Twenty minutes ahead of the nearest riders, Ligia Madrigal unclipped her shoe from the pedal and fished her contour map out of its plastic casing. She was lost. None of the contestants had seen her for hours, not a smidgen of her red spandex on the forested horizon, not even a streamer of dust from her Trek's knobby tires.
She was outriding men and women alike; only the flash-popping paparazzi kept pace in their 4x4s. Now, though, she had taken a wrong turn and was lost in the remote highlands of Monteverde, in the Tilarán Mountains of north-central Costa Rica . The mistake, and two more like it, cost her the race: orienteering was the Achilles' heel of this riding, running and rappelling warhorse.
In the end, slow and steady won the race, when Rodney Jiménez was the first to roll through the finish line 12 hours and 50 minutes after the race began. He plodded kilometers behind the others until the last leg of the race, when the three leaders were lost on the peaks of Cerro Pelado. Jiménez backtracked, checked his points of reference and forged on, this time on the right track. He was followed by Max Soto in second place, who had never before competed in such a race.
From the wee morning hours to the hot afternoon finish, it was an epic tramp over river and woods, fought with sweat and smiles among nine athletes. Adventure races are spinning to the forefront of the B-side sports scene around the world, now boasting an average of 12 annual, grandiose international forums for iron-lunged and stone-chiseled men and women to muscle across finish lines, in addition to countless smaller races.
Euphoria, a family operation by Andrés Vargas and Susan Mora, emerged from the planning phase this year as a response to an adventure-racing void in Costa Rica. The company wants to make Costa Rica a racing mecca and seed international races with sponsored, outfitted and burly Costa Rican teams. It plans races for individuals and for teams of three, and hopes to cultivate the best athletes for sponsorship in international competitions.
We want to make sure that in every big race there's a team with a Costa Rican flag, Vargas said.
In the meantime, he and Mora are hosting a series of races, some for individuals, others for teams of three, through undisclosed swaths of the country's howling patches of wilderness, subjecting athletes to punishment on the slopes of volcanoes, the Central Valley mountains, and multiple-day slogs from the Caribbean to the Pacific.
At 4 a.m., March 19, the racers in the inaugural expedition trotted out of the base camp in Monteverde, a mountain town and Quaker community in the north-central part of the country, in an understated start with no fanfare, gunshot or even a whistle. Their disparate speeds quickly separated them on the black, unpaved road, each running with a headlight beam bobbing ahead like a lighthouse on a Jell-O island. Their ages ranged from early 20s to mid-40s.
The road dwindled to a trickle just a footpath that wound through the woods and overturned log bridges to a ravine. The racers clipped in one by one and flung themselves over the lip, rappelling down to the black gully below, and ran out, pounding through the woods back to the start line. So ended the first loop, about 20 kilometers, finished in about 2.5 hours.
They pulled a quick change back at the line, then pedaled away on bikes that eventually put the greatest distances between them. As the sun rose, it called for sweat offerings, and the racers provided as if their pores were miniature water parks. There was no respite, only the watering-hole stations and medical crews dotting the route.
Each racer had a contour map and a compass, but the labyrinth of unmarked roads between legs of the course was enough to confuse Madrigal and the two young men riding minutes behind her. Madrigal faltered once, near a forgotten mountain town called Campo de Oro, and again, shortly after a steep climb on a hill called Cerro San José. She came to a dead end, perched on a mountainside with a panoramic view of everywhere she should have been, before turning back.
On the return trip, she crossed paths with her two contenders, and they ploughed on together, a decision that would lead them speedily through the course until the last leg, lost on a mountain ridge off the designated path and without water. They would descend from there cutting cross-country, and only two of them would finish, far behind the winner.
Hampered by flat tires, a heckling afternoon sun, inclines that warranted dismounts and hand-pushing, the confusion of orientation and the limits of their own endurance, the racers saw huge gaps open between them during the biking segment. It covered 38 km, ending at another ravine plunge, this one dropping the rappellers into a river. The last leg was the fateful Cerro Pelado, which cost the three initial leaders the race.
Jiménez, the unexpected packhorse hovering kilometers behind the leaders, won the race, followed by Soto, who collapsed with a smile behind the finish line.
