COVER STORY : TEAM EXTREME : SPORTS: Five fitness devotees sacrifice sweat and pain to test the limits of endurance in a grueling 300-mile race.

For the prospect of little more than bragging rights, five Westsiders are offering up their bodies on the altar of physical fitness.

Machismo or masochism? You be the judge.

We’re not talking marathons here. Marathons are for wimps. We’re not even talking 50-mile ultra-marathons, which these people see as little more than training tuneups.

We’re talking a virtually sleepless weeklong (or more if you get lost) race across 300 trackless miles of Utah. On foot, horseback, canoe, bicycle and river raft. Up who knows how many thousands of feet of mountain and rappelling down the other side.

Oh, and for any of this suffering to count, everybody on the team has to finish.

This is Eco-Challenge, not some namby-pamby relay race.

So, from now until the competition’s April 25 starting date, Michael Carson, Charles C. Adams IV, Laurie Ward, Andy Petranek and Michael Lowe will devote mornings, evenings and entire weekends to riding, rowing, running, biking, climbing, weightlifting, map-reading and--perhaps the toughest exercise of all--psychological bonding.

And for what?

Team members claim not to know what the prize is. For them, the chance to participate in the craziest of all endurance events is motivation enough.

“We’ve all had experience in extreme activities and this goes way beyond what any of us could do individually,” said Petranek, 27, a chemical engineer and former Marine captain who lives in Brentwood.

The winning purse is actually $10,000--and free entry for next year’s competition, organizers said. But if the Westsiders are fuzzy about the monetary reward, they are clear on what they are giving up to compete against 49 other teams for a chance at glory, and they are scouring the woodwork for sponsors to defray costs that are expected to total $20,000.

“We’re all going to put in more time and money than we’ll ever get back,” said Carson, 27, a Brentwood aerobics instructor, after a recent group horseback riding lesson.

“Not to mention burning through a hundred relationships along the way,” added advertising executive Adams, 30, of Malibu, another former Marine captain. “You don’t have much of a personal life.”

Except for this five-way marriage of sorts, all are single.

They teamed up almost at random.

Adams and Petranek, buddies since the service, heard about the race from a would-be competitor who was pitching the event on a radio show.

They interviewed him but dismissed him as a potential team member. Putting up a flyer on the bulletin board at Gold’s Gym, they quickly found Ward, 36, a legal secretary, long-distance runner and Century City resident. Contest rules say teams cannot be all men or all women.

A notice in a sporting goods store brought in Lowe, 27, of Venice, a high school English teacher, filmmaker and recent graduate of mountaineering courses.

And mutual friends put them together with Carson, who survived an earlier effort in the French-sponsored Raid Gauloises, a similar endurance derby in which his team broke up amid acrimony in the Sultanate of Oman.

It was Mark Burnett, a former British army paratrooper and Carson’s captain in that ill-fated foray, who organized Eco-Challenge as the U.S. version of the French event. Teams will be required to perform a community service project before the race, and the rules will penalize teams that do anything to harm the environment.

For Eco-Challenge, Carson brought with him the sponsorship of the Ex Officio outdoor clothing firm, which picked up the $7,500 tab to enter the Utah race.

Some 40 teams from 22 states have already signed up for the competition, along with 10 foreign entries.

The teams were enrolled on a first-come, first-served basis, but Burnett said some sifting had to be done to insure a geographic spread.

“Obviously, we could have had 50 teams from Southern California with its strong triathlon base, which wouldn’t have been very interesting,” he said.

There are still more teams from California than anywhere else, but other entries will be coming from the East Coast and the South.

For the Westside team, the first steps were easy.

“I was so pumped,” Petranek said. “I met Laurie Friday night and by Monday we had a sponsor and a five-person team. It was destiny.”

Soon, they were destined to get to know each other almost too well. Since they started getting serious about training in early September, they have devoted virtually all their free time to a grueling practice regimen intended to replicate the harsh conditions of competition.

As Lowe put it, “We threw ourselves into several frying pans to see how we’d fare. We learned a lot.”

One thing they learned was that spending all that time with your extreme sports buddies takes a toll on relationships with significant others.

“Things get kind of testy,” Carson said. “It just puts a strain on it.”

But one of the harshest lessons came in the San Bernardino Mountains last month when a hike up the flank of Mt. San Gorgonio turned into a miasma of mountaineering missteps.

They started the trek at midnight. When the day dawned with the team at 9,000 feet, Ward saw what she thought was a simple cold bloom into full-blown flu just as an unexpected snowstorm whipped the summit of the mountain, Southern California’s tallest peak.

The veteran marathoner was close to a potentially fatal case of hypothermia.

But with two miles to go to the peak, the decision was made to press on.

“It was so cold. I was dying,” Ward said. “I didn’t want to stop the team and I didn’t want to back down. Being a woman, I felt like I needed to prove myself to them.”

By the time they got to the 11,499-foot summit, the thermometer had dropped to 19 degrees and a brisk wind made for a windchill factor of well below zero.

Petranek and Adams started down, hoping to set up a tent and a stove at a lower altitude, but the strong wind and steep terrain offered no place to make camp.

As she followed, Ward’s pace faltered and her body temperature dropped to 90 degrees. She felt lethargic and was unable to lift her hand to feed herself.

“She could easily get into a coma, so I got into a sleeping bag with her,” Lowe said. “After an hour of hugging and kissing . . . “ The kissing part was a joke.

“Hey! You said you wouldn’t tell anyone,” Ward laughed.

Her strength returned, but the team was sobered by the dangers of extreme sports.

“Every week we’ve learned about each other,” Ward said. “This race is going to be 90% mental.”

More recently, the team was within five miles of finishing a 50-mile ultra-marathon when Petranek’s knees gave out. They all dropped out rather than break up the group.

Team members have found themselves taking headers off mountain bikes, dunking themselves in the water at Marina del Rey and quivering with fear before dropping down a vertical cliff face, supported by nothing more than a rope.

“My mom calls me every Monday and I tell her what I did on the weekend and she goes, ‘Ooh, I don’t like that,’ ” Adams said.

Said Carson: “The event requires an incredible amount of will and pushing beyond yourself, but there’s still a call for good judgment.”

He should know.

After eight months of training, his previous team fell apart in bitter acrimony well before the finish line of the 1992 Raid Gauloises in Oman, an event that one survivor described as “the Outward Bound trip from hell.”

“Each person was out for himself after being lost for days,” Carson recalled.

Their confusion was understandable.

In the Utah race, as in the Raid Gauloises, competitors will have no idea where they are going until 24 hours before the race begins, at which point they will be issued a set of maps and coordinates for 30 checkpoints.

During the previous French-organized versions of the race, winning teams have come in as much as four days ahead of last-place finishers.

“We’re trying to make this equally brains as it is brawn,” Burnett said. “There will be a lot of intelligence needed, a lot of cryptic stuff, misleading clues and things you’ve got to think through. Things will not always be as they seem, just like real life.”

It will be up to each team to find its way, deciding when and where to make concessions to physical needs.

As the competition’s promotional literature puts it: “They will sleep when they dare and move while they can . . . They will search for their limits in a beautiful but untamed and sometimes harsh landscape . . . Their friends are the map, the compass, the full moon and each other. Their enemy--time.”

Organizers will provide the horses (each team will get three to distribute among its five members), rafts, bicycles, canoes and mountain-climbing gear. But additional help will be limited to four spots along the route where backup teams will supply food, medical care and whatever moral support they can.

The Westside team’s backup crew is scheduled to include E.S. (Bud) Beggs, co-owner of the San Dimas stable where they have been learning the rudiments of horsemanship, and Robert Forster, a Santa Monica physical therapist whose clients include prominent athletes such as Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

And now that tired old question: Why? Because it’s there?

Sort of.

“The people who do this race have either experienced something deep in life or they’re at that point where you want to draw that out,” said Jon Aguilar, 25, of Santa Monica, a member of a rival team called Spirit Extreme.

After a week on the run, said Aguilar, a former Marine reconnaissance specialist, “You learn to appreciate things in life a lot more--just a cup of coffee.”

Indeed, said Michael S. Goldstein, a professor of public health at UCLA, self-denial on this scale “makes you appreciate normalcy in a different way, . . . and it’s one of the very basic things found in lots of religions.”

For the competitor, he said, “there’s a spiritual component.”

And even for couch potatoes--the race is to be featured in an MTV special--”it seems to epitomize the drive to convert physical sacrifice and even physical pain into something positive that people seek out,” he said.

“For people hearing about it,” he said, “it’s providing a kind of icon for what they could hope to aspire to. . . . If you could do what they’re doing, boy, you could really be responsible for controlling yourself in a way that most people can’t.”