March 23, 1999 — Sara Ballantyne and Chris Haggerty looked tired. Even world-class athletes aren’t immune to Sunday-morning interviews, I assumed.
“I’m sorry,” I offered. “I’m sorry for dragging you guys out of bed.”
“Oh, I’m awake,” said Ballantyne. “I’ve already climbed Stone Mountain this morning.”
I should have known better.
Folks like Ballantyne and Haggerty don’t sit idle too often. Folks like Ballantyne and Haggerty climb mountains while the rest of the world sleeps.
Folks like Ballantyne and Haggerty participate in the Discovery Channel Eco-Challenge — a grueling 300-mile, week-long, multi-disciplinary journey across the multifarious and treacherous terrain of southern Morocco — and finish wanting to do it again.
“I always joke that on my tombstone it will say ‘Ready for the Next Adventure,'” said Ballantyne, 38, a three-time mountain biking world champion from Breckenridge, Colo. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, both physically and mentally.”
“It’s a lifestyle,” added Washington, D.C.’s Haggerty, a 31-year-old Navy SEAL. “We tend to do a lot of these outdoor things anyway. This is a great way to tie them all together, get outdoors and kind of redefine some personal limits you have as far as pushing yourself.”
Ballantyne and Haggerty are currently traversing the country as part of the Eco-Challenge Adventure Tour, a traveling interactive exhibit designed to provide the public a first-hand introduction to the world of adventure racing, and drum up interest in the Discovery Channel’s four-hour documentary of the 1998 Morocco event, which first airs April 11. Last weekend’s stop: the Atlanta Perimeter Mall.
As they sat before me, trying to put their harrowing experience into words, I couldn’t stop looking at their legs. Thick. Sinewy. Well used.
“It’s the highs and lows of a lifetime packed into 10 days,” said Ballantyne, whose four-person squad, Team Vail, actually won the event, becoming the first American team ever to win a major expedition race. “It’s just really stressful.”
The Eco-Challenge began on the sands of the Barbary Coast early last October. With the bang of the starting gun, the 55 four-person teams from around the world were off — on the backs of one-hump Arabian camels.
“It’s very uncomfortable,” said Haggerty, whose Team Navigator placed 17th overall. “They’re wide and the saddles were homemade, sticks under a blanket really. And they don’t have a very smooth gait.”
Next up was a section dubbed coasteering, where teams donned 30-pound packs and negotiated a five kilometer stretch of Morocco’s sharp, rocky coast along the North Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes leaping from rock to rock. Sometimes jumping into the violent waters below. Always keeping a fearful eye on the dangerous fast-rising tide.
Leg three was a 70-mile ocean kayak trip further down the coast. Twelve-foot waves. Forty-five-knot winds. Imagine paddling in a blender.
“I do white-water kayaking, but endurance paddling is a whole ‘nother matter,” said Ballantyne. “I’m not a strong paddler. I could barely lift my arms at the end of it.”
Well, that was day one. From there the teams took a 300-mile, supposedly 10-hour drive to the base of the High Atlas Mountains, where the climate changed to desert and the race restarted. Depending on which Moroccan driver your team inherited, this could have been the most dangerous portion of the Eco-Challenge.
“I think we got there in about six hours because we had Mario Andretti behind the wheel,” said Ballantyne. “It was really one of the scariest rides I’ve ever had. There was also no guaranteeing your driver knew where to go.”
From there, the teams began the 67-mile trekking/canyoneering portion of the race. Climbing up and rappelling down the steep rises and falls of the many canyons and cliffs of the M’Goun Gorge range.
Fiery stallions carried the adventurers on the next leg, Haggerty’s least favorite.
“They put the bit in the horse’s mouth backwards and I didn’t know,” said Haggerty. “The horse was going nuts. I fought this horse for two hours and it was wearing me out. Then a car flashed its high beams on us and the horse reared up and stepped in a hole. And I flew off.”
The 13,000-foot summit of M’Goun Peak was the next obstacle the teams had to overcome. Three days spent in altitudes above 8,000-feet, in hot days and frigid nights, isn’t prescribed for already fatigued and dehydrated bodies. Haggerty’s team almost didn’t make it.
“One of the guys on my team had full-blown pneumonia by the end of the race,” said Haggerty, who, like Ballantyne, also competed in the 1997 Eco-Challenge in Australia. “The female on our team was sick as a dog with a respiratory infection. We were in the top ten to that point but the illnesses just slowed us down. But they were just so hard, so tough. I think I would have quit, but these guys just pushed on.”
The mountaineering leg led to the last section, a 118-mile mountain bike ride to Marrakech, and Ballantyne’s team was just hitting its stride. They went the final 48 hours on two 30-minute “power naps” and overcame a five-hour deficit to take the lead from Spain’s Team Cepos for good.
“We were getting reports from check-point people that they were pretty out of it,” Ballantyne said of the Spaniards. “We could see the tracks in the dirt where they had pushed up hills that we were riding up on our bikes. That was really energizing us. We ended up catching them in the middle of the night and passing them.”
Ballantyne’s was the first of 32 often delirious teams to finish the devastating journey, which lasted anywhere between seven and 11 days, depending on who you asked.
“To just stop and turn your brain off is great,” said Ballantyne of the finish. “It’s just a total relief.”
“You can’t process that much at the time,” added Haggerty, who lost 18 pounds during the race. “At that point you just want it to be done. You’re just looking for food, a shower and some sleep and then maybe you can think about what you have accomplished.”