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On the sea kayaking leg... Photo courtesy of Garrett Madison

Editor's Note: The following recap is from team Necky Kayaks. The teammates were Garrett Madison (captain), Michael Horst, Brent Molesberry, and Cathy Caenepeel. The Subaru Primal Quest was the inaugural adventure race for all team members.

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It all began in June of 2004 when I was guiding a weeklong mountaineering seminar on Mt. Rainier. I was just back from a failed Denali expedition, and Rainier felt much easier to climb because of its smaller size and familiarity. Actually we didn’t summit Rainier on the seminar because a storm moved in the last day when we planned the summit attempt. A failed summit usually results in no tips, which was why I reluctantly agreed to join the clients for dinner the evening we got off the mountain. Dinner was in a cozy restaurant near the mountain and I had the opportunity to talk with one woman who worked for "Primal Quest." I had no idea of what the race was all about, but had heard of similar races such as the Eco Challenge, and instantly wanted to do it. She laughed and said "you really think you could do the Primal Quest?"

"Why yes, and why not finish in the money?" Afterall the entire top ten finishes received part of the prize purse.

"But you don’t have any adventure racing experience?"

"Well, no. But how hard can it be? After all I am climbing Mt. Rainier all summer.

When a spot opened up two weeks later I learned I could enter a team in the event, and I made a split second decision to commit myself to the race. I knew that I needed to organize a team of talented individuals who could hopefully form a cohesive unit, and that we would perform activities like paddling, mountain biking, trekking, climbing, scootering, all while operating off of minimum sleep and navigating by map and compass. Sound like fun? You bet.

As I began to research the Primal Quest (www.subaruprimalquest.com) I found that I had bitten off much more than I was prepared to chew. My only teammate so far was my dear buddy Michael, whom I had talked with before about getting in to AR, and he agreed to do the race, but we still needed another teammate and a girl. After realizing that we needed a plethora of specific gear for each event in the Primal Quest the personal expense tree grew on steroids. We finally convinced his girlfriend Cathy to do the race, and my college buddy Brent, who proved to be a valuable asset throughout.

Because Michael, Cathy, and myself all guide on Rainier in the summertime, our training schedule consisted of walking up and down the mountain with heavy loads, and going on a mountain bike ride or paddle occasionally. Meanwhile, Brent was guiding sea kayak tours in the San Juan Islands, giving him plenty of paddling experience, and he made time for bike rides and trail runs after work. Brent is an amazing guy, both mentally and physically solid far beyond my abilities. The three mountain guides and the lone sea kayaking guide had no AR experience but we did have one important attribute; we shared a common enthusiasm for the outdoors and ability to work well with others, the key elements for success in an expedition AR race.

As the days before the departure to Anacortes, WA, dwindled we scrambled to organize ourselves and our gear to meet the requirements of the Primal Quest. Michael’s dad agreed to be our support team, and he outfitted his Ford F-350 with four bicycles, four scooters, 2 fifty gal water barrels, and a storage trailer behind which would double as our sleeping quarters. A retired Navy Seal Team Captain, his war wagon had cellular Internet, complete kitchen, comfortable beds, and somehow carried all of our gear around to the transition areas during the Primal Quest. While most teams rented an RV for the race, we stood out as the crafty team with a low budget.

After pouring over countless lists of mandatory gear and a dozen trips to REI we finally assembled our loaded truck in Seattle and made the drive to Anacortes, WA where we would meet up with Brent at the Primal Quest rally point. We pulled into a parking lot with about 60 RV’s already parked and many racers and support crew members wandering around in the dark. At 3 AM the following morning we were told that a ferryboat had been chartered for us and we would set sail at 5 am for Orcas Island, where Rosario Resort had been rented out for us the three days before the start of Primal Quest. In our race literature we read that we would start and finish the race at the resort.

The caravan of RV’s trucked down Orcas and invaded the quiet cove on East Sound bay where the resort is nestled. The racers constructed a "tent city" where race gear would be unpacked and organized. Thankfully, rooms at the resort were rented for the racers so that we could sleep in a nice bed instead of on the ground. The resort is first class, and it felt good to be pampered like an Olympic athlete in such a beautiful setting.

But there was no time to enjoy the scenery as we had serious work to do to in preparation for the race. The next three days would consist of gear checks with the race crew, skills testing, and the race prologue, a mini race to determine the seeding for the start of the race. We had to present all of our gear for each specific activity to the race crew, and then demonstrate how to properly use the gear. We flipped our kayaks in the icy waters and proved we could get back in them; we treaded water and swam to shore. We ascended vertical lines and rappelled back down. We spent hours with course directors understanding the severity of this challenging endeavor, and what to do in case of danger. They lectured us for hours about river hazards, open water hazards and mountain safely. We learned how to activate the satellite phone and the emergency gps transceiver. At the end of the first two days we were exhausted from the hundreds of details involved in the organization and use of our gear. We still were working out how we would distribute our food supply while on the course and how our support crew would prepare meals for us at the Transition areas. That night we were invited to a VIP dinner at the hotel’s mansion where we ate steak and salmon and drank wine with the Primal Quest big dogs. Things were finally starting to go our way.

On day three at 8 am the race prologue began. The prologue was a way for teams to determine the order of seeding on race day. The team finishing first in the prologue and the team finishing last would start 18 minutes apart on race day, which over a week-long race hardly matters. You would think the racers would want to go out at a reasonable pace on the prologue the day before the race so as to save themselves for the real race. Two team members would do about an hour paddle, then the team would run a few miles where two mountain bikes lay, and the other two would ride for about an hour, then the team would run together back to the beach where the start/finish was.

	"What you have here are a bunch of elite racers with big egos who have been sorting gear for a week with no exercise. Today, they are getting the butterflies out of their systems by racing hard against each other in typical athletic bravado...."

Cathy and I did the paddle to start the prologue, and almost instantly we were in the back of the pack, and by the end we were in third to last place about 25 minutes behind the leaders. We weren’t really sure why everyone else was paddling so hard, and we didn’t want to make ourselves sore for the next day. Our team passed a few other teams on the way to the bike stage, and I could tell that Brent and Michael were nervous about being near last place. We arrived at the bike drop off and they hopped on their bikes and sped off while Cathy and I ate some energy bars and drank water. We befriended some other racers from team Crested Butte who were near our age (most racers are in their mid thirties while we were all 25) and I asked if the pace today would reflect race pace. "Are you crazy?" she said. "What you have here are a bunch of elite racers with big egos who have been sorting gear for a week with no exercise. Today, they are getting the butterflies out of their systems by racing hard against each other in typical athletic bravado."

"Oh good," I thought. So we might not be totally out of our element here. As the mountain bikers began to return Cathy and I prepared to leave again when Michael and Brent arrived. We thought they might show up at the end of the group, but they surprised us by coming in early by passing over 40 teams. "Jesus," I thought. They really rode hard, Brent and Michael looked tired. I asked Michael what they did out there, and he said, "I can’t ride slow on a mountain bike." We began running as a team back to the start/finish and placed 20th out of about 60 teams. We stood in the salt water for a few minutes to cool our muscles and ease the pain in our legs, then went to the spa inside the resort and soaked ourselves in the warm tubs. Ah, we were beginning to feel like racers.

At 6pm that night we met with all other teams and support crew in the main tent for our race briefing. After all the hoopla with plenty of cheering and hollering the captains stayed behind to receive the race maps and a last minute brief from the race director himself, Dan Barger. After I received the maps I had to check them with a master copy along with all the other captains to verify that the 30+ checkpoints were accurately placed on our maps. The next few hours we spent in the hotel room drawing out a course of travel over several of the topographical maps until midnight rolled around, and we decided to sleep a few hours before the madness began.

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