Endurance Race Started Badly, Ended Worse : Trek: Seal Beach woman never quit during 10-day, 600-mile ‘trip from hell’ in Arabian desert, but two male teammates did. Story is subject of a TV special.

Looking tan and relaxed, Susan Hemond can laugh about the experience now. But there were times in the desolate wilderness of Oman, she said, when the gain was outweighed by the pain.

“It was the Outward Bound trip from hell,” Hemond, 33, said of the 10 days she and several male companions spent last fall trekking 600 miles across the burning sands, broiling seas and freezing mountains of the tiny sultanate near Saudi Arabia. Before it was all over, two of the men had dropped out in exhaustion with one of them blaming, in part, what he described as Hemond’s relentless drive to succeed.

“There were just rocks, rocks and more rocks,” recalled Hemond, who denied any responsibility for the dropouts. “What little vegetation there was usually had thorns.”

She and the others were teammates in the Raid Gauloises, a grueling endurance race requiring contestants to cross country the same ways inhabitants of the underdeveloped areas do. Among other things, she said, they rode and pushed reluctant horses along dry riverbeds, swam through water-filled gullies, rowed kayaks across stormy shark-infested seas, rappelled rocky 1,200-foot cliffs, trekked through dusty canyons and spent four days lost in the wilderness with little to eat or drink.

“When we finally found water,” Hemond recalled, “it was in a rock hole with a dead snake in it.”

And what did they get for their troubles? Because of its missing members, the team--the first American entry in the 4-year-old, French-organized race--was disqualified from placing among the finishers. And today half the participants in the ill-fated group aren’t speaking to the other half.

“We fell apart,” admitted Hemond of Seal Beach, the only female team member. “It was very frustrating. People were physically able to compete, but mental breakdowns were a problem.”

Their adventure will be chronicled in an hourlong television special at 9 p.m. Monday on KCBS-TV. But lasting longer than that, they said, will be the lessons they learned on the trip.

“The race is a lot like life,” said Mark Burnett, the 32-year-old Santa Monica promoter who organized the team and acted as its captain. “When you’re in it, it seems impossible to finish. But if you put one foot in front of the other and keep on going, eventually things get better.”

The Raid Gauloises (pronounced gal-WAHZ and named after a French cigarette company that sponsors the race) began as the brainchild of French radio journalist and sportsman Gerard Fusil, who believed that sports had become too mechanized. As an antidote, he decided to create a major test of endurance to be held in various underdeveloped countries of the world. Participants would consist of five-member teams, each including at least one woman, who would have to cross the course however the local populace would.

The first race, in 1989, took place in New Zealand. The next two years saw competitors slogging through Costa Rica and New Caledonia. And last year’s race in the Sultanate of Oman drew 51 teams, including Team American Pride, the first official entry from the United States.

Burnett decided to put the American team together, he said, after reading a Times account in which Fusil predicted that Americans would fail in the race because they are too in love with their ice cubes and air conditioners. A recent immigrant from England who had served with the British army’s special forces, Burnett took offense at this affront to his newly adopted country and decided to prove the Frenchman wrong, a task he still intends to accomplish.

“We’ll do better next time,” he vowed.

In building last year’s U.S. team, Burnett said, he recruited people he considered to be prime athletes. Owen Rutledge, 38, had been a professional rugby player in his native New Zealand. Twenty-five-year-old Michael Carson is a fitness instructor in Santa Monica, while Norman Hunter, 32, had been an athlete in college. And Hemond, a free-lance assistant director who helps produce sports shows for television, comes from a long line of professional athletes who taught her how to keep a baseball score card before she could even read.

“The minute I read about the raid I knew I had to be in it,” said Hemond, whose father, Roland Hemond, is the general manager of the Baltimore Orioles. “There was never any question in my mind.”

To prepare for the race, the team practiced together nearly every weekend for nine months. Yet no sooner had the actual race begun, Hemond said, than some team members were complaining bitterly about their pain and bickering over which way to go.

“There were very heated arguments,” she says. “We definitely (cursed) each other lots and lots. We called each other names.”

In the end, both Rutledge and Carson dropped out early, in part, according to Carson, because of Hemond’s driving competitiveness and lack of compassion for her slower teammates.

“She’s a very hard woman,” Carson said. “She always told everybody she wanted to do the race for fun, but she made every minute of it a living hell. I couldn’t stand her; she was not a team player, but someone who was there strictly for her own gain.”

Hemond, for her part, had little positive to say about the two dropouts.

“I don’t respect them or how they handled the situation,” she said. “I trusted other people with my dreams and you don’t screw with me on that.”

While admitting that she has a tendency to be “mouthy” in competitive situations, the hard-driving TV director believes that her sex may have contributed to the reaction of some of her male teammates. “The woman is supposed to be the weak link on the team and I wasn’t,” she said. “They expected me to say I was hurting at some point and I didn’t.”

Carson denied that his reaction to Hemond had anything to do with a male-female rivalry, and Rutledge could not be reached for comment.

Team captain Burnett, on the other hand, attributes the team’s failure to two major factors: inadequate map-reading experience, and lack of comfort in the outdoors. “You can be an athlete,” he said, “but you also have to be able to stand being wet, cold and hungry.”

All of which has given him some ideas on how to select this year’s U.S. team for the upcoming Raid Gauloises in Madagascar. For starters, he said, both he and Hemond will once again serve on the team to add a strong competitive edge. Other members, according to Burnett, probably will include two Navy Seals who are expert map readers. And instead of jogging and pumping iron, he says, the group will train by spending long periods camping out together in the mountains.

“Instead of just meeting every week to hold hands,” Hemond said, “I’d like to go out for a week or 10 days to live among each other without any help.”

Will Hemond personally behave differently next time around? Well, yes, she said. For the next race, she said, “I’ll turn away to make my faces rather than looking (my teammates) in the eyeball.”