Issue date: 4/13/09 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo Participants take part in a Rattlesnake Racing tour in which they bike, camp, fish and tube through scenic areas of West Texas in the adventure tours. [Click to enlarge]

On a cold Wisconsin morning, before the sun has risen, more than 200 men and women are scrambling from sleep and into inner tubes.

They run as fast as they can into the cold, dark, white water rapids of a river in the middle of nowhere. Shoes, clothes and teammates are lost in the chaos.

This is a race unlike any other, one that does not conform to rules, time frames and the limits of human endurance. This is adventure racing.

Adventure racing is a competition that can span anywhere from several hours to several days. Instead of a fixed track, the remoteness of the outdoors provides the course and races include many physical aspects from running to swimming.

Adventure racing demands navigation skills and orienteering of the participants. Though adventure racing has been around for many years, the sport didn't really take off until the 1990s

Two former Texas A&M students, Leiza Morales and Jim McTasney, went along for the ride by chance.

Morales and McTasney's story begins January 1997. McTasney was reading an airline magazine while away on business when he stumbled across an adventure race in California know as the "Triple Bypass."

"When he came home he was really excited," Morales said. "He threw the magazine down and said how cool it would be to do this. I looked at it and told him 'you're nuts.'"

Though the pair did not enter the California race, in August of that year, McTasney found an adventure race in Dallas. He purchased Morales a mountain bike and the two began training for the 25-mile running and biking event a week before.

"We finished the event in the middle of August," Morales said. "We both nearly had heatstroke and I was bleeding all over from falling off my bike. We finished the event and it wasn't really planned or organized well. I look at Jim and said 'I can do a better job than this.'"

Continued...

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