News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Ken Thorp, Dave and Paul Schneider and Shannon Cortez are weary but exhilerated at the finish of Primal Quest. photo provided
For most folks, trekking cross country in 120-degree heat in the deserts of Utah carrying a 45-pound pack and sleeping in tiny catnaps sounds like a not-so-subtle form of torture.
But for Paul Schneider of Sisters and his three teammates, it was eight days of grueling, but rewarding fun.
Schneider, who owns a cell tower construction firm in Sisters, was one of four members of Team BOAR, which finished 49th in the Primal Quest adventure race out of Moab, Utah, June 25-July 4. The other Team BOAR (that’s Battered Old Adventure Racers) members were Dave Schneider, Paul’s brother from La Pine; Ken Thorp of La Pine and Shannon Cortez of Olympia, Washington.
The adventure race includes horseback riding; trekking; mountaineering; mountain biking; kayaking; whitewater swimming and rope work.
“It took us almost exactly eight days” to complete the 419-mile race across some of the most challenging terrain in America.
With a goal of simply finishing the race, Team BOAR placed 49th of 89 finishers.
“We did better than we thought (we’d do),” Schneider said. “There’s weekend warriors like us, but there’s also paid pros... not to mention ex-Olympians and just all-star athletes.”
The four team members trained hard, mountain biking in the snow, swimming in the Deschutes and taking horseback riding lessons. They also consistently made high estimates of the amount of time it would take for each stage of the race and how much water and supplies to carry.
That made packs brutally heavy for some parts of the trek, but it also meant that they never ran out of water. In fact, they gave water to other teams on several occasions.
“We raced this smart,” Schneider said. “We went into this knowing what the challenge would be. We trained incredibly hard for it.”
The training and preparation paid off.
“It was really uneventful,” Schneider said. “The worst injury we had were blistered feet.”
Of course in adventure racing, “uneventful” means no catastrophes. Only a Primal Quest survivor would call rappelling down a 500-foot drop, cycling hundreds of miles in tire-melting heat or trekking across a rocky spine in a lightning storm “uneventful.”
This year’s Primal Quest, which is a descendant of the EcoChallenge adventure race, was designed to be the toughest of its breed.
“The race directors said right at the beginning that they were going to hurt us,” Schneider said. “They were going to make us quit.”
Team BOAR didn’t quit — partly because the group didn’t come apart under the brutal stress of intense exertion in rough conditions on virtually no sleep.
“We formed a team that bonded together, that we knew would work well together,” Schneider said.
And they never lost sight of the fact that adventure racing combines the sports they love in a beautiful setting.
“We wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t fun,” he said.
Schneider emphasizes that adventure racing is accessible to regular folks.
“If we can do this, I guarantee there’s hundreds of people in Sisters who could do this,” Schneider said. “We’re not exceptional athletes. We train hard.”
For more information on Primal Quest, visit http://www.ecoprimalquest.com/2006/race.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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