AdventureCORPS in the News

The Ten Toughest Races on Earth

By Michael Coulter
Originally published by The Sunday Age (Melbourne, Australia) Nov 19, 2006

1. Tour de France

There are two main categories of gruelling sporting events: those that few can do well, and those that few can do at all.

The Tour de France, as an ultra-endurance trial that is also the most prestigious prize in cycling, qualifies as both. When it was first raced in 1903, people wondered if it was even physically possible, and when organisers introduced the first mountain stages a few years later, anguished riders accused them of being "murderers". The tour is hard because while riding 200 kilometres in a day makes you tired, racing 200 kilometres reduces you to gibbering exhaustion.

Doing it day after day for three weeks is impossible for all but a tiny number of physical freaks. Throw in heat, giant mountains, crashes, saddle sores and the fact that riders' bodies are eating themselves alive by the middle of the second week, and you can see why the Tour de France is our finest monument to the human capacity to suffer.

2. The marathon

The fact that hundreds of thousands of people run marathons each year might suggest it's a touch on the easy side. The counter to that is that each runner still needs to put in months of training, and that for many people simply completing one is the culmination of a lifelong dream (sometimes literally—deaths are far from unknown). At the elite level, the punishment factor is extreme; one of the classic images of the marathon is the runner staggering in a dazed circle, having pushed far past their limits. Where footballers speak of struggling to recover in a six-day break, marathon runners take six to eight weeks to fully rebuild their bodies, and two races a year is considered about right. Also, any race where you can finish several centimetres shorter than you started must be respected.

3. The Iditarod

Definitely in the "few can do at all" category. The Iditarod dog sled race requires not just enormous physical and mental stamina, but an encyclopedic knowledge of canine psychology and physiology. The 1600-odd kilometre Alaskan epic exposes participants to between 10 and 17 days of freezing temperatures, blizzards, sleep deprivation and brutal terrain. Crucial to success is keeping your dogs in prime condition, which means no matter how cold, hungry and exhausted you might be, you look after the dogs first. This also means you're not just standing on a sled—competitors spend large parts of the race running behind it to lighten the load.

For the really, really committed, there is the Yukon Quest, an even more extreme race started by disgruntled mushers who believed the Iditarod was becoming soft and commercialised.

4. Race Across America

There's clearly something in the nature of cyclists that draws them to implausible endeavours. There are countless foolish events open to anyone with a bike and a strong streak of masochism, but only a handful will ever aspire to the grandfather of them all, the Race Across America (RAAM to its friends). The race distance varies with the route, but it is around 5000 kilometres from west coast to east coast of the US and takes around eight days for the best riders. Aside from the usual obvious fatigue factors, paranoia and hallucinations are common. To get an idea of how it might feel, you could try the following regimen: put an exercise bike in your backyard and ride it for 22 hours while drinking 20 litres of water and eating four times your usual intake.

To recover, sleep for two hours in a car.

Repeat every day until hysterical.

5. Vendee Globe

For chronic sleep deprivation, though, RAAM cannot begin to compare to racing a boat around the world by yourself. The Vendee Globe started in 1989 as a semi-mystical quest. As legendary sailor and founder Philippe Jeantot put it: "Time is a necessary factor to attain perfect harmony with one's sailboat. We had to forget about stopping. A round-the-world race, without stopovers or assistance, such were the conditions to reach the desired communion." He certainly couldn't have devised a better method for reaching his nautical nirvana. The select few who have the skills, personality and finances to compete will spend three to four months driving their yachts as fast as safety allows through every kind of weather. It's exhausting just to think about.

6. Paris-Dakar rally

While it might seem incongruous putting a car race in the same class as a brutish event such as the Iditarod, there's no question the famous rally pushes the boundaries of what people can do.

Particularly for the motorcyclists, the rally requires the ability to maintain total concentration in the face of extreme heat, choking dust and relentless physical pounding. Each year nearly half the field will fail to complete the 11,000-kilometre journey, but the penalty for a lapse can, horribly, be far more severe than failing to finish. More than 30 competitors and spectators have died since the first race in 1978, including Australian rider Andy Caldecott this year. In 2005, Caldecott mused on the dangers in words that history has made tragically prophetic."

Potentially, accidents can happen," he said. "Maybe fate, unfortunately steps in sometimes and what can be a simple little accident just turns into a severe case."

7. The Grand National

We might have the wrong end of the stick about the toughness of England's most famous and popular horse race, the Grand National. Could we ask the animals themselves, they might say they're really quite refreshed by hauling a whip-wielding burden over 30 fences in a 7.2-kilometre slog. Something about the way injury, exhaustion and death claim a fair percentage of the field each year suggests not, however. Certainly it seems wise for organisers to allow 40 starters, just to ensure at least one horse will make it to the finish. While some class it with bull-baiting and cockfighting as a spectacle, logic says it is not as barbaric as all that.

After all, the mighty Red Rum won the thing three times without dying once, and it's been run almost continuously since the 1830s. Surely people wouldn't persist with an activity for nearly two centuries if it was in any way cruel, would they?

8. La Traversee du Lac Saint-Jean

Swimming seriously is a pretty tough business at the best of times. The dedication of the 4am brigade is legendary, and as we know from the exploits of Grant, Kieren et al, the 1500 metres is an absolute torture test. On the next level up of suffering are cold-climate open water events, such as the race around Manhattan Island, in which swimmers are warned, ominously, that they may encounter "flotsam and jetsam". Arguably even more demanding, because fresh water is less buoyant than salt, is the swim across Quebec's Lac Saint-Jean. The treacherous 32-kilometre journey in water around 16 degrees celsius has only been completed by some 350 people since its inception in 1955 (there has been one Australian winner). The 1982 victor Robert Lachance said after the race: "Wow! It feels as if I have conquered Everest, but horizontally!" Wetsuits, needless to say, are forbidden.

9. The Gigathlon

Fans of pure endurance sports might say that Switzerland's Gigathlon is a silly, made-up event for silly, although not necessarily made-up, people. Even if that's true, it doesn't detract from the essential difficulty of a seven-day race through some of Europe's larger mountains that requires competitors to swim 25 kilometres, ride 264 kilometres off road and 759 on, run 157 kilometres and skate 173. Some claim that because of the harshness of the terrain it's the equivalent of seven back-to-back ironman triathlons, although it's not clear whether anyone's ever done seven back-to-back ironmans to test the theory.

10. The Badwater Ultra

As pointed out earlier, the marathon is quite a tough nut to crack, but lies within reach of most active types with a sufficiently broad stubborn streak. Obviously it's not nearly selective enough, which is why we need California's Badwater Ultramarathon, described variously as the "most demanding and extreme running race offered anywhere on the planet" and like "running in hell". Neither are ridiculous statements, as the numbers show. The race distance is 217 kilometres. It starts in Death Valley, 85 metres below sea level, and finishes on Mt Whitney, 2533 metres above. The temperature in the shade, should you find any, can reach 55 degrees.

There is a time limit of 60 hours, but the race record is a tick over 24. A glance at the race website, which lists in detail the many terrible things that running in extreme heat can do to you, suggests it should not be a popular pastime. Despite that, entry to the Badwater is by application only, and each year many are turned away—for their own good, presumably.