“Eco Challenge-so what is that? Didn’t I see that on the Discovery Channel-something about leeches crawling up some guy’s ‘you know what’?” This is the question most people ask when the subject of Eco Challenge comes up.

The Eco Challenge is the ultimate challenge, produced by Mark Barnett of “Survivor” fame. It has been around for eight years. This event occurs yearly in a different part of the world-Borneo, Australia, Morocco, Patagonia, and so on. While the location of the event dictates much of what type of sports are included, it usually has mountain biking, hiking, bushwhacking, kayaking, horseback riding, climbing (rappelling, fixed ropes, and ascending), rafting, and swimming. Other sports that have also been included are camel riding, sailing, mountaineering (with glacial trekking), boat paddling (using locally made watercraft), caving, scuba diving, and whitewater swimming.

The Eco Challenge generally has about 80 international teams-four members per team, with the stipulation that all teams are mixed; there are usually three men and one woman, but some teams have had more than one woman. The team stays together throughout most of the event-and must finish together.

The main challenge is that it is a ‘nonstop’ race-between six and 12 days long, depending on how fast your team is-where each team decides when to sleep and how much to sleep! Finally, each team must navigate through the entire course with just a compass, maps, and instructions on where checkpoints and transitions are located (no GPS allowed!).

Last year, the event took place in New Zealand, on a wonderfully mountainous course, complete with an exotic tropical environment, large volcanoes, vertical rock faces, and the sub-alpine terrain of the lower slopes. Other sections included fast-flowing rivers, glacial lakes, and many deserted beaches. The 2001 Eco Challenge included mountain biking, mountaineering, river rafting, and horseback riding.

This was my third Eco Challenge, having competed on Team Subaru Outback Canada in Argentina and Borneo for the past two years. My teammates were Dave Zietsma, Lawrence Foster, and our new member, Sarah Wiley. We arrived in Queensland, New Zealand (Adventure-Extreme sport capital of the world) after two straight days of air travel. one of our team goals was to finish in the top five, as we had finished ninth last year. Preparation for this event is huge, as all your food and equipment must be organized beforehand.

The next step involves getting all of your mandatory equipment checked; each activity requires different specifications. Finally, the event staff tested all of our skills. This gave us a small taste of what was to be our team’s plight throughout this long event. The race began at 7:00 a.m. with horseback riding! This year’s equestrian component used two horses per team, which meant two people run and two people ride. Before getting on my horse, named Carrot, I caressed her, made eye contact, and tried to befriend this beautiful beast. When the trainer handed me the reins, she mentioned that Carrot was a bit feisty. She went on to explain that Carrot liked to flip the reins out of the rider’s hands.

I knew this meant trouble, but still looked forward to the race start. Bang, the gun went off. Sixty-seven teams, 134 horses-yeah haw! Thankfully, Dave Zietsma was holding my horse’s reins as we started off; Carrot was ready to run. Immediately after the start, horses all around us were bucking their riders off. Imagine all of these riders with 50-pound packs on flimsy English saddles. We were doing fairly well, getting up into the top-ten teams, but Carrot was a wild ride. Dave had to hold her for most of the first ride, as she wanted to run even with the reins pulled tight. Just then, in front of me, Simon Dinato, from another Canadian team, Adver, came flying by out of control. Then I watched in horror as the female member of the Japanese team came by holding onto her horse’s neck, upside down, with her huge pack dragging along the ground. Miraculously, she flipped back up and landed in her saddle! The adrenalin rush continued and before long we finished that section, and then all teams split into two teams of two. Lawrence and I headed out for a trek; Sarah and Dave were off with the horses, and were to meet us farther down the trail.

For three hours, Lawrence and I ran up and down a mountain. We were close to the French team, so we were quite excited, since they had finished second last year. By the time we reached Dave and Sarah, we were exhausted, but we were in the top 10. Dave and Sarah had had their own problems-the horses did not like crossing water, so they’d had a tough time. Exhausted, Lawrence and I hopped on the horses, and, finally, Carrot was riding well, now that she was a bit tired. I kept a firm hold on the reins, hoping she’d be more controllable. Then disaster struck when Lawrence’s saddle broke. He went flying to the ground as his horse took off. Lawrence got up, no bones broken, and we caught up to his horse, which we ran through the rest of the section.

The upcoming stages included huge amounts of trekking. We had trekking poles, which helped greatly, considering we all had heavy mandatory equipment: tent, stove, sleeping bags, rope, first-aid gear, crampons, and food. The scenery was spectacular; the total amount of elevation gain for the whole race was 60,000 feet (18,240 metres)-yes, that’s twice the height of Everest! Needless to say, we all got blisters and trench foot. This problem occurs in most long adventure races-your feet are constantly wet and, after a while, the skin starts to peel off them. As well, Lawrence and I got Eco feet, a hypersensitivity that comes from overuse. You are just in absolute pain every time you put a foot to the ground, and you lose your balance very easily.

The vegetation was brutally harsh as well, thanks to a plant called Wild Spanish. This waist-high plant has huge thorns all around it, and the only way to negotiate it was slide underneath and hope the next plant would not spear you. The weather was fairly calm, meaning there weren’t any huge storms, but we did get some snow. At the top of all the mountain treks, it was snow up to your knees and sometimes to your waist! once in the middle of the night at the top of a mountain, Lawrence needed to sleep, so we pulled out sleeping bags and got pummeled by snow and sleet. And during the bike section, it was also raining on and off.

After a fairly uneventful rafting section and another trekking section, we found ourselves on our fourth morning at the beginning of the mountain-biking stage. We had braved much of the hardest trekking sections and were looking forward to hopping onto our bicycles. But we forgot that our feet-now one size larger from all that trekking-would have a hard time fitting into our cycling shoes. OUCH! The blisters and other foot problems did not help.

At this point, we had only slept for four hours in total and were ready to drop. Dave had athletically induced asthma, so he was really hurting. After the first two miles, we hit a monster hill and had to get off the bikes to climb it. Of course, our feet really did not like this at all. In ninth place, we were back and forth with the Swedish and English teams. Still, we were determined to catch more teams.

The bike ride through the rolling hills of New Zealand was beautiful. There were always huge flocks of sheep to keep us company. We often wondered what a sheep farmer’s life was like compared with ours? As we progressed, the bike course got harder and harder-and we ended up walking many of these ridiculously steep hills. We tried putting our equipment on the pannier, racks but this didn’t help. And we were forced to zig-zag along river crossings no less than eight times! Along the way, hope came from cameramen who told us that all teams were walking the hills, so we didn’t feel as bad. Halfway through the biking section, we hit the base of a mountain and knew we were going to have to climb a huge hill in the dark. At that point, I had run out of my favorite foods and began eating two-day-old sandwiches, and a really wet combination of peanuts, Jube Jubes, chocolate, and dried stew!

The climb took 12 hours, and with sleep deprivation, we all started to hallucinate. I saw funny little pictures on all of the rocks and thought there were people hiding alongside the course! At this point, I forced the team to sleep for 30 minutes; otherwise a bike crash was inevitable. We woke up at 3:00 a.m. and headed down a crazy 90-minute downhill on a gravel road covered with large boulders, where often both brakes locked, and our asses were over the back of our seats. The tough navigation slowed us down considerably. By now, it was light, and finally we hit real roads. We could go faster on the roads, but sleep deprivation was a factor again, as Dave was on the verge of crashing. We took a 15-minute nap, then finished the bike section, and pounced on our food boxes. Yes!

The rest of the course included huge amounts of bouldering, followed by a traverse through thick bush, and ended with a two-hour river raft ride. I could go into all the team dynamics, the problems and disputes that we had along the way, but still I’d have to say that we worked really well together.

Yes, we finished-in eighth place, the top Canadian team. And no leeches or tropical diseases-quite an easy year overall!

For more details: www.ecochallenge.com.