There will come a time when someone on Team Intrepid will want to stop.
Maybe as they peddle their mountain bikes up an endless hill or paddle in kayaks across open water. Maybe as they stand on a cliff and prepare to rappel hundreds of feet. Or maybe in the early morning hours as sleep deprivation saps their will to compete.
"You're going to be tired. You're going to be hurting," said Doug Wilde, a member of the San Fernando Valley-based squad. "You'll just want to sit down."
But it's unlikely that Wilde and his three teammates will succumb to such urges. They are veterans of a torturous sport called "adventure racing" and are considered among the best of 37 teams that will spend the weekend at Point Mugu State Park trying to qualify for the Eco-Challenge.
The Eco-Challenge is an annual event in which competitors run, climb, bike, paddle, ride horses and sometimes crawl across 300 miles of wilderness, a race that requires eight to 10 days.
Having finished eighth in 1995, Team Intrepid's members expected to be invited back for the race this summer in Australia. But, sidelined by injury last year, the team of 40-somethings is instead required to qualify in a mini-race against mostly younger opponents from across North America.
The hopefuls will start at 7 a.m. Saturday knowing that only the top three finishers go to Australia. They face a 120-mile course over land and sea that should take about 24 hours to complete. There will be little time to eat and no time to rest.
"The worse the conditions, the more our experience will pay off," said Bill Lovelace, a team member. "We're hoping for a hot day, a choppy ocean, the most awful conditions we can get."
Such hardships lie at the heart of adventure racing, which began in New Zealand in the early 1980s as an outgrowth of extreme sports such as ultra-marathoning and orienteering, a timed cross-country competition in which runners follow a course by using compass and map. The concept was simple and brutal.
Come race day, competitors were handed a map and told to navigate their way across ever-changing terrain. They needed brute strength for long hikes and courage for mountaineering. They needed specific skills for kayaking and horse-riding. And they needed teamwork.
Depending on the given race, each squad was required to have either four or five members, including at least one person of the opposite sex. If any member dropped out, the entire team would be disqualified. So if a member was hurting, it behooved the others to carry his or her pack.
