Top adventure racer has 'fire in the belly'
By Dan Morrison

Louise Cooper-Lovelace

And if you make the mistake of attempting to keep up with her in a multi-day adventure race, she will leave your pathetic carcass alongside the road, exhausted and defeated, watching her disappear in the distance, still wearing her ubiquitous smile.

Louise Cooper-Lovelace is a 43-year-old expat from Johannesburg, a transplant to Los Angeles where she teaches elementary school at a private institution.

She also is one of the very best adventure racers in the United States, ranked third among women in the relatively new sport.

Cooper-Lovelace has run over 50 marathons, including Boston, New York, and San Francisco. She has run grueling ultramarathons as well, and won the Lawyer's Mulholland 56-Miler. She has numerous triathlons to her credit, and has completed the Hawaiian Ironman seven times.

And then she discovered adventure racing. The attraction was instant. "The adventure aspect coupled with the idea of teaming was most appealing to me."

Banned from entering triathlons at the time because she was still a South African citizen, Cooper-Lovelace's interest in organized sports events was at an ebb.

"I was somewhat burned out on doing the same kind of training day in and day out," she says. "So I went back to just running. I was tired of training — I just wanted to work out."

After seeing a television special about the 1994 Raid Gauloises, the semi-retired triathlete came out of semi-retirement.

"I looked at the Raid and thought, 'God, there's nothing there that I can do, other than hike and run.' It was totally foreign to me, but I thought, 'I've got to try that.'"

Cooper-Lovelace put together a team of her running buddies and entered the event the following year. In Patagonia the novice team finished a respectable 13th.

Team Endeavour entered the Eco-Challenge in Utah, and finished eighth overall in that desert event. "In Utah we were so green," she remembers. "We knew that we had all the skills, and we knew we had the mental strength." Of the 50 teams the started the race, only 21 finished.

At last year's Eco-Challenge in British Columbia, in the middle of the night her team capsized one their canoes during one of the water sections. In the ensuing chaos one of her teammates wrenched his knee, effectively putting Team Endeavour out of the race. The course rules were arbitrarily changed by Mark Burnett in light of the near-drowning in the darkness of Cooper-Lovelace and her team. All remaining teams were given the option of taking a time penalty and having their canoe transported downstream past the dangerous rapids.

In 1997 Cooper-Lovelace returned to her birthplace and Team Endeavour finished second in the Raid Gauloises in South Africa. Recently she led her team to a second-place finish in the ESPN X-Games in Mexico.

Cooper-Lovelace downplays her role as team captain.

"I am the captain of Team Endeavour but I relinquish all 'control' when we start the race," she says. "With my team there really is no one leader. Everybody has their strengths and takes charge during that discipline. There is certainly no ego involved with my guys. I always tell them that my job is to do all the work to get us to the starting line, then I become on of the merry little dwarves."

The lack of individual ego and the abundance of team spirit is undoubtedly one element of Team Endeavour's success.

"To do these events there has to be a certain amount of ego involved," Cooper-Lovelace explains, "but it's not the personal kind, where you have to shine over and above your team. There's a common respect for each other. Respect is what keeps you together." Respect is important, but for Team Endeavour humor is equally necessary.

"Your humor — that is something you have to keep," Cooper-Lovelace states emphatically. "At the Extreme Games in Mexico it was 139 degrees. We hadn't had any water for three hours and we knew there wasn't any water anywhere in sight. One of our team had puked so much he didn't have anything left in him to puke out. He had diarrhea, muscle cramps. We just kept walking. It was miserable. There aren't any words to describe it. And one of the guys on my team walked up and put his arms around me and said, 'You know Louise, it's times like this that I wish I had never met you.' It was such a light moment at a time that was so uncomfortable for everybody, and that kept us going."

And, perhaps to state the obvious, you must be driven.

"To win you must have the fire in the belly," Cooper-Lovelace says. "You have to have a certain level of conditioning, that's a given. But once you start, I think it's that mutual motivation. You've got a common goal. And you're all just going about finding ways to achieve it."

Good teams learn to deal with pain. And really good teams, like Team Endeavour, actually learn to enjoy the event, despite the pain, according to Cooper-Lovelace. "I think you have to go into something like this knowing it's going to be uncomfortable, but in the big picture, when you cross that finish line, that pain is gone. There really is a lot of fun to be had out there. I enjoy these things. The reason I do them is because I enjoy them."

At the Eco-Challenge Adventure School, where Cooper-Lovelace works once a month as an instructor, students often hear the phrase, "It's 90 percent mental." She agrees. "There's always going to times when you're uncomfortable. But it doesn't last forever. You don't dwell on it. When you fight it, and when you question it, that's when you begin to mentally crumble."

Even Achilles had his heel, however, and certainly a mere mortal like Cooper-Lovelace must have a weakness.

"The only time you'll see me getting nervous is when I'm initially getting into a raft," she admits. "Once I'm going I'm okay, but I'm real anxious around big water." That is simple nervousness. Does one of the world's best adventure racers actually fear anything? Yes.

"I've heard that's there's a lot of wildlife," she says, speaking of this year's Eco-Challenge, which is being held in the wilderness of North Queensland, Australia. "They keep sending us newsletter telling us to beware of the snakes. I have a horrible, horrible phobia about snakes. I can't even look at a picture of one."

And what of the apparent contradiction found in a woman who professes to genuinely enjoy surviving grueling and dangerous adventure races, all the while wearing jewelry.

"I try to keep a balance. That's just me," Cooper-Lovelace says. "I like to do feminine things."

If you somehow find it difficult to include adventure racing in your lexicon of feminine pursuit, perhaps it is time to rethink your definition.

Dan Morrison covered the Marathon des Sables for Outside Online.