From the Mountains, to the Desert, to the Sea . . . : Quintet Finds Southland Perfect as Training Site for Race Across Oman

The Raid Gauloises, sort of a triathlon on amphetamines, brings five-member teams together in far-flung places of the world for eight to 10 days of unspeakable human suffering in the form of running, crawling, bleeding, mountain climbing, riding various bad-tempered, hoofed mammals and much time spent flailing haplessly in the muddy, leech-infested bottoms of lakes and rivers.

You know. A sport.

In 1989 the French organizers of this endurance race from hell brought their event to the scenic but painfully rugged interior of New Zealand, amid thorny blackberry shrubs and thickets so dense the competitors had to find small clearings just to get enough space to change their minds.

The next year organizers brought 40 teams--each team must include a female member--into the jungles of Costa Rica for a romp that included poisonous snakes, crocodiles and the constant threat of malaria. A year ago it was off to New Caledonia where the athletes were treated to 14-hour days of stumbling over moss-covered boulders slicker than George Foreman’s head. The only time the competitors weren’t falling down was when they were getting up.

And in three months, the 1992 Raid Gauloises, gets under way in that most traditional of vacation retreats, Oman.

This year, the mind-numbing race of more than 300 miles will have many of the ingredients of the previous three, with the added bonus of camel-riding without saddles for two consecutive days across the Arabian Peninsula. Encounters in the mountains are likely with huge-fanged vipers, wolves and a wonderful creature called a camel spider, a poisonous critter that grows as big as a man’s fist and often carries scorpions on its back.

And just for kicks, the whole thing will take place within a Scud missile launch of that most charming of cities, Baghdad.

Into this caldron of craziness will jump an All-American (sort of) team consisting of a Duke-educated stockbroker from the wilds of Queens, New York, and now Santa Monica; a New Zealand-born actor from Los Angeles; a former British Special Forces Red Beret from West L.A. who has warred in the Falkland Islands and in Northern Ireland; a woman from San Diego who is an assistant television director; and a young man who works as the aerobics instructor at one of those sparkling West L.A. fitness centers where even the men’s locker room smells terrific.

Since March, stockbroker Norman Archer Hunte, former New Zealand rugby star Owen Rutledge, Mark Burnett of London, Susan Hemond and Michael Carson, the aerobics director, have pounded their bodies silly throughout Southern California, kayaking in the ocean off Ventura, trekking through the Mojave Desert near Palmdale and then sleeping on top of rocks and broken sticks in the frigid desert night, and running the steep-sloped Santa Monica Mountains near Topanga Canyon until their legs burned like a Cajun steak.

Next month they will ride camels across the Perris Valley. Bareback.

“We will prepare for this by dragging our bottoms down the Santa Monica Freeway, hanging out of our cars,” Rutledge says kiddingly.

The team came together quickly early this year. Burnett read about the Raid and thought, I could do that . He told a friend. And so on and so on. Before any of them really knew what they were getting into, all five found themselves racing along Pacific Coast Highway from Point Dume back to West L.A., a 20-plus mile burst of excitement that served as their initial training run.

“None of us knew what we were really doing,” Carson says. “I’m running with these people thinking they must be crazy, that I must be crazy, and they’re talking about this endurance race through a jungle in Oman. I just kept running, though.”

The early days of training were marred by humor. This is fine if you’re entering a comedy festival, but laughing has as much place in a Raid Gauloises as an evening gown. Still, the newly formed team had its moments. The best, perhaps, came on a training run along the canals and storm-drainage ditches of Marina del Rey.

Rutledge, 38, was the central character, a hulking, black-haired athlete. With the other four watching, Rutledge came to a short fence--perhaps four-feet high, as they recall--and tried to hurdle it.

Half of him hurdled it. The other half stayed on the side of the fence from which his body had come. He was hung up. Severely. He couldn’t free himself from the fence.

And the tiger was staring at the sun.

“Owen has this big tiger tattooed on his butt,” Burnett recalls, the memory of the moment causing a burst of wild laughter from the gathered group. “And here’s Owen, training for the ultimate endurance race through a desert and a jungle, and his pants are ripped wide open and he’s caught badly on the fence and he’s struggling heavily and all we can see is this tiger looking at us.”

Not so funny was the day Hunte, 31, nearly drowned in his kayak amid six-foot waves off the Ventura coast. A body-builder, Hunte allows that before agreeing to join this team of would-be Raiders his experience in the great outdoors consisted of a week at a scout camp in New Hampshire at age 11, his one and only retreat from the concrete of New York City.

“And another thing,” Hunte said. “I never particularly cared for the water.”

The next thing he knew he was lashed firmly into a kayak and the team was heading toward Anacapa Island some 14 miles off the coast. And the waves got bigger and bigger and the next thing he knew the team is heading away from Anacapa, back to the safety of the mainland. And then the ocean introduced Hunte to a new game: Bobbing for rock cod.

“The first wave knocked me over so quickly I didn’t know what happened,” Hunte says. “Except I knew I was drowning. Somehow, with help from the instructor, I climbed back in. And then another wave, a bigger wave turned me upside-down again.

“I was pretty tense. Pretty rigid you might say. The instructor got ahold of me and said, ‘If you don’t relax, you are not going to make it.’ So I relaxed.”

Southern California, according to Burnett, has been the ideal training ground because of the closeness of the ocean, mountains and desert. Even camel training is available, although the group has yet to try it because of the cost ($750) of a one-day training session. Raising the necessary funds to train and buy equipment and get to Oman has been a bigger obstacle, Burnett and the others say, than the physical challenges the race presents.

“Getting some financial help is much more stressful than all the other things we have done,” Burnett says. “The mental aspect of this race is so very important, and the mental obstacles begin now with training expenses and balancing jobs and totally committing ourselves to this effort. We can’t prepare for this just a little bit. It has to be with everything we have.”

Helping the team with the mental conditioning such a body-battering race will require has been Dr. Leslie Pam, a psychotherapist who has himself ventured into the world of pushing a body to the limit and beyond, having participated in several lesser endurance races than the Raid.

“In a team format, it is absolutely essential that all five members keep themselves mentally prepared,” Pam says. “In the situations they will encounter in those eight or 10 days, even the faintest hint of a negative attitude, of one person giving in to his or her body, can be disastrous. We are working on knowing that all will not go well. Problems will come up. Maybe big problems. They must expect that and when it happens, work through it.”

If the lead map-reader, likely Burnett, who did that during his years in the British Special Forces, makes a blunder, the team can stray hopelessly off course. And off course in this race can mean an extra day or two of suffering.

The driving force, they say, will be fear of failure.

“That’s the worst,” Rutledge says. “Coming up short in something like this would be a personal disaster for me.”

Burnett, not a trace of humor in his voice now, takes it a step further.

“I am more scared of failure than I am of death,” he says. “Embarrassment, giving up. That’s my fear. When I was in the army I had a bad fear of parachuting. . . . But even then, I would rather my parachute didn’t open and I fall to the ground and die than to refuse to jump from the plane. That refusal to go, letting fear control me, I couldn’t live with that.”