Melbourne man faces 12-day race

His work for a Marine Special Forces unit took him behind enemy lines in Northern Iraq during the Persian Gulf War and into war-torn Somalia a few years later. Now a civilian Patrick Dunne is an accomplished triathlete and adventure racer whose body doesn’t yield a punch of fat.

Even with a backpack as steeped in survival and physical training as his, Dunne knows nothing has quite prepared him for what he will endure next month when the Melbourne resident competes with three teammates in their first Eco-Challenge.

Eco-Challenge is the creation of Mark Burnett, the executive producer of the popular TV show, "Survivor".. The race, which starts Aug. 21 and can take 12 days to complete, makes life on the deserted island look like a week at Disney World.

The Challenge covers more than 300 miles of unrelenting territory. It is the ultimate test for the toughest of tough guys (and women, since at least one member of each team must be female). Getting from start to finish requires crack navigational skills, athletic versatility and the strongest of wills.

This year’s race will be held in the island of Borneo, which is off the coast of southeastern Asia, and the 79 teams entered will have to navigate their way through rain forests, jungle rivers, mountains and caves. Mountain biking, canoeing, scuba diving and rappelling are some of the skills that will be required of participants this year.

Throw in the $12,500 fee for each team, steep travel costs and the fact that the finishing rate of the race is less than 50 percent, and an obvious question emerges:

Just what is the allure of this?

"When I tell people about this race", said Dunn, a 1988 graduate of Satellite High School, "they think I am crazy."

"There’s a great sense of accomplishment when you cross the finish," said Blain Reeves, a veteran of three Eco-Challenges who is a friend and adventure-racing partner of Dunne’s. "Then it becomes addictive."

Teamwork, as always, will be vital.

In a race in which emotions swing like a pendulum, teammates have to help each other get through the mental and physical rough spots. If one quits or gets hurt and cannot continue, the entire team is disqualified, since all four have to cross the finish line.

"You could be the best athlete in the world, but if you don’t work well within the team atmosphere, it doesn’t matter. You really won’t make it through the race without a good team dynamic," said Dunne, who is self-employed as a personal trainer. "It's really about being a good athlete who can persevere, because it’s a lot of pain and a lot of suffering. You’re going through the roughest terrain in the world on very little sleep, very little food, and things go wrong."

Knowing this hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm Dunne, 30, has had for the Eco-Challenge since he first saw it on the Discovery Channel in 1996.

He vowed he would compete in the race one day, but that dream was starting to fade when he saw a listing on the Internet from a team in Miami that needed a fourth.

His resume immediately caught the eyes of the Miami team, and it is easy to see why.

While fighting for the Marines in Iraq and Somalia, Dunne completed missions so classified the said he still cannot talk about them.

He now fills his days with triathlons, road races and adventure races, and was the 1999 national champion in the Coca-Cola Triathlon Series in the 25-29 age group.

The only question the Miami team had about Dunne is how well someone with his qualifications would fit in with the others.

"We were expecting to find someone extensively confident," said teammate Manuela Jaramillo, adding that the group interviewed seven other candidates. "We all walked away from that meeting and really liked him. He’s very calm and soothing. He seemed like someone that would be able to assist us in a way that wasn’t abrasive.

In April, the team traveled to Costa Rica for what turned into more of a preview of the Eco-Challenge that they had hoped.

After getting dropped off in part of a rain forest so remote that locals gaped when told where they were going, the team got lost on a mountain peak.

Dunne said they had to descend thousands of feet to get to the ocean, which they followed back to civilization. That meant going down numerous waterfalls, some with severe drops, and going long stretches without food and sleep.

"We probably went a good two days without food, pushing it hard for well over 24 hours," Dunne said. "We were probably within two hours of having two search parties launched to come find us. It’s amazing how well we performed under pressure."

The reason the team got so lost in the first place is because it went into the rain forest with outdated maps, Dunne said. The maps the teams receive for the Eco-Challenge are up to date, but they don’t offer much in the way of detail.

They give the starting and finishing points, latitude and longitude coordinates and not much else. Hence teams better have at least one person who is handy with a compass.

"I mean someone amazing at navigating," Eco-Challenge director of public relations Meredith Potter said when asked about the importance of having a good navigator. "It’s the biggest skill of the Eco-Challenge."

Adding to the difficulty of navigating is that teams must do so on small portions of sleep and food. Four hours of sleep a day is considered excessive, and participants fit as much food and water in their backpacks as possible. But it is not uncommon for teams to experience shortages in both.

The winning team's gets $50,000, and the next four finishing teams divvy up the rest of the $100,000 purse. Only a small fraction of teams have a realistic chance of winning, Dunne said.

Dunne said his team’s goal is to simply finish the race, and that is no small achievement since only 142 of 286 teams have finished six previous Eco-Challenges. The "attrition rate," as Dunne calls it, is supposed to be higher this year because teams weren’t required to qualify for the Eco-Challenge for the first time in the event’s six years.

"I've seen hard people drop very quickly in those races, and Patrick’s a very hard person," said Reeves, an Army major in Fort Bragg, N.C., whose teams have finished one of the three Eco-Challenges in which he has participated. "I’d say Eco’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The race brings out the best and worst in people."

Three days of that will be consumed by travel back to the United States. The other seven will be spent recovering from what promises to be a race like no other he has seen.

"I'm not really nervous, not yet, anyway," Dunne said. "I'm sure once I'm standing on the starting line I will be.

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Florida Today Newspaper
15 July 2000
Written by Scott Brown