Again To The Death Race

At Hour 30 into the Death Race, Dave Harwood and his friend Andrew were beginning to have drop-out thoughts.

It was well past midnight and they were still chopping logs in the dark, splitting them into quarters. They had to chop eight piles of 15 logs each.

Next they would have carry the wood off and stack it into piles. After that, they had no idea what the race directors might throw at them. More miles of following ribbons meandering through the woods? Another walk through the freezing river? Perhaps they would take another trip to the Onion King (he had made everyone eat a pound of onions last year) to do more labor.

For all Dave knew, there could be only be one more hour until the finish. It might go on for another day.

“He and I both wanted to quit, but we didn’t say that to each other,” Dave said. Despite his fatigue, he was still haunted by his memories of last year when he had dropped out 27 hours in. If he had hung on for a mere five hours longer, he might have been one of the few people who actually finished the competition.

As they continued hacking their way through the logs, the feeble illumination of the dawn crept over the trees. With the light came fresh hope. The two decided that they “might as well finish the task of stacking wood,” and stay in the competition until Sunday.

Joe Decker, last year’s winner and so-called “world’s fittest man” had already moved on to the next task.

“Screw it, let’s just do this.”

If it’s not clear already, the Death Race is not your average competition. The backdrop for the annual masochistic celebration of abuse is Amee Farm, a tranquil plot of woods and pasture nestled into the hills of Vermont, a state better known for its Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream along with an enthusiasm for station wagons and jam bands.

This year, 154 people converged on the farm to see if they had the stuff to last through the barbed wire, the endless lifting, the sleep deprivation and endless miles of wandering in the woods. Most would drop out well before finishing.

The Death Race is the crown jewel in the series put on by PEAK Racing, an outfit that organizes everything from triathlons to the Spartan Races—The Death Race’s goofy little brothers.

Dave, like the rest of the participants, had no idea what this year’s race would look like. The race directors had sent all the competitors a list of required equipment that they would have to carry along the course with them, a list that included a handsaw, a splitting axe, an electric drill, a pencil and a fishing license. The theme of this year’s race: Religion.

Amongst other things, the race included two meetings at a church and memorization of bible passages: “Be on your guard; be of the faith; be men of courage; be strong.”

The Death Race has been a source of enduring fascination for me, because of how far it pushes limits. Unlike any race I’ve run, the competition begs the question: Is it too much?

“Crazy” is a term that gets pushed around fairly casually these days, but I think one could make a strong case that competing an event that requires lifting rocks and weighted PVC pipes for eight hours straight might require an unbalanced psyche. If you weren’t crazy going in, perhaps you’ll be crazy on the way out. Some finishers on the event’s Facebook page swapped stories about the hallucinations they’d had on the course, from phantom voices to imaginary photographers.

The decision to theme this year’s race after religion seems apt. Most serious runners or other athletes have been called “fanatic” once or twice. We are not so likely to wage a holy war on behalf of aerobics, but then there are more a few similarities between a devout follower and a dedicated athlete. We have our daily rituals on the roads, track or weight room and go on pilgrimages to races, robed in sacred athletic clothing. Monks fast; athletes watch their diet.

The Death Racers, with flesh scourged by barbed wire, muscles beaten by exertion, brains filled with hallucinatory visions, might be mistaken for a cult of devout followers punishing the body to elevate the soul. If they are not running down the road to salvation, they are running towards the finish line and the broader goal of superior fitness. Or are these one and the same?

For Dave and the rest of the racers, the journey began at a church near the farm. The racers hiked a half mile with full packs to listen to a minister deliver a sermon. It was 6 in the evening and the official race start was for 4 a.m. Like last year however, the officials decided to get everyone started early.

After the ceremony, the group marched back to the farm and began their duties. First, everyone would have to lift 100,000 pounds—not all at once. The race officials subdivided everyone into groups of 13 and set them to lifting pillow-sized rocks, hay bales and PVC pipes filled with water. Everyone in the group had to do 150 sets of 13 lifts each.

Eight hours in, most people were at 90 or 100 sets, however, the race officials told them that they could get a break in order to walk a mile up a river in the dark.

“The river was higher than previous years,” Dave said, referring to the water level, which sometimes reached his chest and shoulders. Often, the onslaught of water nearly took him off his feet and swept him away.

All the while, he and Andrew kept on the look out for fish. Because, this had been a required item on the list that had only recently been removed, they were suspicious that they might have been expected to find their own. He had brought fishing line with him in his car.  Dave found salamanders along the riverbank, decapitated them and put them in his fanny pack in case he would need bait later.

In case they wanted to dry off, after the challenge, the race officials said that everyone would have to stand for five minutes in a freezing, spring-fed pond. “It was really freaking cold at 3:30 in the morning,” Dave said. There was no shame in friends holding on to each other for warmth.

For the next exercise, everyone had to cross a deep pond with full packs by pulling themselves along on ropes. Next, they had to walk around the farm field with a lighted candle. If it went out, they would have to restart the exercise. Everyone did the field loop and the pond crossing multiple times.

A woman who was making the crossing behind him began to panic, screaming that she couldn’t swim. Fortunately, with encouragement from the shore, she was able to pull through.

At this point, Dave was freezing and struggling to stay warm. Others told him that he looked pale. He forced himself to drink hot tea, even while his stomach was convulsing.

 “That was probably the worst part of the race for me,” he said.

The new morning brought rain and a fresh barrage of difficult tasks.

Eventually he was able to pull himself together for wood-chopping at a nearby farm. Here, officials assigned him a heavy stump that he would get to carry for most of the remaining race. Everyone used their drills to attach their race numbers to the wood, marrying their fates. Dave estimates that the burden was about 60 to 80 pounds. Fortunately, he was allowed to leave his pack for the hike up through the woods that followed.

At the next task, he had to leave the stump in a pond so that it would pick up weight, and stack 100 pieces of wood. Then he hiked back down to the farm. 

The racecourse took a detour through a drainage culvert beneath a road and then he had to pick his pack up where he left it and haul it up a small mountain with the wet log. Because the racecourse went off-trail, he had plenty of steep and muddy sections to negotiate. It had been raining continuously and the slope was a slippery watercourse. As if things weren’t already bad enough, race officials had strung the course out with barbed wire to crawl under.

By the time Dave and Andrew got back down to the farm, it was 11 Saturday night. Back to splitting wood.

In the hellish hours that followed, Dave kept from dropping out of the race by thinking about how much he’d be letting his friend down. Doing the Death Race with a buddy had been a clear psychological advantage. Each encouraged the other through the exercises, helping them get through seemingly impossible and pointless tasks. A few friends and family had also come out to cheer. When it seemed as though the two of them were finished, the light on the horizon filled them with fresh motivation.

By 8 or 9 that morning, the splitting was complete and Dave felt re-energized for the next day’s challenges.

On Sunday, the tasks showed no sign of letting up. For one of the bigger challenges, he had to carry a heavy bucket full of water through the woods. He also had to go through a multiple-choice test on religion.

At 3 p.m., there was a mandatory meeting back at the church where they had started. Everyone, no matter where they were on the course had to be there and show up in clean clothes and free of mud. After that, they would have to plant cucumbers and ride an inner-tube down the river.

At the appointed hour, Dave showed up at the church. Twenty-two others had made it this far. Though he tried his best to pay attention during the sermon, 45 hours without sleep made him susceptible to nodding off. The sermon concluded with an unexpected message: The Death Race was over. The room erupted into cheers.

Based on their performances on the course, Dave and Andrew were co-awarded 10th place. Joe Decker, last year’s winner, came in first again. But even with the race officially ended, Dave and Andrew weren’t done yet.

In a show of bravado, they put the completed the final tasks, putting cucumbers they had been carrying in the ground and then took the inner tubes they had brought with them and went ahead down the river.

So what is the appeal for competitions like the Death Race, which inflict trauma on the competitor’s body and soul? Do they exist to replace the caged boredom of office life or as a release for the mundane cycle of day-to-day existence? Perhaps people are drawn out of a desire to commune with the wild and dangerous elements that shaped our ancestors. Hardcore religious rights such as fasting and scourging might do the same thing.

In ordinary life, we define ourselves by our ability to navigate a world that is of security and comfort, safely isolated from our primeval past. But even in this technology-driven, convenience-worshiping paradise there lurks the wish for struggle and hardship. We wish for hardship, not for its own sake, but so we can better know who we are and test ourselves against that most basic measurement of human ability: ability to survive.

“It really has given me a new outlook on myself,” Dave said. “It changed how I feel about myself and my potential and how I see other people.”

“In a good way,” he added quickly.