The Adrenaline Junkie and You

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"And at the end, they were like, 'That was a really good workout!' " Hafer recalls. "I thought I was going to die."

The meeting marked the formation of Colorado Adventure Training, of which Adamson is director of operations.

"If you're an entrepreneur, it's a very similar rush."

On the day of my outing with Adamson, he drove me up into the mountains outside Boulder, switched his Toyota 4-Runner into all-wheel drive, and then rumbled down a dirt road half covered in snow until we couldn't go any farther. Down in town it was rainy, but up there, the sun was peeking out. The wind howled through the snow-tipped ridges that lined a narrow canyon.

As we readied for a snowshoe hike, Adamson handed me an avalanche shovel. On the trail he pulled out his handheld satellite global positioning system. "Just in case something happens to me, you can get back," he said. The sky was clear now, the sun shining.

Adamson glided over the snow like an efficient machine. I sweated and trudged along, sucking in the thin air, but strangely enough I didn't feel challenged. He let me set the pace. We stopped frequently to talk, an interview conducted at 10,000 feet. "Not bad for an office," he said, looking out at the peaks.

Spending downtime with Adamson, you don't get the sense of the extremes he talks about in racing. He's sunny, upbeat, and cheerfully polite, and always aware of what you're doing, how well you're managing. But then, that is his secret as well. The race, he says, is all about management -- of the course, the team, emotions, physical stress, speech.

It was that same awareness, on his part, that kept me from feeling like a slowpoke. We traveled at the pace we needed to.

It's easy to see the payoff of such a measured approach. In Borneo, one Eco-Challenge team that failed to make a checkpoint in time to qualify for the next leg of the race spiraled into bickering, name calling, and breakdown. But blowups, even in the most trying times, don't happen on team Eco-Internet. Its members simply do not yell at one another or blame one another for mistakes during a race. "You might think it, but you don't say it," Adamson says.

Those are the kinds of lessons Adamson and Colorado Adventure Training hope to sell. One company actually hired Colorado Adventure to put two Continued on page 70 executives, who couldn't get along, through a training course. Last year Starbucks hired Adamson's company to train 800 managers. Another high-tech company put its division heads -- leaders who were used to calling the shots on their own -- through a training program held on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia. "It became evident very quickly who could work in a team and who could not," Adamson says.

It's all a matter of approach. Adamson points out that military teams tend to do poorly in adventure races. The U.S. Marines compete against their own teammates, don't ask for help, and either don't admit when they're injured or admit it too late. They depend on a leader to make the decisions, no matter how exhausted that one person may be. Military teams have hardly ever finished, let alone won, an adventure race.

On team Eco-Internet, there is no leader. The members all gather and make decisions collectively as quickly as possible on the course or spontaneously defer to someone who has knowledge of the situation. When a teammate is flagging, the others offer assistance. And team members frequently check on one another to see if anyone needs help.

Businesses might learn something from such a selfless approach. At least that's the pitch Adamson's training company makes. But executives who try even a faux adventure-race experience might come away with something else. If they're addicted to intensity, competition, living on the edge, working without sleep, or any of the other crazy behaviors that businesspeople sometimes wrestle with, they might be tempted to do what Adamson did -- to try adventure racing for real.

Adventure racers, after all, don't go out on the course because they want to recharge their batteries. They aren't trying to "get away." They race because they can't get as intense an experience anywhere else. What they want is that rush, that compression of emotional and physical experience that Adamson describes, played out in an extended moment of competition and madness and clarity.

Want a piece of that? Adamson obviously did. You might think you do, too. First, though, I've got a videotape I think you should see ....

Samuel Fromartz is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., who hikes each summer in Colorado.

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