by Robert Gillespie

Tracey Cote

Tracey Cote is going downhill fast--on the end of a bungee cord, towed by her white Siberian husky, Lena, of sled dog lineage. Even though Cote is Colby's nordic ski coach, it's not the white stuff she's dreaming of right here. She's puffed along behind her pooch readying herself for races in the Hi-Tec Racing Series--"extreme adventure races" in which three-member teams pitch into kayaking, trail running and mountain biking, the three teammates all the while keeping within 100 feet of each other. That's the rule.

Hi-Tec adventure racing is serious stuff--even when it isn't. On the one hand, at the fourth annual Hi-Tec adventure race in Texas on July 12, Cote's coed elite team, Team Guinness, won all the marbles in a field of 197 teams with a time of 2:08:28. On the other hand, some couch potatoes might think that Cote and her male teammates lost their marbles: through the one and three-quarter-mile kayak course, the six-mile run and the 12-mile mountain-bike race the threesome hung together--sometimes hooked by that bungee cord. Besides paddling, padding and pedaling, they crawled through a hay maze, shot paint guns, crossed from one swing to another without hitting the ground and scaled a 15-foot wall.

Tracey Cote. center, scales an obstacle while tethered to her teammates with a bungee cord during an Adventure Series race last summer.

These people are taking it, as the expression goes, to a new level.

Learning to "control hurting" is challenging, too, but Cote maintains that training for a race is fun. It's fun, running downhills with her dog. "It helped me increase speed. It's an art," she said. On Team Guinness, "If it's a cord now, it's me towing them."

About 300 three-person teams took up the Hi-Tec challenge in this year's eight-race series. It's great sport, Cote says, meeting people from diverse backgrounds, from former world-class athletes--some teams include retired bikers or runners or kayakers who have gone in for adventure racing--to a 65-year-old competing along with his kids. "It's a great group of people. Everyone's just looking for a little challenge," she said.

Team Guinness looked for "a little challenge" in the coed elite category in six of the eight races this year. To be "elite," a team has to place in the top five in the regular division or apply with résumés. "What it means is, you're able to win money," Cote said. "I'm approaching two-thousand dollars, total."

Cote competed on an elite team last year, too, until its sponsor went belly up and the team broke up. One night in January, she got a call from two fellows in Arizona, and in the summer she flew out to train with them. The brewing company agreed to bankroll Team Guinness.

"Guinness is a great sponsor," Cote said. "They paid for all of our travel. But most races are in state parks where you can't have beer. I drank more Guinness before I started than I do now."

The Hi-Tec Adventure Series races, which usually last two and a half to three and a half hours, are considered sprints. This summer Cote also competed in three races in the Balance Bar series, 12- to 24-hour orienteering competitions in which athletes find their way by compass and trail map, sometimes rappeling down cliffs and crossing gorges in climbing harnesses. Biking and running are part of it, as they are in the Hi-Tec races, but the Balance Bar races, she says, are "just a lot longer."

Cote came to adventure racing from nordic skiing and cross-country running at Division I Northern Michigan University, where off-season conditioning meant miles of running and mountain biking. Even that doesn't seem enough preparation for the event she calls her pinnacle, the Appalachian Extreme in Maine.

"Extremes? They're crazy," she said of the 72-hour event she completed on an hour and a half of sleep, "but it's amazing how popular they're becoming. It's a whole new challenge."