Team GearJunkie.com poses with race director Stjepan Pavivic at the closing ceremony. (Photo: Valentino Saldivar)
After an emotional journey in the 2010 race, all-American team Gearjunkie.com was the only team to return to Patagonia with the same group for the second year in a row – and this time they came here with their eyes on victory.
In the end, British squad adidasTERREX-Prunesco proved too strong for them again and beat them into second place, despite them taking some crazy tactics to try to short-cut the course and chase them down.
Here, the team explains their wild approach – and reveals why they will be back again next year to chase that elusive victory…
Q: How was it for you to come back as the same team from last year?
Jason Magness: That was one of the highlights. The three of us race together a lot, Stephen only gets out to do a couple of crazy adventures every year, and we’re really excited that we had the same foursome and were just able to take some of the things from last year, learn, and push and play that edge.
Q: You raced against adidas when they were Helly Hansen last year – what are your thoughts on them?
JM: They have pretty much dominated this race for the last two years and raced hard and not had competition. Our goal this year was to come and push them. We wanted to be another force in this race.
Chelsey Gribbon: We wanted to beat them, really bad, so I was a bit bummed about that. They were our carrot to chase, that was really exciting, every checkpoint we were like ‘where are they, where are they’ and that was always really exciting. A couple of times we gained ground and that made us go faster. I had my vision on them, for sure.
Q: You made some crazy short-cuts, take me through the decisions you made between PC7 and PC8…
Stephen Regenold: The approach was to follow the shortest route between point A and B, which was over a giant mountain pass, which for us four is normal procedure. I’m a former editor of a climbing magazine, Jason’s a former pro-climber, the other two are very experienced, so we saw a line, picked our way over a giant mountain and came back down the other side.
JM: It’s interesting in a race like this. There’s a red line drawn on the map, because the race director needs to give teams an idea that there is a possible route through this, but a lot of the sections, especially in the mountains, we tried to ignore the red line…
Q: And what about the idea of swimming the fjords and rivers rather than hiking…?
CG: We had been through a lot of bushwhacking before PC6 and were sick of it. We saw on the route you could go around the coast. We saw some beaches, but not too much. We’d joked about taking out our inflatable camping pads, so we thought now is the time to try it out!
JM: There was a website called ‘Beyond Spec’ which was a bunch of crazy guys who would buy equipment then write about how they had used it far beyond what it was ever specified for. We’ve known some of those guys, and this just started off as ‘this headland’s really short, we can lay on these things and swim’. You could lay on the pad and pull yourself along the kelp beds. We clocked in at 2km/h or so, which is as fast as the fastest trekking legs.
SR: It was totally surreal. After you’ve been hiking for 10 hours to lay down and swim through rapids with this overgrowth overhead.
JM: Probably nobody has ever swum in the areas we have swum, and probably nobody ever will again! It’s that far out there. Nobody’s ever going to swim down that river or across those fjords. So there’s ‘Rio Gearjunkie’! The success of those things made us make the decision to try to swim the fjord. In the end, we gained all this distance through the swim but then had to spend too long recovering from that. It was a gamble but it definitely didn’t help us as much as we were hoping.
SR: After that our swimming strategy quickly went from uber-aggressive to ultra conservative – we were like ‘ooh, I don’t want to get my feet wet!’
Q: What are your thoughts about the decision to shorten the course?
DS: Around PC10, it was mixed terrain, it was fun, fast terrain. Everything was going well, then halfway to 11 the map didn’t correspond so well to what was on the ground and it was interminable bushwhacking, the forest from hell. By that point it was so wet and rainy, and your body is not as responsive as it was. Everything hurts and the bushes seem even more evil than they were before. With the conditions worsening every day, there was no telling how it would be beyond that.
Q: And you missed PC10. What happened…
JM: When we got to PC9, I was trying to communicate with the person there and find out what changes there had been to the course and in my understanding, which I know now is incorrect, was that the cut-off was the same for 11 and that was the only cut-off that mattered and that PC10 might close. I don’t know whether he was saying PC10 is ‘close’ to PC11, Spanish-English, we didn’t communicate well. When we were rolling through the valley where PC10 was at 5:15 and the cut-off was 5, the dot for the PC is, it is a half kilometre in radius. We were in a valley and we could not see anything. We looked around for it for an hour and then we made the decision that they must have taken it down. We now know we probably walked within 200m of the checkpoint and couldn’t find it.
Q: So are you happy with your result?
CG: We are very excited about a second-place finish, for sure. We learned a lot about each other and working as a team, seeing what each of us needed. That’s all we can do. Second place! We’re stoked.
JM: I am especially thrilled to be in second but a close second, rather than being two days behind. This feels really good. About a year ago, we decided to commit ourselves to this sport and see how far we could go. Last year it was let’s just finish the race. We were 36 hours behind. This year we came out to kick some ass and we did. Stephen was a machine, Daniel was the best bushwhacker in the world – we would just point him in a direction and say ‘go!’
Q: What were your favourite parts of the race?
JM: This race lives up to the last wild race. We go from mountain biking in 70km/h gusts, blowing shrapnel at us, to driving rain, to beautiful moments of sunshine. It’s just this land of extremes.
DS: My favourite part was that amidst this whole crazy race you have to be able to rest. Coming down from five, rushing down towards six, getting tangled in the bush, it was getting dark and we weren’t making any headway, and we came upon this little turbal mound that had four perfect little cocoons. We all picked our own one and laid down and the clouds parted and we had a perfect in the middle of nowhere moment of peace and quiet with more stars than I’ve ever seen anywhere else. It was spectacular!
JM: I’ve done probably 160 races, over 30 expedition length, and this edition has been the hardest by a significant margin of any I have ever done!
DS: There’s a lot of different ways a race can be hard – sprint races that are so intense with amazing physical output. The crazy thing about this race is that it is long enough and challenging enough terrain you get that but you also get lots of other challenges – you have to push really hard in many different ways, and there is also the emotional challenge. The crazy thing about this race is it’s the most challenging in so many ways!
Q: What about next year?
JM: We want the Brits to come back because we’re going to kick their ass! They’ve won three years in a row and had years of experience before that. We’re a tiny team from America mostly made up of yoga teachers. We love those guys, and it was a blessing to have such strong competition to take on.
