August 14: Strategy a moot point as lead teams hit Dark Zone
By Dan Morrison

Rappel site at Herbert River Falls

It's secondary purpose is to provide some entertainment for Mark Burnett.

Actually, the latter reason may be the real driving force behind the forced bottleneck.

"I want this race to be expeditionary in nature and to force decision-making under difficult conditions," says Burnett in his Adventure Race Grand Patriarch persona. Then he breaks into a grin and his gleeful can-you-believe-this-is-how-I-make-a-living? side reveals itself when he says, "And I want the race to be interesting to me, too."

Burnett seems to be almost smug right now, and most certainly he is having fun.

All the jockeying for position, all the strategy, all the good luck/bad luck, all the serendipity, and seemingly all the hard work of some teams just became moot.

After patiently remaining comfortably behind the frontrunners for the last couple of days, Team Eco-Internet pulled out the stops today and blasted from 11th position to first. Scurrying up a 300-foot vertical cliff at Blencoe Falls, they picked up their mountain bikes and sped 20 kilometers through the forest to Camp 1, checking in at 1:22 p.m. local time, well ahead of their nearest competition at this point, Team Endeavour, who arrived four hours and 16 minutes later.

John Howard and Burnett joked together about the nuances of this year's course, while Robert Nagle stopped in at the medical tent to have some very minor foot irritations attended to.

In their trademark fashion, Eco-Internet was quickly in and just as quickly out of the checkpoint area. But, despite all their efforts, it was simply too late in the day to beat the Dark Zone deadline looming at the Tully River.

From the CP-17 at Camp 1 to the Tully River whitewater raft put-in is 81 kilometers, a distance too far to cover before sunset.

Team Endeavour after the 104- kilometer mountain-bike leg

Due to the Dark Zone, the top handful of teams will essentially start together tomorrow at 6:30 a.m. And, as Nagle noted, the important adventure race dynamics — strategy, team experience and team cohesiveness, physical strength and stamina, choice of gear, and pre-race planning — will play little to no role in team positions on the Tully River, and will come to bear only to a slight degree during the horseback section.

So, for the top teams at least, this year's 528.5-kilometer race will be decided in the last 194 kilometers, which consists of a mountain-bike leg followed by a trek and a sea-kayak paddle. That distance, about 120 miles, will certainly allow the race to be won or lost on the merits of the skills of the teams, but it will reconfigure a multi-discipline endurance adventure race into a triathlon sprint of sorts.

To the other 40 or so teams just a bit further back, the race is still what it always was, 10 days of physical inquisition, in which their ability to endure will be revealed to the world, the other teams, perhaps even to themselves.

The good news is that injuries have been few. Pat Csizmazia of Team R.O.A.M., who was evacuated by helicopter yesterday, was diagnosed with a serious viral infection by the medical team. Serious enough to end this year's race for him, but not as potentially serious as a spider bite, as first feared.

At Camp 1 today, Csizmazia was recovering quickly, although clearly disappointed at having been knocked out of the event.

Chloe Lanthier, of Team Canada, is now almost fully recovered from her illness, and is watching the race progress from the sidelines.

And that progress has begun to falter just a bit for some teams who are showing the telltale signs of mental fatigue and physical exhaustion. A member of Team Peak Sweden got his climbing hardware jammed during the ascent of the 300-foot vertical wall at Blencoe Falls, a mental error that left him dangling precariously — safely but precariously — for over an hour until he could clear his head long enough to rectify the situation and resume the tortuous jug to the top of the cliff.

Other teams, perhaps more experienced, are allowing longer rest stops in an attempt to pre-empt such mistakes.

Mark Macy of Team Stray Dogs

As team member Mark Macy explained, the long delay was worth it.

"Everything is going excellent," he said while preparing to rappel down the 50-meter wall at Herbert River Falls. "We're in about 30th place right now, and we were in about 20th yesterday. But we hadn't slept any, so we stopped last night and slept and we got a little bit behind as a result, as far as standings are concerned. But now everybody is feeling good; nobody's hurt."

Part of the justification for the long sleep, according to Marshall Ulrich, was to wait for the warmth of sunrise. "We just couldn't stand the thought of getting back into the cold water."

Facing the hazardous swim in the cold water at the bottom of the long rappel, Macy shrugged his shoulders and stated the obvious, "If everybody else is doing it, we can certainly do it."

Stray Dogs ran the Eco-Challenge last year in British Columbia, and, as is the very common practice among adventure racing teams, after the race they reshuffled the roster a bit and replaced a former teammate with a new one, Sharyn "Shazz" Davis, a 37-year-old Australian native they met while competing in this year's Xtreme Games. The new team dynamic seems to be holding.

"This is working out pretty good so far I think," Davis said with a smile, "they haven't hit me in the head yet. And I haven't had to hit them in the head yet either."

Sharyn "Shazz" Davis of Team Stray Dogs

The pack is now distributed over a broad area of terrain. As of 7 p.m. local time this evening, two teams, the British Team Xtreme and the Mexican Team Eco-Tonatiuh, had yet to check into PC-7, located only 105 kilometers along the race course from the start line.

The five frontrunners, Team Eco-Internet, Team Endeavour, Team New Zealand, Team ARS, and Team Red Hot, have already put over 180 kilometers behind them.

The attrition rate will begin to rise soon. It's now raining. It's dark and cold.

Mark Burnett no doubt finds this all very interesting, just as he hoped it would be.

Dan Morrison covered the Marathon des Sables for Outside Online.