The last forty-eight hours of the course was a tough final training exercise (FTX), which included a two-thousand-meter cold-water ocean swim, a river crossing via high line, and long-range navigation through the mountain wilderness to infiltrate and establish covert surveillance of a target site. We had to accomplish all this while carrying seventy-five to ninety pounds of operational gear each, including weapons and ammo.
Accompanying the platoon during the winter training were two SEAL LT reservists. As we made igloos and snow caves, skied, and trekked through the mountains, they kept asking me about my background as a multisport athlete.
One day, the two of them pulled me aside and told me about something called the Raid Gauloises. They said that it was the world’s premier long-distance multisport endurance race and that it had been created in 1989 by a man named Gerald Fusil. The five-hundred-mile race included mountain biking, kayaking, white-water rafting, running, rock climbing, and swimming, and it required each competitor to be part of a five-person coed team. It was named after its original sponsor, which in an ironic twist was the Gauloises cigarette company.
The Navy reservists asked if I would be interested in coaching, training, and leading a team.
I said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to, since I have a lot of responsibilities as the training officer at ST-Two.”
“We already checked with your commanding officer, Joe Kernan, and your executive officer,” the LT reservist responded, “and they said that as long as Don can still do his job, it’s his call.”
“In that case, absolutely!”
They explained that they wanted to build a team around two men, Mike Sawyer and Mark Davis, who had already raised a lot of money from an organization in Chicago that included NBA superstar Michael Jordan and heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson.
Mike Sawyer (who was a world-class sprinter) and Mark Davis (a weight lifter and former WNBA coach) planned to be the first African Americans to compete in the Raid Gauloises, which was known as the world’s most difficult endurance competition.
The first thing I had to do was select two more athletes to complete the team, which was named Team Odyssey. At least one of them had to be a woman, so I chose one of the toughest people I’ve ever trained with, Juli Lynch—an exceptional athlete, a world-class ultra-distance marathoner and cross-country skier. She stands five feet tall, weighs about a hundred and five pounds, and is tough as nails.
Rounding out the team was another SEAL, Erik Liebermann, who was not only one of the best athletes in the teams but also an exceptional navigator.
The next Raid Gauloises would be held in the Patagonia region of Argentina in late 1995. Which meant that we had a little more than a year to prepare.
Mike and Mark were cousins and incredible athletes, but neither of them was really a trained outdoorsman. In fact, they both hated the water and didn’t like being out in the woods at night.
So a large part of the fifty thousand dollars that they raised from various sponsors was spent on sending them to climbing, kayaking, and mountaineering courses. The five of us also met once a month for three-day nonstop workout sessions, usually in the White Mountains.
We assembled in southern Argentina in late November of 1995. The area we would be racing through, Patagonia, was a million square miles featuring a harsh combination of ice, snow, glaciers, mountains, heat, and relentless Antarctic winds.
Race officials informed us that we would be required to ride horses using wooden saddles, like the native gauchos; don snowshoes and crampons; and risk altitude sickness and avalanches—all the time carrying all of our food and gear. They estimated it would take the fifty-five-person teams seven to ten days to complete the five-hundred-mile course. Most teams would average fewer than two hours of sleep per night.
The reward? Forty thousand dollars to the winning team, which would barely cover the fifteen-thousand-dollar entrance fee and the additional money we had already spent on travel, equipment, and training.
We weren’t in it for the money.
Despite all the time they’d spent on training, Mike and Mark began lagging behind from the start of the race. Erik and Juli were always way ahead of them. And I was running back and forth trying to keep the team together so we wouldn’t be penalized for being dispersed.
Mike and Mark were made up of fast-twitch muscles, which are better suited for sprinting and lifting than for long treks. Like Erik and Juli, I was born with mostly slow-twitch muscles.
Fast-twitch muscles contract and expand quickly, but get tired fast. Slow-twitch muscles are more efficient at using oxygen to generate fuel, and can fire for a long time before they fatigue.
Mike and Mark were great guys but constantly complaining. The white-water sections scared them. When we got to the smoother sections of the river, we had to pull their kayaks. They weren’t very good at the climbing or biking sections either.