AR Ramblings

I thought that the Primal Quest Utah 2006 website was gone forever, but tonight I somehow stumbled upon a copy of it hosted at the design firm who created it. I really enjoyed revisiting my teams page and reliving some of the moments and experiences through the pictures and videos on the site. PQ Utah was one of my favorite races of all time, and I was able to race it with one of my favorite teams of all time.

Ernie, Pete, Beth, and I only had the opportunity of racing together twice as a full team. Once at a 3-day event in Texas where we took first place, and at PQ where we managed a respectable 21st out of 89. Since then, the distances from each other and various other circumstances have kept us from all competing together again. I think we had a lot of potential and hope to eventually get those guys together for another big event some day. I really miss all of those team bonding experiences at Denny’s, the debates over whose WAG bag smelled the worst, and learning how to be a pipeline manager (you had to be there to understand).

To 24Seven: I miss you guys! I hope you are all doing well! When are you all going to move closer!!!

I don’t know what else to say. I was there, though you wouldn’t know it from watching. You also wouldn’t know that approximately 85 other teams raced either. I guess that is almost normal for these types of events though. What is really sad is that I don’t think the coverage really was able to communicate the difficulty of the course. The intense, brutal heat of the first two legs and all 4 canyons (did you even know there were four?) was not effectively shown. Most of the mountain section was skipped over, and the coverage of the ropes sections totally sucked. That ropes course was absolutely amazing and the TV helicopter was still getting shots of it when my team came through about 1.5 days after the leaders. So where was all that footage? In fact, none of the coverage of any ropes section really showcased how huge they were. There were no good perspective shots. Awful. Just awful.

Perhaps the video production could never be what I would hope for. Maybe film can’t even come close to capturing the real-life experience of being there. I think maybe the idea was to market it more as a race than as a reality show like some of the previous Eco-Challenges were made to be, but in doing so a lot of the real-life suffering, drama, and triumphs that are inevitably a part of any expedition race were lost. I think the public would have been more drawn into the race if more of it had been shown. And I promise there was a lot more going on out there than just what was shown of Team MPGear.

I think covering it either purely as a race or purely as a “reality show” would be equally disappointing. I think PQ tried to provide a little of both, but the end result was a bit lackluster. I’m probably a little biased, but I’ve heard from several others that also thought it was terrible.

It was an amazing race, but I guess no one but the participants and volunteers will ever know that.