New Zealanders Take Fast Track for Adventure
As the 1999 Eco-Challenge adventure race came to a close Friday, a full two days ahead of schedule, the winners had already enjoyed several days of catching up on sleep and stuffing themselves with Argentine beef.
The race was decided at 9:20 a.m. Monday when Team Greenpeace of New Zealand paddled across the finish line on Lake Nahuel Huapi, about 20 miles from Bariloche. The team completed the 197-mile course in a blistering 5 days 33 minutes, finishing on a placid Patagonian summer day that belied the fierce storm two days into the race that divided the leaders from the followers.
This year's Eco-Challenge course, which teams of four competitors traveled by kayak, horse and foot, was almost 100 miles shorter than previous races, to give racers a greater margin of safety in Patagonia's rugged terrain and unpredictable climate.
The race director, Mark Burnett, allotted 12 days for the teams to pass the race's 28 checkpoints, and had estimated it would take the speediest teams eight. Many had strong kayaking and mountaineering experience and, aside from the storm, the weather was mostly on their side. This led to one of the closest finishes ever in an expedition race.
Two other teams paddled close in on Greenpeace's wake: Team Sierra Nevada from Spain came across just 50 minutes later and Team Condor an hour later. Condor, from Bariloche, was met by thousands of local fans lining the beach and chanting 'Bariloche, Bariloche' while firemen let loose their shrill sirens in tribute.
Four other teams finished that afternoon and evening: the largely female American team Atlas Snowshoes/Rubicon; Finland's Team Halti; the 1998 titleholder, Team Vail from the United States; and Foster's Australia.
Of the 50 teams that started the morning of Dec. 1, 34 finished. Seven others lost members with injuries and completed the race unranked. There were only a few medical problems, including a broken ankle, an ovarian cyst that needed emergency surgery and several severely infected blisters.
The Greenpeace team, which is named after the environmental group but has no connection to it, did five days of deep-water kayaking, bushwhacking through thick bamboo and multiple ascents and descents of 10,000-foot-plus mountains and was ready to go around again, said its captain, John Howard.
'We weren't pushing ourselves -- we could have gone faster,' said the 44-year-old Howard, one of the world's premier adventure racers and a well-known character. Howard, who cleans windows at mansions around Christchurch, New Zealand, lives in a bus overlooking the city. He has won every major race, including three Raid Gauloises titles and two previous Eco-Challenge titles.
Rounding out the team were Andrea Murray, 35, a garden designer from Christchurch; her husband, Keith Murray, 38, a doctor; and Neil Jones, 38, a kiwi grower.
The Greenpeace team will take home $50,000 for its victory. Many teams are sponsored, allowing them to be outfitted with the latest gear and clothing, but not Greenpeace. It's a situation Howard prefers. He provided teammates with drugstore shower caps -- lighter than any technical gear -- to keep their heads warm and dry during the three kayaking segments. And it would be hard to forget the sight of team members jumping into a churning river clutching black plastic garbage bags full of their gear as they frantically swam across to pick up their horses for the riding segment.
The talk of the race was the storm that began on the afternoon of the race's second day. Temperatures quickly dropped and winds exceeding 90 miles an hour were recorded at a checkpoint halfway up the Agostini Wall, a sheer rock face that a majority of the teams had yet to ascend when the storm arose. Those who had begun their climb returned to a base camp, where temperatures fell into the 20's overnight. Snow began in earnest at daybreak, and the upper mountain checkpoint was later closed as the fixed ropes were buried by up to a foot of snow. Racers were later sent on a longer, roundabout path to the next checkpoint.
Greenpeace and Rubicon were already far ahead, as were Sierra Nevada, Halti and Condor. Rubicon spent eight hours mostly on the move to stay warm, while Sierra Nevada found shelter in a campground and slept. Greenpeace waited out the storm under a tarpaulin, catching catnaps.
Knowing when and at what point to sleep was important. Greenpeace slept a total of nine and a half hours over five days. But by sleeping mostly on course, not at checkpoints, it fooled competitors into thinking it was barely resting.
'If we're pushing on, they think we're not sleeping,' Howard said.
At checkpoint 23 on 12,000-foot Mount Tronador, a climbers' refuge perched on a glacier 5,000 feet below the summit, racers could stop for a hot bowl of pasta and sleep. Rubicon arrived giddy from sleeplessness and decided to rest before attempting the next glacier crossing. The members zipped themselves into reporters' sleeping bags and shut down for two hours. While they slept, Team Sierra Nevada whizzed in and out, as did Team Condor, and Rubicon fell from second to fourth. But its captain, Rebecca Rusch, said it had given up its lead much earlier in the race by forgoing sleep.
But Rubicon's members were not disappointed, having expected only to be somewhere in the top 10, she said. 'We were really, really psyched,' Rusch, 31, said of their finish. 'It was a near-perfect race for us.'
THE BOATING REPORT