But when I returned, I encountered two very unfriendly-looking fellows armed with machetes standing over my pack. When I moved to pick it up, they blocked my way. I started to back off, then quickly lurched forward and grabbed my trekking poles. Now I had something in my hands to defend myself with.
They tried to stare me down, but I wasn’t going to back away. Nor was I going to let them walk off with my pack. I mean, I had a race to finish!
After a few seconds, they turned away and disappeared down the trail.
I caught up with my teammates, and after reaching the Nepal border near Kodari, we continued, canoeing, white-water rafting, and kayaking down the turbulent Sunkosi River. This section concluded with three kilometers of canyoneering, where at one point we had to rappel down a six-hundred-foot waterfall.
Our next challenge was a twenty-three-kilometer section of white-water swimming, where we used fins to help us negotiate the rapids and avoid large boulders. It was like riding a very cold, wet roller coaster.
The race ended in Janakpur, Nepal, after 827 kilometers. Team Nokia from Finland won with a time of six days, twenty-two hours. Despite our best efforts, we finished more than two days later.
In late 2000, Dawn and I went to Hawaii to conduct a team-building event for Seagate Technology, the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives. CEO Bill Watkins had hired me to spend a week training two hundred of his employees in hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, and rappelling, in preparation for the corporate Seagate adventure race. He saw the race as a way to instill a greater sense of teamwork and accountability throughout his company.
After the race, Bill approached me with an offer. He said that he was willing to invest a million dollars of his own money if I would help create the world’s greatest adventure race—which would be named Primal Quest.
Together with my wife, Dawn, our incredible race staff, and over two hundred volunteers, we planned, conducted, and directed Primal Quest Utah (2006), Primal Quest Montana (2008), and Primal Quest Badlands South Dakota (2009).
Primal Quest Utah turned out to be particularly intense, because competitors faced a course of approximately 420 miles and temperatures exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The four-member coed teams weren’t allowed to bring support crews, so they had to carry more gear and all of their food.
Race disciplines included mountain biking, trekking, horseback riding, technical rope skills, mountaineering, kayaking, and white-water swimming. The event was broadcast internationally as four one-hour episodes on ESPN2, with a one-hour recap and finale on ABC Sports.
The extreme temperatures had a tendency to produce hallucinations. At the end of one seventy-mile paddle section, a participant thanked me for carving the faces of his family members in stone cliffs along the river.
Also, someone captured videotape footage of a snake crawling onto the hot sand and burning to death. Fortunately our competitors fared better, though we did experience one close call when a male racer suffered heatstroke and fell off his bike as he rode into the town of Moab.
He quickly slipped into a coma and was immediately flown to the regional hospital, where they intubated him and attached him to a respirator. Days later, the athlete started to mumble. Someone handed him a pad and a pencil. He wrote that he wanted food.
Shortly after I retired from the Navy, a retired SEAL buddy called me and asked if I would be interested in serving as a weapons and tactics instructor. I didn’t want to be tied down to a full-time position, but accepted his offer. Soon I was working as an independent contractor teaching weapons and tactics all over the world, including in Serbia, Ethiopia, Romania, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries.
Part of our mission was to train the security details assigned to guard friendly heads of state. The United States had a vested interest in keeping certain world leaders, prime ministers, and presidents alive. So we would train the protective details of many Middle East heads of state. This could be a challenge because compared to U.S. security, most of the Middle East protective details were very poorly trained, ineffective, and even dangerous. We also trained our allied military troops in marksmanship, CQB, small-unit tactics, defensive driving, and protective operations.
In Serbia I worked closely with an Army captain whose eyes would fill with tears when he talked about the atrocities he and his men had committed during the ethnic cleansing that had taken place there.
I completed one training assignment with ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ operator and hero of Black Hawk Down. One night, while Paul and I were teaching low-light and no-light shooting to some Middle Eastern soldiers, I said to the translator, “Tell the men to be careful that their light doesn’t go on accidentally. Because if the enemy sees it, they will shoot at the light.”