EXTREME SPORT:Next Saturday, 30 teams from 15 countries will fight sleep deprivation, hunger and exhaustion as they tear around the rugged landscape of Cork and Kerry for the Turas, the Irish round of the multidisciplinary Adventure Racing World Series. Laurence Mackintalks to some of the Irish organisers and competitors, Harry McGeedescribes competing in an adventure race
AS YOU ARE reading this, Brian Keogh is preparing for the toughest mental and physical challenge of his life. He and his three team-mates on Irish AR Denny will soon be racing through the most remote parts of the country. On day one, small aches will creep into their limbs and doubts will plague their minds. The team will push these to the back of their minds in those first 24 hours, because this is just the beginning. They will focus on pacing and try to avoid getting carried away with other teams who seem to be powering ahead.
Over the best part of the next week, this team will race across roughly 650km, through six peninsulas in counties Kerry and Cork. They will run, cycle and climb mountains; paddle and swim in the waters of the southwest; horse-ride, rope and zip-wire their way through the toughest landscape in Ireland. They will navigate their route through a series of control points, snatching a few hours' sleep a day in the rough, fighting sleep deprivation, hunger and mental and physical exhaustion. They will travel a distance equivalent to running 13 marathons and scaling Mount Everest. Twice. Welcome to the Turas, the Irish round of the Adventure Racing World Series.
Adventure racing began in France, where mountain guides would race each other across the Alps. The rules were simple - get from one point to another, as quickly as possible. Today, the sport is a sophisticated team event, with its own international series, and, for the first time ever, Ireland will host a round. Thirty teams of four, one of which must be female, from 15 countries will tear around the hills and mountains of Cork and Kerry until next Saturday. Those at the top will complete maybe five or six races every year. The rest, such as Irish AR Denny, are amateurs who are hooked on pushing their bodies and minds to their very limits.
Con Moriarty is course director of the Turas. "On the one hand, it's an event for a couple of hundred elite athletes, but for me there's a story to be told on the back of these guys' journeys through these landscapes," he says. Born and raised in the Gap of Dunloe, "a mountain man all my life", his passion for adventure sports is matched only by his deep-rooted pride in his native place.
"The Dingle peninsula has the greatest concentration of archaeological sites in the world," Moriarty roars down the phone from Kerry, where he has been photographing antiquities with National Geographic since 4am. "From Blennerville Bridge to Slea Head is 30 miles long and the average width of the peninsula is about six miles wide. There are 3,500 listed sites in that spit of land alone. Our landscape is riddled with ritual and archaeological sites, many of them marking the passing of great events, great armies and great pilgrimages. We chose the name Turas for all that it means in Irish, which is essentially a metaphysical journey over the metaphysical landscape - a journey of mind, body and soul."
Metaphysical musings might seem a strange place to start from, but adventure racing is a strange sport. Vanessa Lawrenson is the publisher of Outsidermagazine and has been helping to put the Turas together. In recent years she has been one of the leading female adventure racers in the country, and her experience has been a physical and spiritual one.
"After about a day [ of racing] you slip into a meditative, sublime state and you don't really notice the time passing. You are very connected and living in the moment. Your body wants to give up and then it realises that you're not going to, so it stops giving you pain and floods you with endorphins instead," she says.
"The way the world is at the moment, people are thinking, 'I need to pay my tax, I don't have enough money, get up, shower, alarm clock, phone bills'. When you are racing in the wilderness for five days, none of that matters. You are so refreshed after it. You look at the world differently and have a purity to your attitude. Your world is chasing the next control point, making sure your team-mates are okay, and getting all these incredible, beautiful views of the country."
Endurance athletes often talk about this adrenaline rush that comes with breaking through a pain barrier, but in adventure racing there is some pretty spectacular landscape to keep the limbs moving.
"Some people call it speed tourism because you see all the best bits of an area in a week," says Lawrenson. "It's not gruelling or arduous - it's beautiful."
As tourism goes, though, this is about as hardcore as it gets, and for every place visited the most important aspect is the people. The local communities have been involved in organising this race from the very beginning and this will prove crucial to its success. Con Moriarty sees the Turas as a powerful vehicle to drive tourism in the area.
"This year's tourism figures in the countryside are a reminder of just how far we have slipped from being a destination that was exciting and had a lot of potential," he says. "At the heart of all this, at a commercial level, is trying to re-kickstart what we were involved in a quarter of a century ago - vibrant, sustainable, rural tourism.
"You go down to the tip of the Sheep's Head peninsula and you will find one of the most sophisticated, warm-hearted communities, but absolutely rooted in their place. What has been exciting about this is that, aside from putting together a race for a bunch of very geeky people who want to run around for five days, is to see how that enlightens a community who are tripping over themselves to put on a series of festivals every day that this thing comes through."
The idea of adventure tourism might be too tough for some, but Moriarty believes that Ireland can engage with this on a more accessible level. Ireland should be fighting hard to establish itself as "not just an adventure tourism destination but as something very fresh, where you could come and fish, golf, cycle - stuff beyond what adventure tourism is typically about", he says. "An older lady being pushed in her wheelchair onto Ross Island this morning among the garlic woods is having an amazing adventure."
To help the ordinary punter have an "amazing adventure" while the Turas winds its way through the southwestern wilds, the organisers and local communities have arranged a series of events throughout the week, where people can get to grips with parts of the course, follow the race and try their hands at the disciplines involved. There will be guided sea-kayaking, snorkelling, rock-climbing, wind-surfing, tours to various areas, including Skellig Michael, and a chance to have a go on a 400m zip wire, which will be lashed across the Gap of Dunloe and form the breathtaking finish for the athletes when they stumble home on Saturday to the sounds of Kíla and others playing below at a solstice festival.
For now, though, that finishing line seems a very distant prospect, and Brian Keogh, Irish AR Denny and all the other athletes will be focusing on getting through the first day, when a third of teams typically drop out. Whether they emerge from the Turas after five days in one mental and physical piece, only time, and the unforgiving landscape, will tell.
For more details on the Turas and the events taking place in counties Cork and Kerry throughout the week, see www.theturas.com