Okay, I guess it’s time to come clean: I’m not a lethargic sloth. I know it might seem that way, especially given that I’m still living in Studying-For-The-Bar-Exam-Land. It brings forth an image of me hunching over books, flipping through pages and pages of worthless material (if you ask most lawyers who have been practicing for a few years, you’ll discover that most of them have forgotten everything they needed to know on those fateful two days). So I read my books, write on my blog, occasionally get together with my friends… “Wow, he walked from the parking lot into the restaurant! What a powerhouse! I want a piece of that muscular ass!”
But like I said, I’m coming clean. I wouldn’t say it’s a muscular ass, but I hope it’s moving in that direction. As nice as it would be to have extra cushioning when I’m sitting around for hours on end, the jiggling back there while I walk would drive me nuts. Consequently, I’ve been working out. Doing a little biking, doing a little running around, even doing a little rock climbing. Why, you might ask? And I might answer “None of your damn business!” But I’d more likely say that it’s because I’m preparing for a season of adventure racing.
I haven’t the slightest idea how many eyes may have perked up when they read that, but it’s not exactly a wide-spread sport. You’ve probably heard of the big competitions in other sports: the Super Bowl, the Tour de France, the Indianapolis 500… you may have even heard of “The World’s Biggest Gang Bang VII.” (That’s my personal favorite, but the one down side compared to other sports is there aren’t any “dynasties”—the women are one and done. But it’s not hard to imagine why that’s the case.) What you probably haven’t heard of is Primal Quest.
It’s a big adventure race that tests a person’s physical and mental endurance well beyond that of other piss-ant sports. Screw the Boston Marathon—teams in Primal Quest will run for seven days on four hours of sleep. … Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration… they run on five hours of sleep. If you’re wondering what it’s like to hallucinate but you’re not into stuffing small plastic bags of powder into your rectum so the cops won’t find them, then adventure racing is for you. One day of pushing yourself as hard as you can with a half-hour nap and you’ll be seeing Santa Claus riding a flying octopus and flipping you the bird in no time.
For those a little more hesitant, a little less fit and a lot more sane, there are a lot of shorter races as well, but they have a lot of the same elements: biking, climbing, orienteering, etc. (Since I’m too lazy to write out a long description of everything that adventure racing entails, click here to learn more.) Given that it’s a team sport, I’ve joined up with my older brother Brent to form GT Frost. (Even though I feel obligated to not be too lazy to write a description about the team, you can still click here to learn more.)
Our adventure racing careers spawned in the wake left by my little brother, Justin. He’s a seriously hardcore, total badass when it comes to adventure racing. If you need proof, check out WEDALI’s website and see how many people’s worlds they’ve rocked. But for Brent’s sake, Justin broke away from his team for the “Spring Sprint” the last two years and joined “Team BEK-N” (we figured that was the best way to get people to pronounce our last name properly). The three of us would find a female to fill our roster, then hit the trail in the middle of May to enjoy the glowing sun shining down and a cool breeze in our faces. Or not-so-enjoy heavy rain spewing from the sky and an icy, gusting wind that made our nuts shrivel up into sperm-filled raisins. Amazing how much the elements can change from race to race, year to year…
But the organizers have changed the system this year: because people have been holed up all winter and want to get the hell out into the woods, the sprint race will be in the summer and this spring is supposed to last closer to 8-12 hours. Surprisingly enough, we opted to exert our independence by letting Justin return to WEDALI and running as a two-man team. In doing so, we abandoned Team BEK-N and became GT Frost.
