Racer's Story
by Slate Stern

My teammate, Jan Bear, asked that I write a brief article about adventure racing. Rather than writing specifically about adventure racing, I decided it would be more interesting to write generally about a recent experience in my life and how it relates to adventure.

This experience relates to a question that my teammates and I are constantly asked: Why do we seek such physically demanding challenges?

During the first week of February, I flew to Baffin Island in Canadian Arctic to train for an expedition I intend to undertake to the North Pole in April.

The expedition is being lead by both Rick Sweitzer, a three-time polar expedition co-leader and by an incredible woman named Matty McNair, who lead the first all women's trek to the North Pole.

Despite my prior, winter camping experience in Colorado, my first days on the ice in the Arctic were a painful introduction into polar travel. Temperatures were no warmer than minus 30 degrees F and on one day as cold minus 60 F. Such temperatures not only constantly presented danger of frostbite but instantly turned my thoughts inward to a primitive form survival. I quickly learned that to survive in such cold temperatures every action I took had to be choreographed in my mind before it was taken.

For example, if I needed to take my hands out of my mittens to lash equipment onto the sled, I had about 90 seconds to do it. After that, my hands became so cold they would become useless. At such temperatures, pain accompanies nearly every task and the tendency is always toward haste. Haste, however, can be dangerous and one must learn patience to survive in the Arctic.

As Will Steger wrote in National Geographic about his polar expedition, "to understand patience, one must lash sleds at 70 below," a task that can only be done without your mittens on. I share that anecdotal experience with you as a backdrop to my initial question. Why is it my teammates and I voluntarily choose to put ourselves in such demanding and physically challenging situations?

It is a difficult question to answer and perhaps we all would answer the question differently. One answer to that question for me is that when I put myself in extreme situations, I always come back to my day-to-day life having learned something.

The challenges that my teammates and I seek through adventure racing and our other endeavors somehow force us to acknowledge that the things that often occupy our lives and seem so important are nothing more than fleeting moments. True adventure, however, forces one to live in the moment. Oddly enough living in the moment is something that has been abnormal for most us. Most importantly, adventure teaches me what is most important to me are those I love.

As so poetically put by Thomas Hornbein when writing in his journal while climbing Everest, "but at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind."

ADVENTURE RACING - About the Events