No diddling around for defending champion
By Dan Morrison

Nagle ran against the desert heat at the Marathon des Sables

When the lead team reached the glacier, rather than taking the time to change from running shoes into thick leather mountain boots, the team members simply strapped their crampons on their soft running shoes and ran off across the ice.

"Crampons on running shoes," the safety officer mused, "and they ran across that glacier. I mean they ran ..."

Team Eco-Internet went on the win the event.

Team Eco-Internet is the defending champion at this year's Eco-Challenge, and its members are acknowledged as the world's premier adventure racers. Yet team captain, 38-year-old Robert Nagle, had never even competed in a multi-day athletic event until recently.

"In 1994 I did the Sea-to-Summit triathlon," Nagle says, "which starts at the Atlantic and ends up on top of Mount Washington."

He won the event.

Unlike many of the other competitors at the Eco-Challenge, Nagle, an Irishman who currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works as a molecular-modeling and high-performance computer researcher at Harvard University, has never competed in an Ironman; he has never run the Raid.

"I began as a runner, then I had a running injury so I took up biking and I raced bikes for a few years," Nagle explains. "And when I got back into running I concentrated on duathlons, and that's when I represented Ireland at the World Championships. And I did pretty well at that. Mostly I concentrated on events that were two to three hours."

As the team name suggests, Nagle and his teammates met over the Internet. "I had met Ian Adamson on the net," Nagle says, "and we had agreed — without ever having met one another — that we were going to put together a team for the Raid because we felt that we had good backgrounds and that we could do reasonably well at it. And then we got wind of the fact that Mark Burnett was putting on the race in Utah, so we decided to do Utah first and then do the Raid afterward. And that's how Team Eco-Internet got started."

The team members never train together as a complete unit. "One of the disadvantages we have as a team is that we're scattered all over the world. So it's very hard for us to arrange a discount arrangement with an airline carrier, for example. It just adds up to being very expensive."

To say that an adventure race is expensive is to understate the situation. Each team (at least any team who seriously hopes to actually finish the event) will arrive at the event with somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 worth of equipment.

Now, in their third year of racing, at least some of the cost for Eco-Internet is diminished.

"We all have a lot of the equipment that we need. And we tend to work with manufacturers to design new equipment for a particular race. So our equipment costs tend to be reasonable, but there are always lots of incidentals that you can't discount — food costs, hotels before and after, vehicle rentals — which usually run a huge sum of money. We typically spend about $2,000 on food for every race. That's a big chunk of change."

Offsetting the disadvantage of living at separate ends of the world is the team's impressive collection of athletic accomplishments. "I think one of the strengths of our team is that we got very, very focused and driven people, who have a wide variety of skills and could be successful at lots of different things. And when we bring all that power to bear, it helps us a lot."

Collectively, Team Eco-Internet's members can claim first-place awards in the following events: 1996 Eco-Challenge, 1995 Atlantic City 24-Hour, 1994 Sea to Summit Triathlon, Alpine Ironman (seven times), 1989 Raid Gauloises, 1994 Raid Gauloises, Speights Coast to Coast, 1994 Southern Traverse, 1994 Southern Traverse, 1996 Kepler Challenge, 1996 Avalanche Peak Challenge, 1997 Coast to Coast Longest Day, 1997 Tutapere Wild Challenge, 1996 Mt. Isobel Challenge.

Impressive individually, daunting as a team. With that much combined talent and experience, anyone who would presume to be in charge must possess unusual confidence. But there are different ways to lead.

"In the case of our team," explains Nagle, "to say that I'm team captain, well that's simply a fact. But our decision-making process, I think, is pretty unique. We resolve things in a very democratic way. We try to bring all five minds to bear on every decision, if that's possible — if all five minds are functioning. But there's different aspects to being captain, like getting the team to the start line ready to race. I view that as my paramount job."

There are several schools of thought regarding what constitutes a winning adventure race team. One school holds that any group of top competitors could gather together at a moment's notice and do well in an event. Another school holds that team cohesiveness from shared experience is critical. Nagle is of the latter school.

"I don't think there's that much interchangeability, really," he says. "I think the harmony is very, very important. It is always possible that if you had a number of people who were really focused and driven to keep putting aside the differences, just sort of crash through a race. But the toll on everybody while doing that is enormous. I've seen it happen. Other teams have beaten us, and then the people don't talk to each other ever again. It's not that important." The race experience, Nagle believes, should be positive, if not outright fun. "And when it stops being fun, I know I'll stop doing it."

It is difficult to square the images one encounters during the Eco-Challenge — tempers flaring, men crying uncontrollably, exhausted athletes lying semi-conscious on the ground, torn and bleeding feet, hypothermia and heat stress — with the concept of fun. But that is a common theme of the top teams.

"These races are not to the swift, although being swift helps. It's not all intensity, it's sort of, 'there's the prize and damn everybody in the way.' You have to harmonize that with all your other points of view. And again, I think one of the really key things for us in our racing is that if we can't say after a race we had fun, then we would tend to strike that race off our calendar, whether we finished first, 10th, or 50th. You have to enjoy yourself. You invest so much in these events that you have to get something back."

That "something back" Nagle refers to certainly isn't in the form of cash, although this year's Eco-Challenge offers a sizable winner's purse.

"It's not for the money," observes Nagle. "I could earn five, eight, easily 10 times as much consulting as I do racing. Life is not about adding another zero to my personal assets. Although that would be really nice. But it's not about that. You do things so that you build your life, you add layer to layer to layer. You become a repository of knowledge about yourself and the people you interact with. And the nice thing about adventure racing is you can compress a year's worth of experience into four days."

The knowledge gained during the races, Nagle believes, is applicable to other aspects of life as well. "It's so that when I have children I'll be able to deal with them better, to educate them better and show them things better. It's so that in my work situation I have a lot of tools to make the people who are working with me and for me perform better. It's always about the incremental growth. That's what it's about."

Because the rest of his team lives in New Zealand, Nagle's training regime is a solitary and demanding one. "There are two training modes," Nagle explains, "generally the winter time is when I lay in a lot of base training. That will stretch from November through March, depending on when the first event of the year is. I tend not to have any competitions then, but I do a lot of running, biking, paddling exercises, weight work, up to 30, 35 hours a week."

Once the Cambridge snow melts and the temperature permits, Nagle spends more time outdoors.

"I switch into a mode of focusing on particular skills and, as soon as the weather gets good enough, getting a lot more paddling in, decreasing the amount of time I spend in the gym doing weights. I tend to do weights as an injury-prevention mechanism. I'm not really trying to build up a lot of strength, rather I'm trying to build up a lot of the smaller muscles around my joints."

Nagle approaches training much as he does his profession — analytically. Training for the Marathon des Sables, a 150-mile, seven-day stage race held in Morocco — where the temperature routinely reached 125 degrees — Nagle utilized a training regime developed for U.S. military troops to cope with extreme heat during desert warfare. Of the 12 runners from the United States, Nagle finish first in the group and 28th overall out of 339 finishers who raced across the Sahara Desert. He spent weeks learning how to first elevate his sweat rate, then lower it.

Despite the training, he still pushed himself in the race to the point of collapse during the longest stage — 50 miles over blistering sand dunes. He wrote about it in his usual understated style.

"The early pace took its toll. Passing the 40-kilometer marker, I fell apart, slowed badly, and could sustain barely a stumbling, wavering walk. Eventually I collapsed and rested to give myself a chance to recover. [Rumors quickly found their way to the press that Nagle was in a coma and near death. In fact, he was napping in the shade at a checkpoint.] After losing almost two hours, I finally resumed a decent pace as dusk began to fall. Heat," he wrote, "has always been my nemesis."

Heat came back to haunt him again during this year's ESPN X-Games in northern Mexico, where he had to be helicoptered out after experiencing severe heat exhaustion. Of the experience, Nagle wrote, "Here nature emerged victor as I was, for the first time, defeated by the climate and humbled by the awesome ferocity of the desert."

The defeat was merely a temporary setback. Just 10 days later Nagle went on to win the Sea-to-Summit race — a difficult event consisting of a 12-mile kayak paddle followed by a 92-mile bicycle leg, culminating in an 8.5-mile trail run to the summit of 6,288-foot Mount Washington — despite suffering dry heaves during the final section.

Why push yourself to such limits — even past them? When asked, Nagle, who has been asked that question countless times, replies wearily, "Not that question again. If you have to ask ..." But he will attempt an explanation.

"When you do something, you do the best you can," he says seriously. "That's the essence, isn't it? Especially something that is such a big commitment. You're asking your wife, you're asking your children, you're asking your friends, your workers and co-workers, you're asking everybody to accept a lot from you, to cut you a lot of slack so that you can do these things. And you then have to maximize it. You can't just diddle around."

Undeniably, claiming victory while competing with some of the best athletes in the world is gratifying. "Winning is nice," Nagle admits. "Being competitive is nice. Racing against the best people in the world is nice."

But it helps to keep it all in its proper perspective. Nagle completed the Marathon des Sables race in an aggregate time of 23 hours, 34 minutes, 36 seconds — race that organizers bill as "The toughest foot race in the world."

Of his finish, Nagle wrote, "I stopped briefly to accept my medal and then set off in search of a much more relevant reward — beer."

Dan Morrison covered the Marathon des Sables for Outside Online.