BY JEDD FERRIS

Adventure races are supposed to be tough. Not just the fun scavenger romps through the woods for adults that they may seem, these rugged multi-sport comps force racers to overcome physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and the unknown vagaries of rugged, remote mountain landscapes. As a result, blunders abound, mistakes mount, and friendships falter during adventure races. Teams from the Blue Ridge share their mishaps-some humorous, some humiliating-from the region’s rowdiest adventure races.

RIVER RESCUE

The four-day BEAST of the East has earned a reputation as one of the most intense adventure races in the country. Last year, a team from upstate South Carolina felt the monster’s wrath.

Team Mojo, a duo squad from Greenville consisting of experienced racers Tate Putnam and Frank Greer, had reached a checkpoint just as the sun went down at the end of day two. The late-summer daylight had diminished by 9pm and the team was starting a 30-mile paddle on the French Broad River in Transylvania County, N.C.

The section of the river was littered with strainers-trees that have fallen into the water and trap debris (and sometimes people) flowing downriver. In the bow of the boat, Putnam was having a difficult time navigating with the insufficient light of a small headlamp.

Paddling through the dark, the canoe abruptly bumped into a log and turned sideways, dumping Putnam and Greer from the hull. A few seconds later, with the wet racers clinging to the boat, the canoe collided with another bigger strainer. “As we were trying to clamor up on top of it, we could see the canoe being pulled directly underneath the strainer in front of us,” Putnam says. “For a couple of seconds we could both feel the river pulling us down. When you see this big canoe spinning counter clock wise in front of us full of water, the power of the river becomes very apparent.”

Putnam and Greer desperately scrambled to climb up on top of the strainer, fearful of getting trapped beneath a limb underneath the water. Many paddlers have died getting caught on submerged limbs. Fortunately Putnam and Greer made it on top, and they could see the canoe underneath them six inches below the water with all of their gear.

“There we were, stuck on this river in the dark,” Putnam says. “It was moving too fast to get out, and the banks were steep, so there we sat until another team came down.”

A passing team used an emergency radio to get some help, but because of the remote location, it took a rescue crew almost four hours to locate Mojo. With the rescue squad’s assistance, Team Mojo was able to free the boat and eventually continued the race after getting back to dry land.

“It was one of those things in retrospect that was very easy to say, ‘yeah that’s what happened and we continued the race,’ but strainers are really scary,” Putnam says. “There were a few seconds where we were both pretty panicked.”

THE FUNKY CHICKEN

After a long winter hibernation, Jim Farmer of the Chattanooga Trailblazers began training for the Double Dog Dare Adventure Race. As a warm-up, the week before the race he traveled to Cartersville, Ga., for a “practice” race with the Trailblazers of Atlanta at Red Point State Park.

Before making the trip south, Farmer’s little brother Hezzy insisted on lunch at Wendy’s. Farmer, usually an Arby’s man, gave in and ordered a grilled chicken sandwich. Mistake. Shortly into the car ride his stomach started bubbling like an active volcano.

“I was ready to flex my new adventure racing muscles,” he says. “Unfortunately, the muscles that got flexed were not the ones I planned on using that night.”

Farmer spent the majority of the drive taking in the elegant décor of gas station bathrooms along the I-75 corridor. (As a side note, he’d like to let everyone know that the Shell in Calhoun has a very nice facility.)

Upon arriving at the park, he gobbled a few chalky Pepto tablets and grabbed an extra roll of TP before heading out with the Trailblazers for the practice race. As it turned out, his Trailblazer buddy Tony was also feeling under the weather that night.

“We decided to team up for the nighttime stroll through the woods, figuring that at least we wouldn’t die alone,” said Farmer.

The Pepto held back the insurgence for a solid two hours, enabling the duo to set a blistering pace through the course, cruising to each checkpoint with ease. The glory would be short-lived, though, as the monstrous gurgle from Farmer’s innards returned two-thirds into the race. Unable to hold it any longer, he spewed violently over the side of a hill.

Conceding defeat, he sent Tony ahead and continued to purge himself of the evil chicken. Farmer eventually stumbled to the finish and headed home, but not before a few more gut-scouring stops at his new favorite gas stations. “A nice night in the woods had turned into a nightmare. But I have to admit, I’d probably do it again,” he says. “It was fun while it lasted.”

NUDIE BLUES

Atlanta-resident Bryan Goble of Team Fortitude learned a valuable lesson about packing the right gear at last year’s Primal Quest, the world-renowned 10-day expedition race in the High Sierras of Northern California. Unfortunately it was his teammates who had to suffer the consequences. Goble and the crew started a 40-mile hike on the Western Sates Trail at 4am. Late summer temperatures were nice and cool at the early hour, and Goble was comfortable in his fleece tights, the only pants he had packed for the trip. As the sun came up, though, the mercury quickly climbed to 110 degrees. The black tights had brought Goble to the point of heat exhaustion, so he did what he had to do.

“I ended up stripping off my tights and walking-bare-assed for two or three miles.”

It just so happens that it was Goble’s turn to navigate, so his teammates were treated to an unobstructed full moon in the mid-day heat. After a few hours, his teammates couldn’t stand it any longer. They took over the navigation and forced him to the back of the pack. To spare his teammates further torture, he ended up tying an extra t-shirt around his waist as a skirt to cover his bare balls.

Says Goble, “It was my first time racing in a kilt.”

THE DEATH MARCH

This past May Goble experienced the opposite weather extreme and ended up wishing for an extra layer at the 40-hour Endorphin FIX in the New River Gorge of West Virginia. Racing solo, Goble wandered through a late-night bushwhacking trek deliriously sleep-deprived.

After tumbling five feet down an embankment and into a creek, he gathered his navigational wits and continued trekking toward the next checkpoint. Suddenly, he felt repeated stings on his bare legs. He looked down to discover that he was walking through a minefield of knee-high stinging nettles, a common seasonal plant that-when brushed by human skin-releases an acid that can irritate for up to 24 hours.

“It’s like an ant bite or bee sting that lasts for three to five minutes every time it touches the skin,” explained Goble.

It proved to be a true test of tolerance, as the hike through the nettles lasted over three hours. During his death march, Goble wandered off course several times and had to backtrack through the stinging nettles again and again. “I was on the verge of madness,” he says. “I was out there by myself, so I had no one to commiserate with.”

INSTANT KARMA

For the past three years, Team Litespeed has been one of the best adventure racing squads in the country. With its racers based in Asheville, N.C., and Chattanooga, Tenn., the team has become the Blue Ridge’s ambassador to the national racing elite. Their impressive resume includes dozens of race victories and a first place finish at the 2002 USARA Adventure Racing National Championships.

However, things don’t always come easy to Litespeed’s Brenda and Lee Simril and Jay Curwen. They got a heavy dose of AR hardships during their first race together: the Nantahala Outdoor Center 30 Hour Adventure Race in March of 2001.

Temperatures were in the low 20s in the Nantahala Gorge when the race started. The trio heated up by taking the lead in the 20K run. At the paddle transition, they were sweaty and hot, so instead of layering up for the water leg, they hastily jumped in the raft.

A few hundred yards downriver, Curwen and Brenda were doused by a wave and quickly realized their clothing catastrophe. “I looked along the banks of the river and noticed icicles hanging from tree branches,” says Curwen. “It suddenly occurred to us that it was only 24 degrees outside, and we had eight miles of class-II whitewater to paddle without much in the way of clothes.”

Three miles down the river, Curwen and Brenda, who were sitting toward the front of the boat catching the bitter wind and wading in six inches of frigid water, started feeling severely hypothermic.

“I looked over at Brenda, and one of her eyes was frozen closed and she couldn’t really hold the paddle,” says Curwen. “I tried to talk to her and noticed that my mouth couldn’t move very well.”

Cleverly, the team pulled to the side of the riverbank so that Brenda and Curwen could run along the side of the boat to stay warm. The biggest challenge then became keeping everyone within 100 yards of each other, a strict rule in adventure racing. After warming up, Curwen and Brenda climbed back in the boat to finish the paddle.

But Team Litespeed’s tough luck wouldn’t end there. When the sun went down that evening, the team headed into what they thought would be an easy mountain bike ride up a gravel road. Course designers didn’t realize that rhododendron thickets and laurel “hells” had completely overgrown the road.

Forced to carry their bikes through the thick patch, the trio took nearly five hours to travel a distance of less than one mile. At one point during the trek, Brenda was literally suspended in the air, tangled in the thickets with her bike six inches off the ground.

Despite the obstacles, Litespeed persisted. They won the race, beginning an adventure racing legacy that continues today.

CALAMITY COLLEEN

She’s a top racer for Team Mighty Dog, but to her teammates, Colleen Pitts is a catastrophe waiting to happen. It was during the second night of 2003’s Endorphin FIX that Calamity Colleen first earned her nickname. She and her team were biking up some steep uphill switchbacks when sleep deprivation took over and Pitts’ eyes started to get heavy. With a high heart rate from pumping uphill, she didn’t expect fatigue to strike so suddenly. One moment she was pedaling uphill; the next, she was lying face-down in a ditch on the side of the trail.

“My head started to nod, and apparently I just toppled over,” she says.

The result was a painful sprained wrist, but it didn’t stop her from finishing the race.

This year at the 2004 North Georgia Adventure Race, Pitts lived up to her nickname once again. During a late-night trek on the Benton MacKaye Trail, she tripped on a stump, falling flat on her face. This tumble left her with a broken left ring finger.

“It immediately just snapped,” she says. “My teammates said I was cussing and yelling. They let me sit for a minute, and then they made me continue on. It numbed up an hour later.” The rest of the race proved to be one of her most arduous adventure racing experiences. She nursed her broken, throbbing finger through a four-hour bushwhack and long bike ride along a bumpy forest service road.

“The final leg had me crying,” she says.

Still going hard the whole time, Mighty Dog ended up finishing second overall.

Colleen added one final calamity to her resume at the Coast to Coast Three-Day Adventure Race in central Florida this past June. Pitts and the crew were in the middle of an eight-hour paddle crossing Crescent Lake when suddenly nature came a-calling to Colleen. Teammate Ardie Cook suggested that she just jump in the water to relieve herself, but repeated alligator sightings deterred Pitts from taking the plunge. Instead, she decided to pee in a plastic bag that was holding her tuna sandwich. (She ate the sandwich first.)

“My teammates never said a single thing about it, which I can’t believe. I guess they were just glad I didn’t go in the boat.”