August 19: This year's race has become a 'survival mission' for some
By Dan Morrison

Robyn Benincasa, captain of Team Dew

And right now she's kinda pissed.

Her team, Team Dew, which consists of herself, her boyfriend Mitch Utterback, and two Kiwis, are way back in the pack, perhaps as far back as 30th place.

One of the New Zealanders on her team this year, David Hannon, took eighth place in the '96 Southern Traverse, and third place that race the year before. The other Kiwi, Adam Fairmaid, won the Southern Traverse in both '94 and '96, and also ran it in '95.

But both Hannon and Fairmaid are having problems during this Eco-Challenge.

Utterback, formerly in the U.S. Army Special Forces and now Chief Instructor at the Eco-Challenge Adventure School, was on Benincasa's team when they took eighth place in British Columbia and second place in Utah. He, at least, remains upbeat about this year's event.

"Personally, it's been the easiest for me of all of the races," Utterback said while hiking off Mount Bartle Frere and toward Bramston Beach. "I did a lot of praying before the race that it would not be the one to cause us to drop out. That's my biggest fear. And none of us have caused that to happen yet."

"But it's also been the race where more of us needed to work as a team. Every other day or so we had to help each other."

"I wasn't that hard for me to dismiss the notion of a top-ten finish and replace it with a finish with four healthy people, relatively speaking, within the parameters of the race."

"Dave [Hannon] got some really bad blisters a few days ago, and Adam [Fairmaid] was a heat casualty, twice. So we've had to do a lot of physical management of ourselves. And probably more than any other race, this one has been the challenge of riding the red line of not making it."

"The thought of giving up in this race never occurred to me. Although the thought that if I hit my head on a rock at least I'd be able to sleep awhile did."

Fairmaid, struck down with heat exhaustion, was given an IV just before the canoe section. He was struck down again just before Tully River.

"We had cool, overcast temperatures the next day for the walk and the horseback ride. So in a strange, serendipitous way, the weather has pulverized us on one day, and then has been benevolent the next day when we really needed it."

"It's been a survival race more than anything else. I guess I can't even say race. It's been a survival mission."

Mitch Utterback coming off Mount Bartle Frere

"Somehow some of my carabiners got kinked around, and by the time I got to the 300-foot vertical, when I clipped in I found my rate of ascent was one inch at a time. So, that for me was the most mentally excruciating, frustrating portion of the whole thing. Because I could look at a crack in the rock wall and watch it drop one inch at a time. I was only able to do about ten ascends, and then rest."

"So I did 3,600 pushes and steps, each one inch tall."

Utterback was looking forward to the kayak section, if for no other reason than to get off his feet.

"But," he noted, "like any other Eco-Challenge section, a sport that you might like to do on an afternoon at home, are so long and excruciating that by the end you hate the sport," he said. "I'm looking forward to it, though."

Robyn Benincasa, walking just behind Mitch Utterback, wasn't feeling quite as charitable.

"It's going ... a lot better ... than it was a couple days ago," she said, choosing her words carefully. "Somebody found the "on" switch on our Kiwis finally, thank God."

"It's been a constant back and forth, yo-yo of feeling good, falling apart, feeling good, falling apart. We started out great, then burned out, and these guys had their problems in the middle, and now they're coming back really strong."

But Benincasa was not thrilled to be bringing up the rear, a position normally reserved for other teams.

"It's harder at the back. It really is ... The teams at the front, and teams that I've been on before that have done really well, they're going really hard, and they're focused. It's even harder, I think, now being at the back of this one, to help people that are in trouble, have the question of whether you are even going to finish or not, and be able to pull together as a team. It's the hardest thing there is."

"These guys both said they were going to quit at one point or another. And the fact that we're here is a testament to how hard we worked to get here."

Fairmaid and Hannon were recommended to Benincasa by Jeff Hunt, who runs the Southern Traverse, based on their success in that grueling race.

"They've got some decent experience, but what I didn't think about is it wasn't experience in a race this long. That is the key."

"I think this year's race if pretty easy by Eco-Challenge standards. Last year's race really was a race of attrition. This year it was a race of speed."

"Of course I liked last year's race better, because we were way up in front," Benincasa laughed. "And I liked the year before even better."

"I've been frustrated out of my mind the last four days. I kept thinking, 'I've been the captain of the top American team for the last two years, and now here I am in fricking 26th place.'"

Then she turns serious. "I keep going because of the pride that comes with finishing. We're really proud of what we've put into this as a team. I've never had to work this hard at being a team. When you've got two people who are inexperienced in a race of this magnitude, you've got to be cheerleader, mom, packing everybody's gear, making sure everyone is on time. It is so much more effort, and it is so much more draining. But I think in a couple of years these guys can be really good with what they've learned here."

"It was my mistake to assume that Southern Traverse experience had anything to do with Eco-Challenge experience."

Then she said with another laugh, "I'm going free agent."

When Team Dew launched their kayaks into the surf to begin the long paddle to the finish line in Cairns, to many onlookers they probably seemed like a cohesive team. But if you looked real close you might have noticed they looked perhaps a bit more like four very tired individuals, who, coincidentally, happened to be going in the same direction.

Dan Morrison covered the Marathon des Sables for Outside Online.