Adventure Racing: Primal Quest Now a Race to the Finish

Thursday, June 29, 2006 - 04:45 PM

After days of struggling to survive triple-digit temperatures and hundreds of miles of the most unimaginably harsh terrain in Northern America, the world’s top endurance athletes have passed the halfway mark of Primal Quest Utah.

Not all of the competitors in Primal Quest are elite athletes, though, so while the race leaders have now traversed more than 300 miles of the roughly 450-mile course, the teams at the back of the pack are just past the 150-mile mark and face days of toil.

Three-time defending champions Team Nike/PowerBlast held the lead for much of the first day, with Team Spyder in dogged pursuit. But as the days stretched into nights, followed by more days, the lead group was dominated by one team: Merrill/Wigwam Adventure.

Team captain Robyn Benincasa has never won Primal Quest – the only laurel missing from her nearly-unmatched race resume. In fact, she withdrew from Primal Quest Telluride due to a pre-race injury and withdrew from Primal Quest Tahoe when one of her teammates fell ill.

In 2004, at Primal Quest San Juan Islands, her team was unable to match the pure speed of other teams in a race truncated by the tragic death of Nigel Aylott.

But this course suits Benincasa and her teammates Jeff Mitchell, Ian Edmond and Neil Jones. She likes being surrounded by well-seasoned Kiwis. They thrive on a race of epic proportions. They excel in applying strategic decisions to the critical elements of the race: how much water to carry; when to sleep; what to eat and how to travel.

The accumulation of decades of experience has brought Merrill to the front of the pack – by a margin of one hour and nineteen minutes. That passes for a big lead in what has been the most competitive Primal Quest to date.

In their 300 miles of travel, the teams have completed a 29-mile horseback ride; a 23-mile desert trek; a 65-mile mountain bike; an 8-mile river swim; a 35-mile kayak leg; a 26-mile canyoneering leg; a 45-mile kayak leg and a 29-mile canyoneering leg.

These pale statistics give lie to the difficulty inherent in finishing Primal Quest. The competitors have traversed burning sand, launched off precipitous rappels, fallen asleep while paddling and survived on paltry stores of food, water, and sleep.

This is, simply, the world’s toughest endurance challenge, and sometime in the next two days, it will crown a winner. Stay tuned to
http://www.ecoprimalquest.com for the race to the finish, and watch for the television broadcast in the fall on ABC and ESPN2.