I was an athlete for a long time. I rowed all through high school and college, with the latter being a very intense, DI program at the University of Tennessee. We trained. A lot. Amazingly, despite the fact that I graduated 13 years ago, I am still very close friends with many of my teammates. So why has that bond held on so long? I firmly believe in the power of friendship that grows out of mutual experience, especially sweating and suffering together!!

I had the pleasure of re-experiencing that friendship first-hand last weekend. I competed at the Wild Canyon Games, held at the Washington Family Ranch in rugged central Oregon with a team of seven co-workers, spouses and friends. It’s a two-day adventure race that relies on athletic fitness, strategy and a heavy dose of teamwork. The weekend is divided into four separate events. The first morning, three of your team members do a Trail Triathlon relay; a swim, trail run and mountain bike. At the same time, the four remaining team members divide into teams of two and do a Geocaching challenge, which is a combination of endurance and navigation strategy. You have four hours to find as many caches as you can over a 50-square mile, off-trail area. The afternoon consists of the Team Challenge events. You must complete seven individual events and one team event as fast as possible, for as many points as possible. The events include things like riding a zip line, doing a high ropes course, doing a mud run and playing a giant game of memory. There’s lots of strategy involved here, but you also have to be fit enough to run all over this ranch to complete the events quickly. Finally, the second morning is the Creek to Peak Relay. It involves each member of the team running a leg, including two sprints through obstacles, a cyclo-cross course, a military-style obstacle course, a lake swim and two running legs that climb a very steep mountain. Wild Canyon Games has an enormous range of athletes from total studs like the pro teams from Nike, military teams, professional triathletes to the more casual athletes, composed of corporate teams (ala: Starbucks and Citi Group) as well as “average joes” like our team.

This was my third year on team Pill Crushers (they are pharmacists) and it gets better every year! Which, leads me to my original point: mutual-hardship on a team make an awesome experience that allows us to lift each other up and creates long-lasting friendships.

I came into the games after working hard, training over the winter, only to have an old, nagging injury pretty much put a stop to my training the entire month before the Games. So I had lost a good portion of my fitness and came in with a sore hip. And let’s be honest… these days I’m kind of tubby and out of shape anyways, so losing any of my fitness was a big blow to my self-confidence! I was on a Geocaching team with my friend, Katie, who is a fantastic mom to two young kids and still manages to maintain tremendous fitness between running and the gym! Oh, and she had just had a root canal the day before and her jaw was still sore!! So here I was, plodding along with Katie running beside me, cheering me on, despite her own discomfort. We got to the first checkpoint and discovered our first cache was at the top of Communication Hill, which is steep, dusty and a lot higher than it looks. I knew this was going to be a rough series of caches, with 3 more mountains to climb within our 4-hour time limit. In total, we did almost 9 miles off-trail and 2600 vertical feet over extremely steep, slippery and rocky terrain! Here’s what made this suffer-fest so rewarding: We did it as a team. We figured out where to go next and strategized our route together. There was no bitching about how tired we were, even during the third hour, because we were both in it together. Katie encouraged me to jog the downhill and push through nagging hip problems. She “gazelled” ahead to grab the last cache for our team when my energy was flagging and didn’t say a single negative thing when I needed to walk. She was nothing but supportive, which gave me a huge confidence boost about tackling the rest of our weekend! That is what friends do and that is what teammates are for! When we returned back to the finish line, there was a crowd there cheering for us, including our triathlon teammates, who sat out in the hot sun waiting for us, despite being exhausted themselves. These people didn’t know if we had done 3 miles or 30 miles out there. They just knew we had worked hard, pushed ourselves and we beat the clock! Afterwards, our triathlon teammates, Rick, Erin and Justin enthusiastically shared all about their trials and successes, which we all celebrated. They did an amazing job, despite a longer, crazier course (including our swimmer having to run half of his leg) and super hot weather. As a team, we high-fived their huge effort, no matter what the finish times were.

The Team Challenge that afternoon was equally challenging and uplifting. We had a great plan from our team captain, Ryan. He took everyone’s strengths and weaknesses into account. I’m a slow runner, so I was given a short sprint to my event. I’m also afraid of heights, but I got to do the Canyon Swing. They strap you into a climbing harness and attach you to a swing that they winch 50 ft up in the air before letting go. It’s actually really fun, but that initial lift is scary! I got a big fat thumbs up and lots of cheering from Erin during the wind-up. I saw Erin, who is equally afraid of heights, take a lap around a ropes course! It was so inspiring to see her overcome her fear, even though I’m sure she would say it was no big deal. I have the same fear, so I can relate to the personal challenge involved. We praised everyone’s effort and there was no judgment about anyone’s performance in any event. We just celebrated finishing each event as a team. High fives went all the way around. That teamwork paid off in the form of a top 20% finisher score!

The final event was the Creek to Peak Relay on Day 2. Did I mention I was a slow runner? My relay leg was a sprint across a field and to attempt to get over 2 huge pool blobs on dry land. This involves running as fast as you can and throwing yourself/jumping/scrambling/rolling over this giant, 7-foot blob. We went out to practice before the relay, as I couldn’t get over the blobs last year. Guess what? I still can’t get over those stupid things!! My whole team could do it, but I couldn’t figure it out. Again – everyone was super supportive. No one gave me a hard time that I couldn’t do it and I had to run around them. Because really, who cares? It’s a blob. Does that make me less of a person that I can’t get over it? Nope. Does it make me a less talented athlete? Sure. But that’s ok. I ran as fast as I could, minimized my penalty time and I tried my best. Will I get it someday? Hope so! Even though I couldn’t get over the Blobs, I still got a big cheer and a “great job” from Rick when I handed off to him in the relay. Because teams support each other through success and failure.

While we placed middle-of-the-pack in points, this team gets better every single year. We have seen each other succeed, fail, get frustrated, work through injuries and give it our all. We see each other’s personalities in their rawest, most exhausted form. And by supporting each other through the hard times that we all share, we make this event fun and we inspire one another. My team is made up of amazing individuals and I want to be more like them in so many ways. They are friends and teammates and I look forward to competing, having fun and pushing myself to the limit again next year!!

For more information about the Wild Canyon Games, check out http://wildcanyongames.org/