9 a.m., Day 1
As the remnants of Hurricane Helene swept over me, I huddled on a mountain ridge in West Virginia. The 2024 United States Adventure Racing Association National Championships hadn’t even begun yet, and I was already getting chilled. About 200 other competitors and I were using one another for shelter and doing jumping jacks, while the frigid gale bowled metal chairs across the plaza of Snowshoe Mountain resort. This was actually the best weather we were supposed to have all day, because the storm was in a lull; rain would soon begin pouring again.
Finally, the race directors shouted go, and the runners broke toward every point of the compass. We were all headed toward the same finish line. But in between here and there — some 120 miles on the most efficient and complete route — we would take countless different paths.
That’s because adventure racing is a mash-up of an Ironman triathlon and a wilderness treasure hunt, with teams of three tracking down hidden checkpoints over vast distances in rough terrain. For this national championship contest, we had to seek 50 checkpoints secreted throughout the Monongahela National Forest over the course of 30 hours — during which time few teams would sleep. To reach the checkpoints, we could use only our feet, mountain bikes and canoes, and for navigation we had to rely on maps and compasses. Whichever team found the most checkpoints (and crossed the finish line) by the deadline would win.
I received topographic maps of the course before dawn, in the bunkerlike basement of the resort’s convention center, along with my two teammates: MacRae Linton and Jedediah Britton-Purdy. Despite the early hour and horrid weather, MacRae was literally bouncing with excitement, as he had for all our annual expeditions since college 15 years before. Jed, however, was questioning the wisdom of racing in the storm. Jed is about a decade older than I am, and he reminded me gently that our wives and young children would be in the path of the storm — was it wise to make ourselves totally unavailable for 30 hours? I shared Jed’s unease at being away from my family — and also MacRae’s excitement at the impending challenge. Ultimately, I figured we were already hundreds of miles away from our homes, so the only practical option was to forge ahead.
Laying all 10 maps out on a table, we surveyed the mountain ranges we would traverse. Topographic maps are filled with elevation contour lines — which to the untrained eye look like illegible spaghetti but to the knowledgeable reader transform 2-D paper into a 3-D hologram. Scattered through the hundreds of cartographic square miles, amid the other symbols that marked everything from cliffs to the thickness of vegetation, were the red circles of the checkpoints, which we had to figure out how to best connect. It was beyond the ability of mere mortals to touch every checkpoint, so doing well required figuring out which points to attempt. Many checkpoints were hidden far off-trail, in intentionally difficult places to reach, so strategic route choices tended to involve hard trade-offs: Were we better off following an established trail over a peak or bushwhacking a shortcut through a boggy valley?
After three hours of measuring distances, debating and marking our decisions on the map in waterproof ink, we had our route: ambitious at the beginning, when we would have the most energy; more conservative for later mountain-biking sections, which we assumed would be more difficult because of the washed-out trails.
I was in charge of our maps as we rushed from the starting line and through the surrounding warren of condos toward the national forest. But sweeping up a few easy points on the way out of the ski resort proved harder than it should have, as cold rain slapped our faces and whiteout fog distorted distances. Plus, Jed’s anxiety was creeping into my head. I couldn’t help remembering a turtle that I ran over the day before while driving to the competition. Swinging around a bend on a narrow mountain road, I glimpsed it too late. I felt the crunch through the steering wheel. MacRae and I pulled over, hoping to find it only injured, but it looked like a dropped egg — yolky flesh ground into shards of shell. With the disassembled halves of a kayak paddle, we scooped up the corpse and dug a grave. One intact eye glared at me, until I poured dirt over it.
As intermittent storm bursts drummed against my hard-shell jacket, I kept wondering if we were going to be steamrolled by a force much larger than us.
9:40 a.m.
About 40 minutes into the race, after dispatching the easy checkpoints, we found ourselves standing on the edge of a small parking lot, staring into a pine forest so dense it was already dark as evening inside. The next move appeared simple on the map: Follow a trail northeast past two intersections, after which the checkpoint should be hidden about 100 meters northwest. But there seemed to be multiple footpaths winding into the woods, where the map showed only one. Another confident-looking team rushed down a path going roughly the correct direction, and insecurely, I tailed them. But I became increasingly alarmed as I noted even more forking paths too small to be mapped. Soon we joined numerous confused teams beating through pine thickets on indistinguishable tracks. The distinctive crossroads we expected to use as landmarks were impossible to pinpoint in the labyrinth. The race designers had lulled all of us into a false sense of security.
Normally, navigation is my favorite part of adventure racing. It was what enchanted me during my original adventure race, some three years before. I had expected it to feel like a hokey product of the weekend-warrior industrial complex — a synthetic, engineered adventure — but because I was piloting myself, I had to puzzle out the best way to flow with the terrain, rather than simply running over it. The new level of attention made marathons feel rote.
After that first, exhilarating experience, I started setting aside a weekend every spring and fall to race. Though I was an intuitive navigator from a lifetime spent outdoors, there was so much to learn: how to shoot a compass bearing, to adjust for magnetic declination, to count my paces, to employ a barometric altimeter and so on. Some of these techniques had been used by explorers for roughly a thousand years but have largely been forgotten in the age of GPS — and studying them felt like being inducted into a transhistorical guild stretching from Song-dynasty sailors to Victorian cartographers to me. After participating in half a dozen or so overnight regional races, I reached the point where I considered myself a competent navigator. I was what was known by some adventure racers as a “tortoise” — someone who did decently by moving slowly and steadily and avoiding mistakes. But I wanted a bigger test. So I had come to my first nationals — the pinnacle of the sport’s circuit, which last season included over 70 races from Alaska to Florida.
Futilely trying to locate myself among the pines, however, I had to reckon with the embarrassment of flubbing the race’s first real checkpoint. And underneath that shame, there was also an undeniable flare of panic, of feeling like vulnerable prey in the wild, though I was with friends and not even very far from the condos. To be lost is a rare experience these days. (Or perhaps it’s better to say that most people are usually lost, but they don’t realize it because their smartphones aren’t.) To be lost strips you down to just you, in a world you no longer fully understand, and makes clear how fragile your senses of self and place really are.
MacRae, Jed and I floundered through the brush, each of us frustratedly pursuing our own hunches, even though we knew that the best practice was to methodically sweep the area in a line like a search-and-rescue team. It wasn’t just our futility that anguished me but our disorganization. I had failed my teammates twice: first, by leading us astray, and then again by not providing the leadership necessary for us to search in coordination — part of the reason adventure racing is a team sport is for complex searches like this.
Navigation turns adventure racing from just a physical challenge into a mental one. The de-emphasizing of brute strength and increased emphasis on cooperation and problem-solving also make the sport much more gender-balanced than many outdoor competitions. Some 37 percent of the racers at nationals were women, and the first-, second-, third- and fifth-place teams would be coed; the fourth- and sixth-place teams would be all-female; the highest-placing all-male team was seventh.
Finally, we stopped to debate our options. We could either keep hunting randomly, hoping we were close, or return to our last known point, the parking lot by the condos. After a humbling march back, we used our compasses to draw a line on the map from the asphalt to the checkpoint, fixed the orienting arrow on our compasses to that angle and followed the bearing straight through pricking pines. I skipped this brute-force method originally, figuring that approaching on the established path would be faster than bushwhacking and that we could then use the landmarks of the distinctive crossroads to zero in on our target. But this race obviously wasn’t going to permit any margin for error. Guided by the earth’s magnetic field, MacRae ran right into the checkpoint: an orienteering flag, which looks like a white-and-orange lampshade with a computerized recorder attached. It was concealed amid trunks that made it impossible to see from even 10 feet away. MacRae put our electronic key into the recorder, certifying the discovery.
The find provided some much-needed encouragement, especially as storm bursts had started to infiltrate our rain jackets. Next, we followed our compasses through a pine barren deeply carpeted in moss, which felt like walking on green clouds, and then boulder-hopped across an ancient glacial moraine, quickly locating two checkpoints. With each find, our hearts rose. Our searches became more efficient, too, as we coordinated more seamlessly. Feeling confident, we took a navigational gamble, cutting across the upper slopes of a thickly wooded mountain and ignoring a circuitous gravel road below. As we spiked the next checkpoint, we whooped at our success. I couldn’t help smiling as we soon crossed paths with a team we had leapfrogged, which took the easier but longer way and was still searching for the checkpoint.
As we dropped into a tight river valley devoid of any official trails, the storm intensified, but I didn’t mind. Despite being soaked, we found that if we maintained a decent pace, exertion kept us warm. And finally I was achieving the deep focus that was so central to my love of orienteering. With the heightened awareness of navigation, everything appeared extra beautiful. Against the smoky clouds, falling orange and yellow leaves shone like sparks cast from a fire. A cerulean blue crayfish crawling across the path seemed like a fairy-tale creature, as would, later, a six-point stag, its antlers pink from shedding velvet. I felt so merged with the landscape and the map that I sensed two checkpoints, one that hung over a river and another tucked into a ravine, before I even saw them.
When you’re navigating well, you and the map and the world merge. You become hyperaware of the slope of the ground, the bends in a valley, how many meters and kilometers your footsteps have paced out. It’s an immersion in oneself and nature, the interior and exterior worlds — harking back to when navigation was essential to humanity’s survival as hunter-gatherers. Your mind attunes itself to magnetic north almost as much as your compass does.
11:36 a.m.
We were pushing toward the end of the river valley, enjoying the burbling quiet that filled the lulls in the storm, when Helene’s next band roared in, thrashing the hardwoods around us. For the last four hours, I intermittently heard the tremendous pops of roots ripping out of sodden ground and booms of trunks snapping. Suddenly, I heard a thunderous crack above. I knew what it was even before I looked up and saw it: the top half of a dead maple shearing off.
I ran, shouting. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that MacRae and Jed had instinctively scattered, too. But the trunk was coming down at them like a giant arm, its branches spread like the fingers of a hand swatting at a fly. Some of the smaller lower branches were even snapping across Jed. If Jed was crushed, the situation would be desperate. Assuming MacRae and I could stabilize him, the nearest road was still at least a mile away, and there was no way we could carry him out. And even if our emergency beacon could manage to connect to a satellite through the clouds, no helicopter would fly in this weather.
But when the fluttering leaves finally settled, I found Jed standing beside the fallen trunk. He had managed to dodge the main spar, so that only minor branches swiped him. He was staring at a tinfoil-wrapped beef burrito the way that Hamlet regarded Yorick’s skull. Jed, an academic and Times contributor, who as a young man was profiled by this magazine, seemed poised to quote W.B. Yeats or another great poet, as he sometimes does. Instead, he observed that he had saved his own life without spilling any of his snack.
The three of us hugged, savoring our united warmth against the tempest.
2:30 p.m.
Our exhilaration powered us across a plateau, where the pines grew tight as jail bars and the only sign of life was bear scat. There, we hunted down three checkpoints worth extra for their higher degree of difficulty. While other teams might have been physically farther along, I knew we were ahead in our score because only a fraction of them could have gotten all the bonus checkpoints. But by the time we retreated from the national forest and began to climb back to the ski resort to pick up our bikes, our spirits and bodies were flagging. We had been going for about five hours, and the physical demands of bushwhacking had taken a toll. Plus, the mild temperatures we enjoyed in the lower elevations were being wiped away by icy, gusting precipitation near the exposed grassy peaks.
I had been hoping that the race’s first transition area — a mandatory gateway all teams had to pass through by a certain time — would provide some relief, but the gravel parking lot at the edge of the resort was filled with ominous signs about what lay ahead. There, our mountain bikes awaited us — alongside nine other bikes that had been smashed by a falling tree. Another team was pulling out of the competition, after the rough trails destroyed one of their bikes before they could get far. And race staff members were warning that once the rest of us began pedaling north for 40 miles to the next transition area, we were entering true wilderness for much of the remainder of the race. What we had just endured was a looping prologue to the real expedition.
Before pushing back into the national forest, we sheltered in a nearby condo’s foyer to eat and warm up, eavesdropping on other racers who crammed the lobby. One team was having a heated disagreement, with a frustrated man trying to persuade his shivering partners to continue. Teaming up has all sorts of advantages in this sport, from heightened safety to greater efficiency at lugging heavy mandatory gear — but the central reason it’s required is that working through hardships with teammates is meant to be part of the adventure. (While some competitions allow solo participants, the premier ones still require teams.) Listening to the other group bicker, I was grateful to have MacRae and Jed by my side. When I asked how they were doing, there was no debate: We wanted to finish.
The other team stayed behind, and we re-entered the storm.
Sodden, mud-spattered and chilled, we pedaled and pushed our bikes on foot along trails that had flooded into streams. There were still moments of beauty — Jed harvesting wild apples, which tasted refreshingly tart after too many sugary energy bars — but progress was a slog, punctuated by thrilling, occasionally terrifying slip-and-slide descents. MacRae would say that his vision went “black and white” with adrenaline when he spun out on a later one, before regaining control. My body was stressed by so many different types of discomfort — the mounting exhaustion in my muscles, the sloshing in my shoes, my core straining to warm itself against the cold — that I almost ceased to feel anything, except the drive to keep moving forward.
As sunset ambushed us fording a turbid river, I noticed Jed lagging. He had been in remarkably good cheer throughout, especially after dodging the falling trunk, but now, as our headlamps struggled to illuminate the darkness, he was teetering. The night before, he slept only a few hours because of nerves, and all day, he struggled to regulate his body temperature. We stopped trailside to try to revive him. But food and rest did little. Soon, I was riding beside him on the uphills, placing my hand on his back and pushing — but he was too unsteady for the maneuver to do much good. We began discussing skipping checkpoints and tying a rope from my bike to his so I could tow him, a common technique.
About a dozen hours into the race, as we ground up a steep dirt fire road, Jed slumped off his bike. His answers to our questions were confused and halting, and he was shivering violently. We stripped him of his wet clothing, clad him in our driest gear and enveloped him in a bivy sack — an emergency metallic bag, which traps a user’s body heat. After 30 minutes and some food and water, he had recovered enough to answer our teasing questions about the Supreme Court with professorial lectures. (Jed teaches constitutional law at Duke University.) But exiting the bivy, he again was convulsed by full-body shivers and seemed to lose focus. MacRae and I worried he might be entering early-stage hypothermia.
This was Jed’s first overnight race, and I had promised I could get him through it. I invited him along, despite his having done only shorter daytime races, because adventure racing forges special relationships through overcoming shared challenges, and I wanted that bonding with him. But as Jed shakily swaddled himself in the bivy again, it was clear that I had failed him.
An emotional struggle played out on Jed’s face. He had set himself the goal of finishing, trained rigorously and feared letting the team down. His body, however, couldn’t continue. He announced he was done. MacRae activated the SOS satellite beacon, a pager-size weather-sealed antenna that could text even without a cellular network and that allowed race staff to track our location.
Two hours later, a truck rumbled up to us. We embraced Jed, then he pulled himself into the heated cab, on his way to a hotel bed and a full recovery. The next day, we would come across another team with a member mummified in a bivy, waiting for an evacuation. In total, 10 teams — about a seventh of the field — would either lose a member or withdraw entirely.
11:15 p.m.
MacRae and I were left in darkness, in the vast pit of the Mower Basin. No teams had passed us in the hours we were waiting for Jed’s evac, so I was fairly certain that we were now in last place. And it would be physically impossible to reach the second transition area by the midnight deadline, earning us a stiff penalty that would put us even further in the hole. Though we still had a little more than half of the race clock left, we had gone only about a third of the total distance. At a minimum, skipping all discretionary checkpoints, we needed to cover around 50 more miles, much of that on blown-out muddy trails. Not to mention that we still had to climb a majority of the 14,000 feet of cumulative ascent on the course. And it was the middle of the night.
Still, stars were peeking through the dissipating clouds. And as we stowed the emergency mylar blanket and other gear we used to keep warm during the long wait, MacRae’s happy chatter buoyed me. I had always appreciated how MacRae got excited, not daunted, by challenges, and how his open feelings prompted ones I kept deeper down. As it had many times before, the virtuous cycle of his irrepressible enthusiasm and my even-tempered practicality spurred us unto the breach, as we parsed logistics and talked ourselves up for the next push. We could do this. In many ways, this was just an extension of a single long-running adventure that MacRae and I embarked on when we met in college — and we had conquered worse.
We pumped up and down mountains, scaring up bounding deer that we outpaced on gravel-spraying descents, pausing only to drag our bikes over wind-felled trees and across frothing streams, grinding with everything that our refreshed legs had. We reached the second transition area more than two hours late, and staff members routed us onto a shortcut around the base of a mountain, which meant we wouldn’t have the chance to get the checkpoints atop it that the teams ahead of us had reached. It was now approaching 3 a.m. My feet felt wrinkled and numb, as if they had been in an ice bath the whole race. My tight leggings had begun to chafe. My vision occasionally went blurry from sleeplessness. My stomach was rebelling from being constantly stuffed with sports bars and super-high-carb hydration powder — and yet also never having enough sustenance. I had been eating and drinking on a schedule, to ingest the 10,000 calories I had calculated that my body could handle taking in during the event, but that was still vastly less than the amount I would expend.
Even so, I felt invigorated as we climbed a mountain pass, swung around a peak covered in old-growth red spruce and then descended into a rhododendron-choked valley. The heavens shone clearer there than almost anywhere else on the East Coast, partly because light-polluting development is discouraged around the nearby Green Bank radio telescope. We didn’t even have to check our compasses; we could just follow Orion’s Sword south, because the path we wanted was so aligned to the heavenly guide that at each crossroads the correct choice was immediately clear. Navigating by the stars, I felt synchronized not just to the map and the earth but to the galaxies beyond. The blinding terror of the storm had been replaced by a sense of proportionality. I might be a turtle, but I didn’t feel threatened by that. I could see where I stood in the cosmos.
Before long, we began passing other racers who had missed the cutoff, limping or sitting in the dirt, heads resting on their knees. Some were kind enough to cheer us on. Dawn graced us as we forded a misting river in a line of teams with packs held above their heads. Racers hobbled onward, sleepless, blistered, thorn-torn, sodden, chilled and wounded; one later displayed to us a wrist that she said was broken, while proudly insisting that she wouldn’t leave the course. But despite all that, they all seemed more alive than they would in their everyday lives. There is a light that burns in the eyes of adventure racers after a sleepless night, which could be madness or delirium, but I prefer to think of it as a clarity of vision and purpose, a transcendence of the rational into the extraordinary — one that I could see in their pupils and that I’m sure they could see in mine. In fact, rather than complaining about the hurricane, many of the racers were already spinning self-consciously delighted tales about how the storm made an already difficult feat even harder.
Perhaps that theatricality shouldn’t have surprised me, given the sport’s origins. Modern adventure racing began in 1989 with the European Raid Gauloises, televised multiday competitions across exotic locations in which athletes competed “not for fame, or money, or career, but simply for adventure and for the experience of living,” the competition’s French founder wrote, “at the very brink of human strength and endurance.” In 1992, a then-unknown businessman named Mark Burnett participated in a Raid, decided to produce his own American version called “Eco-Challenge” and scored a long-running hit that led to his producing “Survivor,” then, of all things, “The Apprentice.” Everyday Americans wanted to try what they saw on TV, and more accessible races popped up.
Many serious racers today roll their eyes at past (and present) televised suffer-fests. But the sport’s historical foundation remains that of events crafted to take participants on archetypal cinematic journeys. And they do. People are enduring the experience not just for the usual outdoor-sports bromides of getting lost to find themselves and test their limits, but to undergo a hero’s journey of their own.
9 a.m., Day 2
The sun finally emerged from early-morning cloud cover and baked us as we biked the hills above one of the most wild and last undammed rivers on the East Coast — which we would have paddled, had the storm not raised it to dangerous levels. The last push was a 4,000-foot ascent to the ski resort where we started. By that point, MacRae and I had clawed back enough time to sneak a few optional checkpoints on the way to the finish line. The one we most wanted required an additional punishing ascent, which would put us in danger of being penalized for missing the 30-hour cutoff.
As we ground upward, our wheels struggling for traction in the mud, my stomach spasming, my thighs rubbed raw, my brain aching from lack of sleep, I ignored the pain by focusing on my conversation with MacRae. Starting on the nocturnal trek, we had begun discussing reaching the halfway point of our lives — statistically, as we were each in our late 30s — and trying to figure out what we should do with the rest of our journeys. It had proved easiest to distract ourselves from bodily discomfort by asking existentially discomforting questions. What checkpoints in life really matter? And what should we do with our remaining time?
As we rolled up to an observation platform atop a peak, on which a checkpoint hung, I knew we had fallen behind schedule. But I didn’t care. Soon enough, we would get on our bikes again and sprint to the finish line — arriving 4 minutes and 54 seconds late. After a penalty was applied for tardiness, we would come in 34th out of 73 teams. But that wasn’t really what we were racing for.
Up there on that platform, we stood for a full minute, then another, and then another, savoring a panorama of the paths we had taken and those we had yet to take. MacRae told me how much he loved me and how much this journey had meant to him. I told him the same. The atmosphere had been scrubbed clean by rain, and amid endless mountains rusting with autumn, the Green Bank telescope jutted upward like a cosmic compass needle. We could see forever.
Doug Bock Clark is a reporter at ProPublica whose previous reporting for this magazine covered dozens of American military contractors who were imprisoned in Kuwait and illuminated the cutthroat gray market for N95 masks early in the pandemic.
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