 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
On a cold Wisconsin morning, before the sun has risen, more than 200 men and women are scrambling from sleep and into inner tubes.
They run as fast as they can into the cold, dark, white water rapids of a river in the middle of nowhere. Shoes, clothes and teammates are lost in the chaos.
This is a race unlike any other, one that does not conform to rules, time frames and the limits of human endurance. This is adventure racing.
Adventure racing is a competition that can span anywhere from several hours to several days. Instead of a fixed track, the remoteness of the outdoors provides the course and races include many physical aspects from running to swimming.
Adventure racing demands navigation skills and orienteering of the participants. Though adventure racing has been around for many years, the sport didn't really take off until the 1990s
Two former Texas A&M students, Leiza Morales and Jim McTasney, went along for the ride by chance.
Morales and McTasney's story begins January 1997. McTasney was reading an airline magazine while away on business when he stumbled across an adventure race in California know as the "Triple Bypass."
"When he came home he was really excited," Morales said. "He threw the magazine down and said how cool it would be to do this. I looked at it and told him 'you're nuts.'"
Though the pair did not enter the California race, in August of that year, McTasney found an adventure race in Dallas. He purchased Morales a mountain bike and the two began training for the 25-mile running and biking event a week before.
"We finished the event in the middle of August," Morales said. "We both nearly had heatstroke and I was bleeding all over from falling off my bike. We finished the event and it wasn't really planned or organized well. I look at Jim and said 'I can do a better job than this.'"
At the end of 1997, they moved to their ranch in Haskell, Texas. With the acreage and terrain to facilitate a race, McTasney pressed Morales to plan her own event.
Morales researched what encompassed an adventure race, but information was sparse on the subject. A call to an old A&M friend, Russell Parks, led to the two joining with intern Corey Franken of Miami University in Ohio.
Franken, a parks and recreation major, joined with McTasney and Morales and the three began figuring out how to put on a race.
"Not only were we trying to figure out what an adventure race was," Morales said. "But we were also trying to figure out what to put in it, how to promote it, and how to get people to come."
Fearing few people would know how to navigate with a map and compass, they tied small ribbons along the length of the course. Franken and Morales took two weeks, at eight hours a day, to mark the course.
"That's actually how we got our name," she said. "In the process of tying all those little ribbons to the trees we stepped on, sat on or touched dozens of rattlesnakes. We were laughing and saying that we were racing a race of rattlesnakes and that's where the name Rattlesnake Racing came from."
Twenty-five teams participated, involving nearly 60 people.
"The first event went great," Morales said. "People were amazed in town that that many people showed up in Haskell to do an adventure race."
As adventure racing began to boom, the Rattlesnake Racing team found itself a pioneer of the sport. At the same time, the members were educating
themselves and working to keep the sport fresh and innovative while furthering its growth.
Since the boom in the late 1990s, Adventure Racing has split into two camps.
One side embraces the sheer physicality of the race, and the other side embraces the entertainment and loose structure the sport offers.
"I nearly died in the race in California when our 'unsinkable' kayak sank in the middle of Lake Tahoe and I almost froze to death," Morales said. "The only safe adventure race is a canceled adventure race ... Every aspect of the sport is dangerous."
There is also a physical toll: Morales has had two back surgeries since 2005.
Despite the setbacks, Morales looks forward to getting back in the race. She said it's a rollercoaster of emotions that cannot be experience anywhere else.
It's fraught with challenges, she said: "But at the end of that day you make it to the peak of that mountain and you see the entire beauty of the valley below you and you know you have accomplished something that nobody before you has done. You're in your only little place of peace and you're really enjoying life at the moment."
Be the first to comment on this article!