyelids could no longer stay up on their own, we squeezed into a 2 person tent for a few hours. Just before sunrise we were on our bikes with 70 more miles to go. The further south we rode, the better the scenery got, which made me more and more excited to crest the upcoming hills. Stephen on the other hand, was singing a different tune. “I don’t know what hurts worse” He said while lying down on the side of the road “my body, or the fact that the girl who had a miscarriage 7 days ago is taking weight from me so I can keep up with her.” I smiled, knowing I was just repaying his kindness from the start. 120 miles after we left the last checkpoint, we had made it to our food bag and the start of the infamous monster trekking section.
With only 5 hours of daylight left, we set out with enough food and gear to sustain us for 2 and half days in the mountains. Jason, in his optimism, assured us that we would be done in 48 hours. After bushwhacking straight up (literally technical and dangerous jungle cliff climbing) for 5 hours, I had a strange urge to paint mud stripes on my face as if I were about to go to war. My handholds had been either a trekking pole, Daniels shoe, moss, or tree roots. The bushwhacking continued on for the next 3 and half days. There were times when we would be averaging 1 km an hour. We hiked up and over countless mountain passes, crossed countless rivers, balance beam walked across 100’s of beaver dams and trudged through miles and miles of turbal. Turbal is the Spanish word for peat bog. It is really squishy moss with random pockets of mud that could swallow me whole. This was my greatest fear. The quicksand scene from the Princess Bride with the “rodents of unusual size” waiting for me at the bottom of the sink hole was on repeat in my mind for a good portion of the turbal sections. After mile 20 of the turbal however, I’d mastered all of it’s levels and was ready for a new game.
The ropes section on the course wasn’t quite the game I had in mind, infact, I wasn’t even planning on it being a challenge for me. When we showed up to the rappel station and they proceeded to give me an XL harness and a grigri (a device generally used for belaying and not rappelling), I felt a little twinge in my stomach. I proceeded to go along with it until I was stopped in mid rappel by my own hair. It had gotten stuck in the grigri. There I was screaming, suspended 50 feet in the air on a single rope rappel. There was only one thing for me to do. I pulled the full lock of my hair out from my scalp, and watched it fall to the ground. The guys had a better trip down. Luckily at the next ropes section, my luck was better.
At midnight that same day we showed up at the checkpoint with a tyrolean traverse that went across the river. Since Daniel was the youngest, we made him test it out first. It was cold, we were tired, and the guy manning the set-up only spoke Spanish. Before Daniel could even figure out what was going to happen, he slid down the line and was in the river attached to the rope. All we heard was his screaming, while the guy on the other side pulled him slowly through the river. When he made it to the other side, he was sopping wet. I was next, and I was terrified.
I stripped down as much as I could and prepared for a cold plunge. Without much warning, I was pulled off from bank I was on, and preparing for the shock of the icy water. Before I knew it though, I was across the river completely dry! Apparantly the weight limit was 105 pounds. Jason and Stephen didn’t fare as well, but thanks to Daniel, they knew what to expect. That night, after trying to navigate and bushwhack in the dark, we passed out in the forest on the side of a steep hill.
Jason’s 48 hours had come and gone. Despite being able to find and follow the Guanaco (a streamlined energetic lama like creature) trails as well as master the art of bushwhacking and turbal trudging, we were still only half way through the trekking section. We started to ration our food to 100 calories per hour (normally 250) and picked up the pace as best we could.
By dark thirty on the third night, we had scrambled up to the highest checkpoint of the race, an alpine lake just over 700 meters in elevation. One more treacherous pass awaited us and then, according to the maps it was mostly flat or downhill. A cold rain started to fall so we decided to pitch our tents and wait until first light thinking that the pass would be safer in the morning. Little did we know, things were about to get real.
Part 3- The Infamous Wake Up Call- “This S*%@t is real!”
“Daniel – Wake up! I’m standing barefoot outside your tent in three inches of snow. It’s a damn blizzard out here and the Finnish team just passed us! I need a needle, duct tape and hydropel stat! This S*%@t just got real”
It was six in the morning, we had slept through all three of our alarms and Jason was pissed. Even though it was hard to take Jason seriously, we tore down camp and were off into the blowing snow within 15 minutes of this rude awakening.
The blizzard was intense to say the least. The sharp snowflakes pierced our eyes, making it hard to see a foot in front of us. For 5 hours we walked in a row, inches from the person in front of us. The one breaking trail in the front was nearly blind in the angry whiteout. After trekking on turbal for 20 miles the day before, we thought we had paid our dues. Oh were we wrong. Not only were we trudging through swamp, but it had a fresh blanket of snow on it. Between the wet cold turbal and icy river crossings our feet were on the verge of getting frostbite. By keeping a fast pace we were able to keep it at bay.
The icy hell of the blizzard finally gave way, and in contrast, the next checkpoint felt like a temperate heaven – complete with a real angel. There, in the middle of the Patagonia Wilderness was a cabin – and a guy in it who made us hot coffee. It was our first warm substance in 5 days. His coffee along with the news that there was an actual rough trail to the end of the trek was like being reborn. After gulping down our coffee infused with as much sugar as we felt polite scooping into our mugs, we took off running! For the next 20 miles we ran. High off of caffeine and the promise of getting to camp by dusk – it felt like we had brand new legs. With only 5miles left – I hit my wall. Jason put me on tow, smiled and said,”Happy Valentines Day baby.” It was the best Valentines Day gift ever. When we finally got to the end, we were exhausted, happy and dazed. I immediatly went upside down into headstand to let the lymph drain out of my feet. We had just completed one of the hardest, most brutally amazing treks out there. We were still feeling strong and complete as a team. Life was good. As the media crew converged on us with cameras, Jason and I posed for a Valentine’s day kiss, and then did some acrobatics just to prove how strong we still were. As he flew me around in the air, he was unbelievably wobbly as my base. But by the “oohs and aahs” of the cameramen, I am pretty sure that I was the only to notice.
We slept well that night, knowing that only a two legs remained – a 49 km kayak through the rough Beagle Channel, and a final trek across the world famous beauty of Isla Navarino.
The next morning at 6 am, we were woken up by strong gusts of winds. A small part of me hoped to hear a voice saying, “go back to bed guys! the seas are too rough, there will be a ferry here in a few hours”. However, that magical voice only spoke of a forced delay- we wouldn’t be allowed to start the kayaking until 8 am. At 8:05 am the Chilean Naval vessel was in place to offer emergency support. The gun fired and we were off. I felt like I belonged in a fighter jet, clad in my “cold avenger mask” and black wool cap. Despite suffering the scoffing looks of a few nearby teams, I felt prepared for the cold and rough seas – almost invincible. Daniel was my co-pilot, and in the skill test we had rocked the double roll and escaped the giant sea lion in style. I was in my element. Jason and Stephen on the other hand were having a little bit of trouble. They hadn’t ever paddled together, so staying synchronised and up to speed wasn’t happening.
Jason yelled up to me, “Babe, you are not going to like this.”
I hate it when that is his first line.
“I need to switch you paddles,” he continued. “I’ll be able to put more power into my stroke, if I can have the lighter paddle…”
“yes, you are correct, I do not like that” I said matter-of-factly, with a little pout in my lower lip and my best puppy dog eyes. He didn’t react at all.
I handed over my super light paddle.
My shoulders struggled with the added weight, but Jason and Stephen were able to speed up significantly. By the end of the paddle we’d left most of the other teams behind.
On the beach we stumbled around, stretching legs that had been unmoving for 7 hours. According to Jason’s calculations, all we had was a 10 mile trek to the finish. It was actually closer to 16 miles, and we couldn’t remember if the race director had urged teams to stay on the trail or stay off the trail. The meeting had been 6 days ago – which was like 12 years in adventure racer time.
More dense bushwhacking, more post-holing in deep snow, more teetering across precarious (and impressive) beaver damns. We pushed so hard against the failing light. The next 12 hours were brutal, as we kept thinking that it was just over the next ridge, or around the next bend. When darkness did come, we were still in denial and didn’t break out our headlamps until we were tripping all over the place. At 11:00 PM my headlamp died, minutes later Jason’s did the same. We struggled in the dim shadow-light of our teammates lamps, doggedly refusing to stop to dig out new batteries or a spare light. We must be almost there.
At midnight, we came to the first road we’d seen in days. Our joy was immense, but only momentary. The finish line was on this road, but we had no idea which direction to head. The maps were nowhere near detailed enough for us to answer the simple question – “right or left?” Our intense pace of the last three days had taken us into the lead pack, and during the last trek we had passed the Germans, Swiss, and Spanish – putting us into contention for a spot on the podium. What followed was a classic adventure racing blunder.
Fighting the paralysis of indecision, we headed right – running on our hobbled feet at a breakneck pace of 10 minutes per mile. 15 minutes later we turned around, sure that we were wrong. As we returned to the point where we’d started, we met the Spanish team coming the other way. They’d also come out on the road, but headed left for a few minutes and not found anything. In broken English, they told us they were “positivo” that it was not to the left. For some reason we listened, turning around again.
We ran right again, this time for nearly 30 minutes. Nothing. I have never felt so defeated. Here we were, at the end of one of the wildest races in the world and we were lost on a road. On a road!
We turned back again. I could barely walk, but indefatiguable Jason wouldn’t slow down. He attached a bungee cord from his backpack to my waist and started running again. 45 minutes later, and less than a mile from where we’d first found the road, we saw it – the magical white blinking light of the finish. It was so close that my broken body broke into a full run. It was only a quarter mile away, but it was the longest quarter mile ever. The road stopped at a slimy, rocky beach covered in razor sharp mussel shells. In our desperation for speed, that last hundred meters was the most difficult of the entire race.
During our blunder, the Swiss and Germans had finished. But as we crawled up that final embankment to the waiting lights we were happy, exhausted and speechless. We must have looked like we’d been stun-gunned or like a deer caught in headlights. The bright lights, cameras and champagne were a shock to the system. It was over in an instant – and suddenly after almost seven days of constantly going there was nowhere else to go.
Epilogue (beating post race depression)
For 6 plus days, our entire goal in life was to get to the next checkpoint. Our worries and cares had been reduced to food intake, energy out put, preventing blisters and skin chaffing. We subsisted off of Alpine Aire freeze dried meals, java juice coffee extract, bars, gels, and gummies.
For me, conditioning back into the “real world” is usually emotionally harder than the actual race. Things like bills, cars, computers, schedules, and shopping make no sense. After living so intensely in the wilderness, society seems pallid and grey. But not this time.
This time “society” was a cute little fishing village called Puerto Williams, where all the inhabitants seemed to understand what we’d just been through. It felt like going home to the tiny Alaskan towns of my youth, even though, geographically speaking, I couldn’t have been further away. The next day we boarded a naval cargo ship. The ship was like a womb. For 36 hours, the 7 teams that had made it to the finish, along with a whole slew of cameramen, race support crew, journalists and photographers were all safely contained in its protective walls. Living together in the cargo hold, we whiled away the hours sleeping in the hanging bunks, scavaging food from the food bags of the teams that had not made it (all our food bags were empty!), or reliving the race through shared stories. Jason and I were even able to get a few yoga practices in and taught an impromtu AcroYoga and Slackline Yoga class on the deck of the boat.
The glaciers and beautiful mountains passed by. Jumping dolphins teased the ship’s dog. All that was left to do was sit back and watch it all go by.
At the closing ceremony back in Punta Arenas, Jason gave me a fairy tale ending when he proposed to me. On the stage, accepting our medals for a 4th place finish, Jason quieted the room. He started out his speech by talking about how hard the trek was and how far we had come as a team, but before I knew it, he was down on one knee “Chelsey, if you could survive that trek, than maybe you can survive life with me. Will you marry me?”. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought it was going to leap out of my chest. I let out a teary muffled “YES!” and then we kissed in front of a roaring crowd. It was the most perfect moment.
I wonder what we will possibly do for our honeymoon?!?
Cross Posted from Yogaslackers
It took 500 chocolate bars, 25 supermarket cart-fulls of food, and an organizational staff of 64 people to manage and run the 2010 Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race. More fun facts and numbers below from this year’s event.
Total course distance: 554 km (344 miles)
Checkpoints: 18
Trekking distance: 220 km (137 miles)
Biking distance: 288 km (179 miles)
Kayaking distance: 46 km (29 miles)
Ziplines over river: 1
Team Gear Junkie crests a mountain pass on day five
Competitors: 56
Teams: 14
Teams that finished: 7
Time to complete course (winners): 5 days 6 hrs 8 mins
Time to complete course (Team Gear Junkie; 4th place): 6 days 3 hrs 31 mins
Race-ending injuries: 1
Average weight loss per competitor: 5 kg (11 pounds)
Weight loss by Stephen Regenold (Gear Junkie): About 7 pounds
Team Helly Hansen in transition area tent, day five of race
Lowest temperature recorded: -2 degrees C
Strongest winds recorded on course: +120km
Number of mountain passes: 4
Oldest racer: Age 56 (Robert Finlay, Team Eddie Bauer)
Youngest racer: Age 22 (Daniel Staudigel, Team GearJunkie.com)
Organizational staff: 64
Amount of support food: 25 supermarket cart-fulls
Amount of support chocolate: 500 bars
Cameras lost/broken in wilderness: 5
Hours to return to civilization at end of race: 32
Tears: A few
Racers and gear in hull of Chilean Navy vessel, the transport back to the start line from end of race
Yogaslackers – Slacklining for a better world
This was on a ridge top on day 2 of the Patagonia expedition race. It had blown like this for 36 hours straight, and continued for the next 12. Minutes after this video, we were on an even more exposed ridge with even stronger gusts, and Daniel and I had to physically hold on to her to keep her from blowing off the ridge.
The strongest gusts reported were actually approaching the speed of a human skydiver at terminal velocity!
The wind finally died after about the first 48 hours of the race, but picked back up again when a blizzard hit the Darwin mountains while we were crossing them…
serious crazy s%*&.
Jason
