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The foursome made up a good but not elite squad sponsored by Stryker, the medical-products company.

Jan, 47, was racing with his wife, Kim, 46, and their friends Ries Robinson, 38, and Lisa Barnes, 36. I focused on the blue backpack of racer Jan Bear, who followed a less-steep service road, then cut left to ascend a gentle slope, picking his way through ankle-turning tufts of dried brown grass. A racer from Team Whole Foods Market wrenched her ankle immediately and vanished in the cloud of dust raised by the stampede. Fifty yards from the start, one prong of the field veered left, breaking through gaps in the metal barricades and charging straight up the steepest slope. “I see all the same faces,” Gurney had said at the pre-race press conference, “but there’s a look of grim determination I haven’t seen before.” When the race began, the entire pack charged off the line at a dead run, even though the lead racers weren’t expected to finish for at least five days.

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In the starting corral, two women squatted right beside me, in full view of racers, spectators, and TV crews. start, the only thing on most racers’ minds was the prize money-and, apparently, where to pee. That’s like starting at sea level and racing up and down Mount Rainier almost five times. To hit all 28 required checkpoints, they’d have to climb and descend a rugged 138,000 vertical feet over 238 total miles-assuming, optimistically, no wrong turns.

From the takeout near Durango, teams would bike, trek, and rappel roughly 55 miles back to Telluride. From CP4 they would switch to mountain bikes for a 103-mile grind over Last Dollar Pass then they’d don mountaineering helmets before traversing a couple of crumbling peaks then they’d bike some more and then they’d paddle down the Animas, formerly the Rio de Las Animas Perdidas-the River of Lost Souls-in the nearly unsteerable inflatable kayaks that are a hallmark of the sport (“heaps of shit,” in the succinct view of John Jacoby, a veteran Aussie racer).

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Starting at a woozifying altitude of 9,550 feet, racers would climb straight up Telluride’s black-diamond ski runs, scrambling hypoxically over a series of nearly 13,000-foot ridges to hit the first three checkpoints (CPs), before looping back toward Checkpoint 4, at Telluride Mountain Village, the condo/golf-course/trophy-house complex at the base of the resort. Between them and the sport’s biggest payday lay a daunting course. At the other end of the spectrum were outfits like the Too Much Fun Club, the Jelly Donuts, and Team Fred, whose names said it all. From overseas came well-oiled squads like the Finnish Nokia team, the Spaniards of Red Bull, the Kiwis of, and a Spanish/Latin American polyglot known as Team Buff. The big money had attracted the most competitive field ever, including such luminaries as Steve Gurney, winner of the Southern Traverse in 2000, three-time Eco-Challenge champion Ian Adamson, and Rebecca Rusch, winner of Vail’s Adventure Xstream in 2001. soil, Primal Quest offered more prize money than you could stuff into a GoLite pack: $100,000 for the winners, with a total purse of nearly a quarter-million dollars.

Billed as the highest-stakes expedition-length adventure race ever held on U.S. That began to change on the afternoon of July 7, 2002, when 248 of the world’s top adventure racers, along with some not-so-great ones, lined up at the base of a ski slope in Telluride, Colorado, for the start of the inaugural Subaru Primal Quest. In smaller races, you’re lucky to win free entry to the next event. Factor in food and equipment costs, and each thrashed competitor was probably looking at a net loss.

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The winning four-person team at last year’s Eco-Challenge, the sport’s marquee event, took home $50,000, which sounds like a lot until you subtract the $15,000 entry fee, plus airfare to the race site in Fiji.

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The tale neatly symbolizes the pitfalls of professional adventure racing: Even at the highest levels, there’s more pain than money in this game. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure race: Team Montrail making a critical navigation mistake during one of Primal Quest’s bike legs.

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