Row, Row, Row--and That’s Just the Start

Sylvia Corbett was delirious.

Ever so slowly, the raw, unrelenting cold of the Pacific waters had taken its toll, numbing first her body, then her mind. By the time she and her two kayaking teammates reached the first race checkpoint at Point Mugu, hypothermia had taken hold.

The fierce, chilling wind cascading off the Santa Monica Mountains only worsened her condition as her uncontrollable shivering turned to violent spasms. A race lifeguard massaged Corbett’s legs to warm her and a sleeping bag was draped over her to fend off the wind. But all the work was useless. She was out of the Fogdog 24-Hour Adventure at the first checkpoint.

Corbett, considered one of the best in this multi-sport world of adventure racing, was driven to the staging area for more medical attention. One of her teammates, Corky Ewing, had seen the change coming over her an hour earlier.

“She wasn’t paddling like she normally does. It was like she was half asleep,” he said, trying to keep the disappointment from his voice. “We’ve been training for this race for months.”

Others also succumbed to hypothermia at that first checkpoint of the recent five-event race. But most of the 78 teams of three contestants each checked in and went back out on the water to finish their 21 miles of ocean kayaking in the waters just up the coast from Malibu. And that was only the beginning. The paddling would be followed by eight miles of running in the mountains, 32 miles of mountain biking in the dead of night, five miles of point-to-point navigating along the rocky coast and a final 33 miles of arduous wilderness trekking before the racers finally finished the next morning at Leo Carrillo State Park near the Ventura County line.

There would be no directions given, no signs pointing the way, just map coordinates and 24 more checkpoints. The best of the racers--if all went well--would finish 24 hours after the start. The teams with the simple ambition of just finishing would stumble in a day later.

So it goes with adventure racing, an infant of a sport, but one growing so quickly it is difficult to keep track of the expanding number of events. According to MountainZone.com, a Seattle Web site dedicated to chronicling alternative sports, the number of adventure races worldwide jumped from 80 last year to an estimated 350 this year.

“That’s based on a demand, obviously,” said Brian Terkelson, MountainZone’s general manager. “And the real explosion is being seen at the local level.”

Adventure racing is but one of dozens of sports in the extreme category, many of them simply over the top. At the far end of the spectrum are sky surfing, street luging and snow kayaking. Even further out is BASE jumping--parachuting off cliffs and man-made structures--which is so dangerous it is illegal in most places. BASE, incidentally, stands for the places used by jumpers--buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs).

Closer to the middle are more mature sports that have gone from quasi-radical to mainstream in a generation. Some, such as mountain biking and snowboarding, are now Olympic sports.

Inline skating is by far the most popular alternative sport with more than 27 million participants in 1999, followed by mountain biking with almost 8 million riders, according to the Florida-based Sporting Goods Manufacturers Assn. That is followed by skateboarding (almost all young and male), paintball (6.3 million enthusiasts and trying to shed its survivalist image), artificial wall climbing, snowboarding, BMX bicycling, wakeboarding, mountain climbing and, finally, surfing.

At the same time, most traditional team sports are waning in participation, according to the same study. The number of people playing baseball in the United States, including both organized and pickup games, decreased by 26% over the last decade, from 12.1 million to 8.9 million. Softball’s numbers are down while basketball participation remained flat. The only real bright spot for traditional organized sports was soccer, America’s “hot” team sport, which grew by 11% over the last decade.

The reasons given for declining participation are varied, but topping the list, ahead of television and video games, ahead of the reduction in physical education classes in school, is the huge popularity of inline skating and, by extension, the growth of other alternative sports.

Mike May, a spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Assn., said his organization now tracks 102 different sports, from bowling to kite surfing.

“There were not 102 things to choose from 25 years ago,” May said. “We’re spoiled for choice.” Indeed, so popular have the alternative sports become that there are now trading cards featuring extreme athletes. Stunt biker Dave Mirra has his own brand of bubble gum, and people like star skateboarder Tony Hawk have lent their names to video games.

Racing for the Prize

The Fogdog adventure race was almost eight hours old, and there were contestants who were still kayaking, trying to make it to the third checkpoint and back to dry land. Those who did were drenched, their sunglasses spotted from saltwater spray.

The teams racing for a piece of the $20,000 in prize money were coed, and all three had to finish to qualify. Few racers were professional athletes, the vast majority being people who hold down regular jobs in fields ranging from education to high technology. Each team had ponied up $1,200 for the pleasure of running the race, co-sponsored by various sports-related companies. Fogdog, the race’s marquee sponsor, is an online sports retailer.

In the transition area, there was a sense of urgency as the coed racers stripped down and changed into running gear, then set off trying to make up time on the leaders. For the moment, Team Red Bull was running ahead of the pack. Their considerable kayaking skills had gotten them through the course in just over five hours.

Unlike most of the other teams, Red Bull had stayed close to shore, where the cliffs fended off much of the wind. Some teams had been pushed far out to sea.

The wind had died down and the sun was beginning to set on the clear, crisp November Friday. A cameraman shot footage of kayakers struggling with their boats and an announcer called out new arrivals to no one in particular because there were no spectators.

Fogdog organizer Michael Epstein huddled with his race director, Jonathan Denison. It was clear that darkness would overtake kayakers still on the water unless something was done. They decided to bring them in quickly and assess a time penalty.

Nearby, race official Jim Garfield, who retired from adventure racing last year, was helping coordinate film coverage that will eventually be aired as a feature by the Fox Television Network.

He said that often it’s not the fittest team that wins adventure racing, but the one that figures out how to best use each team member’s skills. Garfield said that in adventure racing, everything but the basic needs and skills are pushed to the background. Things that would be important in the everyday world mean nothing on the race course.

“You only worry when you’re cold or hot or when you’re hungry or thirsty. Everything else is extra,” said Garfield, a fitness consultant for the entertainment industry. “I can remember times when we’d go two or three hours on the trail without talking. Then, suddenly, you’d realize how long it had been since any of us said a word.”

Just then, the announcer flicked on his microphone to note that Team Venture Four, a trio from San Diego, had taken the lead away from Team Red Bull. Linda Moffat of Team Atlas Racing sat with her teammates, who were preparing to push on without her. Her team had been disqualified when she, like Sylvia Corbett, suffered from hypothermia on the first leg of the race and had to quit. Her partners, John Lusk and Burton Roberts of San Francisco, had decided to race on, even though their time would not count in the official results.

“I just couldn’t stop shaking,” said Moffat, 37, a technology marketer who is a veteran of adventure races.

At 4:57 p.m., the sun set into the Pacific, showing off for a moment with a warm orange glow before darkness enveloped the racers. Epstein, the race organizer, predicted that the first of the teams--who were competing through the night with little or no rest--would begin arriving shortly after dawn the following morning.

Seeing Potential in an Untapped Market

The paths extreme sports have taken developed on parallel tracks, one of them originating in the Southern California surfing community, the other in the culture of long-distance running.

It was surfing that begot the skateboard, as a way to surf on land. Mountain bikes and inline skates were later introduced to the scene, as were other sports whose

participants were lumped into the “grunge” category, not athletes in the traditional sense, but fringe players who had little bearing on mainline sports.

That all changed when ESPN, the sports network, decided there was an untapped market in the mostly young, male participants who were attracted to extreme sports.

In 1993, an ESPN producer named Ron Semiao recognized what is now obvious: The kids in their baggy shorts and T-shirts and homemade ramps were good jocks. And, as a television person, he also recognized that the visuals were a no-brainer.

Semiao recalls the time when he went to a Barnes & Noble bookstore in 1993, looking for magazines on the sports that had become a part of the American subculture. “There were niche magazines for each sport, so I bought them all,” he said. “What I found was that for the people who did them, it was all about doing something you loved with your friends.”

The result of this revelation was the Extreme Games, a kind of alternative Olympics, which made its debut in Providence, R.I., in 1995. Winter games would soon follow. The X Games became so successful that last year more than 270,000 people attended the San Francisco event. Not only that, but 5 million people watched on ESPN, including 37% of all male teenagers in the United States watching television at the time. ESPN recently announced it was going global, staging competitions worldwide. And in an ever-so-Hollywood move, it also announced recently that it would be staging the first annual Action Sports and Music Awards at the Universal Amphitheatre in April.

The second path from which adventure racing evolved began when the modern marathon became too simple a sport for a tiny cadre of athletes. The first Ironman triathlon, combining running, biking and swimming, was held in Hawaii in 1978.

At first considered the ultimate

challenge, the new sport’s finishing times continued to improve, to a point where some began to look for even more rigorous challenges.

Enter Gerard Fusil, a French television newsman who devised a torturous multi-sport race that he named Raid Gauloises, which in 1989 brought teams of five to the rain forests and high mountains of New Zealand. In that first race, only five of the 26 teams finished. It is still considered the most difficult and demanding race in the world, followed closely by the Eco-Challenge, a grueling, multi-day event as well. (Footnote: The Eco-Challenge was invented by Mark Burnett, creator of the wildly popular “Survivor” television series.)

Nelly Fusil, ex-wife of the Raid creator, runs its American race operation and said that the next competition will be in Vietnam. She also said there is a waiting list to compete, and that Americans are limited to 10 of the 60 team slots because so many people from around the world want to participate.

She said the Raid Gauloises had spawned a large number of similar races, albeit not so challenging, time-consuming or remote. “Look now where we stand,” she said, sitting in her tidy Beverly Hills office. “We have so many races. They are popping up everywhere.”

Karen Lundgren, one of those who competed in last year’s Raid Gauloises, was also contestant in the Fogdog. A former ski racer, her reputation has been built on the fact that she does all the different types of adventure races, from the sprints that take several hours to the marathons that take more than a week.

The Raid Gauloises took place in Malaysia last year, and Lundgren said her enduring memory is of pulling off leeches as she and her teammates raced through the jungle, of never being able to get away from them. “We had leeches in places I don’t even want to talk about,” she said.

There are those who hesitate at lumping the adventure racers of the world with the X Game types, seeing them as two separate breeds. One of them is Robert Nagle of Boston, an Irish transplant and perhaps one of the best adventure racers in the country. From his vantage point, the two groups are separate and distinct.

“ESPN for a few years lumped us in with street lugers, BASE jumpers and skateboarding,” he said. “I think of those as high-adrenaline sports, a few seconds of unimaginable exhilaration. That’s not what we do. Our sport is more deliberate. It’s certainly extreme, but much more the sustained effort.”

Back to the Fogdog

Shortly after dawn, three Fogdog contestants were loading their gear into the back of a van. They had been disqualified in the middle of the night because they didn’t reach a checkpoint before the deadline set by race officials. Two were from the Dallas area--one a family practice doctor, the other a pharmaceutical representative. The third, Shawn Cohen, is a detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. They told of how they had gotten together via the Internet and of how one team member, Chris Sharon, the pharmaceutical rep, had gone over a 12-foot embankment while mountain biking and landed on his head, shattering his helmet.

But more than anything else, they wanted to talk about the otherworldly-seeming fitness of the leading teams who would be finishing the race in half the time it would have taken them.

“Hey, I’m in good shape,” said Cohen, sitting amid a jumble of equipment in the van. “My whole fascination is how they kick up to this ultra level.”

Just after 8:30 a.m., the three members of Team Venture Four rounded the bend on the beach and headed for the finish line. They had managed to maintain the lead taken in the late afternoon of Friday. They crossed, hand in hand, elated but bleary-eyed, as rock music blared.

Off to the side was Sylvia Corbett, minus her partners, minus any place to go until her flight home to Florida the next day. In all, only 30 of 78 teams finished the race. The final team to cross the finish line completed it in 50 hours, 19 minutes and 44 seconds, more than twice the time of the first-place finishers.

The winners were Bettina Ernst, 33, Harald Zundel, 32, and Marc Secades, 38, all from the San Diego area and members of the top echelon of adventure racing. Secades talked briefly about how tough the race had been, of how the kayaking had been a killer and how there had been difficulty navigating the course during the night. Then, for a long moment, he stopped talking and his face turned pale.

“I need to sit down for a minute,” he said. “I’m feeling a little lightheaded right now.”