"The last easy day was yesterday," is what Capt. Blain Reeves – a veteran in the burgeoning sport of adventure racing – likes to say.

Easy isn’t the way he likes things.

Reeves, commander of the Orlando Recruiting Company in Orlando, Fla., recently spent five days traveling over 350 miles of rough terrain in the Allegheny Mountains. His non-stop activity included running, biking, climbing, horseback riding, kayaking and rappelling.

Adventure racers eat only as much as they can carry, sleep an hour or two a night, and battle every obstacle from dehydration to wild animals to venomous insects and snakes, Reeves said.

Competitors cross glacier-fed rivers and ancient rain forests crawl through caves and shoot down white-water rapids. Their feet become bloody. Their knees swell. And their spirits break. Yet the pay as much as $10,000 to enter a race.

It was the Army that lured Reeves to the adventure racing sport, he said. In 1992, he participated in the three-day Best Ranger Competition, what he called "the Army’s ultimate test of strength, stamina and cunning.

"It has all the physical tests of adventure racing, including a six-hour , 26 mile hike carrying 70 pounds of hear," Reeves said. "When you’re really tired, they make you jump out of airplane, assemble explosives and dodge simulated gunfire and nuclear weapons."

"I guess it’s that pressure that I thrive on," said Reeves, who awakens each morning at 4:30 and crams four to five hours of exercise into workdays that end at 7:30 or 8 p.m.

Adventure racing began with the Raid Gauloises, launched by a Frenchman in 1989. It has changed venues to Madagascar, Borneo, Patagonia and South Africa, just so the competitors don’t get too complacent with the course. And while the sport has evolved to include single-day sprint races, the real tests are those that continue around the clock for five to seven days.

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Compiled by Heike Hasenauer from press reports
Soldiers magazine, October 1998