Eco Challenge 1999, Patagonia, Argentina by James Henderson
I guess the purists were always going to be disappointed with adventure racing. It makes the mountains competitive; taints the purity of the wilds with tv; disneyfies the Outdoors. But over the past 15 years, as people have looked beyond simple marathons and triathlons, it has become steadily and inevitably more popular. Growth in the past five years has been phenomenal.
It's true, adventure racing puts the Outdoors into a competitive format. And then some. The major international races are some of the longest and most arduous competitions in the world at the moment. They take the organisation of an expedition, involve more skills than a triathlon or an ultra and they take far longer. Iron men have showered, got their medal and done a week in the office by the time most teams complete an Eco-Challenge or a Raid Gauloises.
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Eco-Challenge 1999, held in December around San Carlos de Bariloche in Patagonia, Argentina, was a truly spectacular course. The sports were lake kayaking followed by horse-riding over the pampas, then trekking and climbing fixed ropes up near-vertical slabs and along on a 7000 ft, snow-mantled ridge, followed by white water kayaking in inflatables, a series of massive vertical abseils, mountaineering (to the summit of 'the Thunderer', Pico Tronador) and more abseils, more inflatables, more walking and then, to finish, a final stretch of kayaking (with a prayer that we didn't fall asleep and capsize).
Often the course is kept a secret until the night before the start, but this year it was revealed a couple of days in advance. Immediately there were rumblings from the Finnish Team Halti who pronounced it too short. They reckoned they could finish in four and a half days. As it turned out their prediction wasn't far wrong-the winners took a shade more than five days-only it wasn't the Finns but the New Zealanders who did it. The Kiwis have traditionally dominated the sport, turning out at least two world class teams each year, but this year they only made it by a margin of 50 minutes. Team Sierra Nevada from Spain came second, an hour ahead of a home Argentinean team. Halti made fifth.
There were three and a half British teams in Argentina: two veteran teams and two newcomers. My own team, this year Team Thomson Financial (Lester Gray, Vivien Kilgour, Richard Montague and myself) was on its fourth outing unchanged, which is unique in Eco-Challenge. Some teams end up hating one another so much that they wouldn't consent to a Sunday afternoon stroll together. Team Hi-Tec were made up of Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Steven Seaton and leading UK racers Sarah Odell and Peter James.
Team Scotland were not exactly new to the sport, having raced in the Salomon X Adventure race and the Western Isles Challenge, but this was their first Eco-Challenge. It is a credit to finish first time out, which they did. So did Team North South, which made up of racers from both Northern Ireland and Eire, competing under the Irish tricolor.
Before the start Ursula MacPherson of Team North South admitted that she was usually something of a purist. Despite her years of experience as a canoeist she still does not enter canoeing races and she has some difficulty with commercial adventure expeditions. For the moment she wasn't convinced that competition was the way to go with adventure sports.
*** Registration for an event like this is always a slightly nervous moment. After months of preparation and training all you want is to get out onto the course, but the Organisation must move in slower gear, making sure that everyone has the requisite equipment and that their skills are up to it. Meantime it's hard not to size up the competition and expend nervous energy wondering how you'll cope, how hard the course will actually be, who will win.
We were driven three hours north of Bariloche, on a lake set in stunning mountains, to the start line, where the last meal of the condemned (condemned to a week's worth of packet food and energy bars, that is) was an Argentinean feast cooked in a pit in the ground. We loaded our plates with huge hunks of beef, chicken and pork, and carbohydrate enough to bloat us, chunks of sweet potato, yam and plantain-just the right sort of meal before a long race.
Next morning, the race kicked off with a triathlon-like start: 150 racers, three from each team, swam 200 yards out into the lake where the fourth was waiting, somewhere in the crowd, with two of the 100 or so kayaks. We swam, searched, scrambled aboard and set off, yellow kayaks streaming in pairs beneath the steep forested shores. The weather was calm and the country could hardly have been more beautiful.
As it turned out Argentina offered us a full spectrum of weather as well as physical beauty. At the start of the first day the water was like glass, flat enough to draught the kayaks. Eleven hours and 80 kilometres later the lake had been whipped into a frenzy, a sleugh of quick-fire breakers that barrelled in on broadside left-fun kayaking but not great for a race. By day three we were being stung by sleet-laden winds. And forty-eight hours after that, up on the glaciers, it was as hot as you could hope in late Spring.
The kayaking ended with a river-swim and then we were straight up onto the horses, for around twelve hours through the night (with two compulsory two-hour stops, so that the horses got some rest at least). Next we were walking, non-stop now, on the first 60-kilometre section. Already by ten o'clock the heat was vicious. It is hard not to be affected by the scenery in these races, but you have to keep the forward momentum, never allowing yourself to be distracted. It is important not to slip down the order because it is far harder to catch up again. After forty hours, coming down into Camp 1, we were feeling the beginnings of real tiredness. The cycle of push on, sleep, push on, sleep had begun.
Most teams snatched a couple of hours of rest at Camp 1, where we also picked up our climbing rig for the fixed ropes. Then we ascended the exposed rock on the side of the Cathedral massif, headed up into the snowline at 6000 feet and then weaved in among pinnacles that soared hundreds of feet above us. As we came off the high ground the storm hit, reduced to rain in the low ground, and then smacked us again as we climbed back over the next two ridges. It worsened all evening, and then, rivers in spate and uncrossable, we were forced to stop. We gibbered, wearing all our minimal clothes (you carry as little of the lightest kit as you can get away with in a race like this), in bivi-bags. When we looked out there was three inches of snow on the ground around us. It was a relief to get off the mountain later in the day. Farther back, the storm made the ropes too dangerous and teams below about 15th place were held back, later being forced to take a different way round. Thomson Financial (in 10th) and Hi-Tec (in 14th) made the cut but Team Scotland and North South were held back.
The white water canoeing section, in now perfect weather, was a pleasant change really. It might have been a nice Saturday afternoon out, except that we were in a race of course. We picked our way down the fantastically clear water over the small rapids-carefully portaging the three biggest ones. Towards the end of the 9 hour leg the beauty and calm returned as we paddled upriver against a gentle stream, dragging the inflatables up tiny rapids beneath curls of bamboo that hung in arches over the banks. Almost relaxing, until we remembered next walking section, all 70 kilometres and 15,000 feet of it.
Faced with figures like that, fitness is obviously vital for a race like this. In the months running up to an Eco-Challenge most competitors train for two to three hours each day. The depth of fitness increases your endurance. But even this is not the essence of a long race. The key, through the physical trials and the exhaustion, is keeping the mind sharp.
Sleep deprivation can become so bad that you fall asleep as soon as you sit down (before sometimes), but you still have to make sure to navigate correctly. Get lost and you'll lose hours. You also have to make sure that you are hydrated and taking in enough food. And in the transitions you have to switch on enough to take the right equipment with you. Turn up at an abseil without a helmet and it's an automatic six hour penalty. All this is particularly important in a race where there are no dark zones (ie no compulsory stops because it is too dangerous to proceed). Then the pressures are compounded because you get no proper rest. You sleep tactically, but stretch this beyond the minimum and another team will pass you while you doze. Four am is the worst time. Your limbs and eye-lids become like lead.
We tramped up four thousand feet over a volcano on the border of Chile. Then in the way of these things, it was back down again, but this time there was a three mile stretch of barely penetrable bamboo, not so pretty. I was still pulling the spines out of my legs three weeks later. After three of the longest abseils I have ever done we were in Camp 3 collecting the equipment for the final ascent, this time up the 11,000 foot Pico Tronador (the name comes from the thundering of sections of glacier as they break off). Next morning, at the snowline, we roped up and after another six hours of plodding, made the summit. It was the only place we felt Patagonia's famous wind, which howled and cut the skin through all our kit.
From the summit it might have been all downhill, but you'd never get away with it that easily. The final 24 hours saw us hike off the glaciers, pause quickly to snatch some sleep in a rifugio, scramble down a boulderfield, fight through forests worthy of Gormenghast, slide down some more abseils, cross another wonderful lake in the inflatables and walk down a stunning river to the final lake kayaking section.
Then, after six days and six hours, there were just 15 kilometres to go, but the sleep monster is at its worst during kayaking. As I paddled, slack-jawed and heavy lidded, hallucinatory dogs chased across the lake's surface in front of me, threatening to push me into sleep. But the line was in sight, and I perked up when a following wind developed, whipping up the waves for a simple surf to the finish line. Pure pleasure. And then rest, relief, and champagne, and food, as much as we wanted, not another energy bar, or not for another year at least. I know no feelings like it.
We finished in 12th place in around six days and nine hours (and nearly a stone lighter in my case). Team Hi-Tec finished in 14th in just under seven days. Team Scotland came 25th, which would have been better but for a penalty, and the Irish team were right behind them in 26th. 33 of the 51 starters made it to the line. Four British finishers was a good record.
And what did they think? By common consent it was the most beautiful course Eco-Challenge ever created. It could have been longer, so maybe the Finns had a point, but you're not too concerned about that once it's over. All the British competitors would do it again, they said. And Ursula, the putative purist? Was she convinced? As it turned out she loved it. 'I suppose people seek adventure in different ways', she says.
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