American team GearJunkie.com, made up of three members of the YogaSlackers and ‘Gear Junkie’ Stephen Regenold, are experienced racers but left Patagonia stunned by its beauty and proud to have completed the course in 147hours and 31 minutes to finish in an impressive fifth place. Here they share their defining moments...
Q: What made you come here?
Daniel Staudigel: We came here because of the stories. We heard about one team’s epic adventure in a hut for two days, about Mark Lattanzi’s three-day foodless trek through the wilderness, and we were like, “we love that stuff!”
Stephen Regenold: It seemed like the epitome of adventure racing and what adventure racing really should be, which is just man against nature in unfettered wilderness. Chelsey Gribbons: It is flat-out beautiful here. Every single picture was amazing and we wanted to experience it first hand.
Q: What did you think of the route when race director Stjepan Pavicic announced it?
SR: Our initial thoughts were “dang Stephen, you nailed it,” because I had actually drawn out the route myself before we got here from an interview I had written and with Stjepan before the race. I got it pretty much exactly right. It was phenomenal.
Jason Magness: Unfortunately, it didn’t give us any advantage, but it was cool to know we guessed right.
Q: One of the biggest challenges was the trek - what did you think of it?
JM: It reminded me a lot of real expedition travel. I have done a bunch of backcountry first-ascent climbing expeditions where there are no trails and anything goes. I have never seen that in a race, but we did here. There were plenty of struggles, but at the same time you started to learn the land. We looked for the Guanaco trails, sometimes they would lead us in the right direction...but sometimes they wouldn’t!
CG: It was just amazing. I didn’t know what to expect going into it but in the end all of it was awesome, not too much suffering about it. There were lots of ups and downs, but the first part was a lot of alpine and I’m used to that, so I felt right at home. Filling up your bottle straight from the stream was just awesome.
SR: We had wet feet for four days and it was a lot slower than it looked on the map. My favourite terrain was the trails at the end of the trek!
Q: Describe walking on the unique peat bog that is known as turba…
CG: It’s like walking on a trampoline or a squishy ball. I am from Anchorage, Alaska, and I got stuck in the mud flats up to my waist when I was about eight years old and had to have five people pull me out. That fear came back after we saw Mark Lattanzi, who’s six feet tall, up to his chest in the turba and I was very scared about drowning in it. I did get really good at jumping over it, though!
JM: It’s like giant sponges. We played a game out there, especially after checkpoint 11, the major turba trek. We pretended we were in a video game, we called it Turbalmaster, and there was a bunch of different levels.
DS: Apparently one of Helly Hansen-Prunesco trained by walking around his living room on pillows with ankle weights.
SR: What a nerd. He actually trained for the turba? Holy cow, that’s awesome!
Q: What about the kayaking?
SR: It was a beautiful, neat section of water, it was fun when the big waves were coming in and it was good to get off the feet for a while and use different muscles.
CG: I’d never sea kayaked in an open ocean like that, so I was quite scared of it going into it. But right away I settled into it and it was nice to feel not so scared.
Q: And the mountain biking?
CG: The wind was very hard. I got blown off my bike and my bike blown on top of me. I had to lean all my weight into the wind. I got it at the end, but it was pretty challenging. The further south we got, the prettier it got and the more energy we got, so that last ride we were really strong.
DS: You had to pick exactly what part of the dirt road to ride on, because the wind would literally push the bike from underneath you.
SR: Biking into the mountains was really exciting. It felt like such a journey going through all those zones of different topography, vegetation and landscape.
Q: What was the hardest moment and how close did you come to quitting?
SR: There was never a moment when we were remotely close to saying this is too much.
JM: I’ve been racing the longest out of this bunch, I think I have done 67 races and always finished. That’s got to be a record. I’ve accomplished this by surrounding myself with people who won’t quit. If one of my team-mates says ‘I’m done’ then it’s over. Everyone says they’re not going to quit, but that doesn’t hold all the time. The rule I always have is that even if I want to quit, I have to wait 24 hours, and I have to continue wanting to quit for that entire 24 hours. If at any point I start having fun again, I have to reset the clock. There were times when we were like ‘this sucks horribly, please don’t make it go on’ but there was never a point in this race that at some point within 24 hours we weren’t like, ‘Sweet! I can’t believe we’re out here, this is awesome, we’re rocking’.
Q: What was the most spectacular thing you experienced?
DS: For me it was the valley after PC10. It had jaw-dropping expanse, looking right up into the valley, with nobody and nothing anywhere.
CG: I loved seeing the glaciers and seeing them turn into big rivers, the beauty of the big valleys, the 1,000ft limestone walls, they were just amazing.
JM: One of my favourite memories was looking up to a high ridgeline we were trying to get to and seeing the silhouette of three or four guanacos. It was called Guanaco Pass, and we had to go over it. We were on a little rutted trail and when we saw them we knew it was theirs and it was probably going to take us there, and it did. That was pretty cool.
Q: Did you suffer any injuries?
CG: Our ankles got rolled a lot but I taped mine up and my saddle sores got to me, but I traded seats with Jason during the race, so it got much better.
SR: I lost two toenails, so pretty minimal.
DS: I scabbed my knee, so all the trekking through the bushes was excruciatingly painful because the thorns poked that directly through my clothes!
Q: Will you come back?
DS: 100 percent, yes. I said it 30 seconds after we crossed the line.
CG: Yes, for sure.
Q: If you do end up coming back, what would you change?
JM: We would bring an alarm that would wake us up. We had three watches and set all three of them and none of us woke up! There were two mornings when we overslept two hours past first light. As people trying to be competitive, that’s four hours we could have had back. Next year we’re going to have a big nasty sounding alarm that says get the f*@! out of bed you lazy b@*$*@?*! and go trek some more!
Q: After such a wilderness journey, what does Chilean Patagonian mean to you now?
CG: It’s very raw beauty. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’m from Alaska, so I have seen a lot of untouched beauty, but you can go forever here in one straight line and not see any evidence of other people, which is pretty amazing.
JM: Since the three of us are yoga practitioners, we see Chilean Patagonia as an abundant source of life energy. I think that often gets fuddled up by civilisation and we stop becoming aware of it, but a lot of it is here. We exist in a wild, raw energy and it is a beautiful thing to soak up, especially here.