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In adventure racing, there's no rest for the weary. But Boulder's Sean Clancy has years of non-resting practice to apply to this weekend's national championships.
"This is a fast race," said Doug Judson, captain of Clancy's team for this race, Tecnu Extreme/StaphAseptic. "It's a 24-hour race. It's going to be really hard. They're not going to sleep at all."
On Friday morning, Clancy will be on the starting line for the U.S. Adventure Racing Association's National Championship in Hidden Valley, Pa.
He'll hike, run, mountain bike and canoe for 24 hours straight. (Teams have 30 hours to complete the course, but the winning team is expected to finish in 24 to 26 hours.) His three-member team will stay within 100 yards of each other as they ride, run, paddle and navigate (and bushwhack) through checkpoints in the Pennsylvania woods.
Hopefully, they will re-emerge from the course faster and with more points than any of the other 50-plus teams competing.
"This weekend is -- I don't want to say Super Bowl, but here in the U.S. it kind of is," Judson said. "It's the marquee event we put on our calendar and we work hard to qualify for."
Clancy, 34, and teammate Mari Chandler, of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., were part of a team that won the national championships two years ago, in Georgia. For this year's nationals, Clancy and Chandler will race with Kyle Peter, of San Francisco.
Though Clancy lives here and his teammates live in California, they race together often, and the ability to train together isn't an issue.
"We all live in different cities, but when you're spending so much time, 24 hours at a time in a race, you get to know each other very well," Clancy said.
Judson said high-level racers, like those on this team, have a high
"We don't even have to talk to each other," he said, adding that you can just look at a teammate and know if he or she is tired or hungry.
That's important over 24 hours, and longer races, too, which the team does regularly. So is fitness -- you're only as fast as your slowest teammate, Judson said, so it's good to have a balanced team.
But the real key to adventure-racing success is navigation with a map and compass, Clancy said. In the 2008 Baja Travesia, a 72-hour adventure race in Mexico, his team went the wrong way for eight hours.
"We started hallucinating maybe 40 hours into the race and started to make some terrible navigation errors," he said. After correcting their eight-hour detour, though, the team navigated flawlessly, he said, and won the race.
Judson said in situations like that, Clancy never loses his composure.
"No matter how much the team is suffering, no matter how much the team has been out in the wet and cold, you never see any cracks in his personality," Judson said.
And that's helpful for the whole team, because lousy weather is part of adventure racing, he said. In fact, Judson had hoped for worse weather this weekend.
"We've spent a lot of time all over the world suffering, and we're good at it," Judson said. "That's part of adventure racing. You want to battle the elements, Mother Nature, just as much as you battle the other teams."
Clancy finds that competitive spirit in Boulder while training, too. He moved here in April.
"The quality of athletes in Boulder is, we all know, ridiculously high," he said.
He said he's made great training partners and friends in locals like paddler Jeremy Rodgers, a member of the U.S. National Wildwater Team. Cycling around Boulder, always surrounded by professionals, he said, is also a great reality check.
"That's what I enjoy about Boulder the most, the constant humbling. It forces you to improve."
