Nike ACG portaging Photo by Denise Watkins

Team Nike ACG/Balance Bar landed their four-person kayak on Lake Tahoe's Lakeside Beach at 2:13 a.m. PDT Saturday, September 10th, winning the first-place prize of $100,000 at the Subaru Primal Quest and reinforcing their position as the best adventure racing team in the world.

Racing together for four days and seventeen hours, the team of Ian Adamson, Mike Kloser, Danelle Ballangee and Michael Tobin tackled a Sierra Nevada course of 457 miles and more than 60,000 feet of elevation gain. Slated to air on CBS January 10, 2004, the Subaru Primal Quest is considered to be the most difficult endurance event in existence. The multi-day, multi-sport race entailed mountain biking, in-line skating, trekking, caving, flat and white-water paddling, and a ropes course that included an ascent of over 900 feet.

Traveling together 24 hours a day and subsisting on only a few scant hours of sleep since the September 5th start, 80 teams from the United States, Sweden, Costa Rica, Brazil, Spain, Columbia, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Finland, New Zealand and Poland have been pushing themselves to the limits of human endurance.

"I would class this race as one of the most competitive ever in this sport," said Adamson, "It was a superb course, very beautiful and very balanced."

The distances involved took competitors from Lake Tahoe west through the Sierra Range and as far south as the near-sea-level town of Folsom, California.

Few sports require as intense a level of teamwork and commitment, and according to Adamson, Nike ACG/Balance Bar is a tightly cohesive bunch, "We work really well together, especially our support crew, which allowed us to focus on racing and enjoying the natural beauty of the course."

Still on the course are a host of other elite athletes and many teams that will be severely challenged to simply finish by the cut-off date of September 14. Among those teams is Team No Boundaries, which features Erik Weihenmayer, the blind mountaineer who has scaled the Seven Summits, including Mount Everest.

More information is available at www.subaruprimalquest.

—Mountainzone Staff

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