Pain equals gain for Finnell, adventure racing teammates

No sleep and limited resources. Cold rain falling while wearing soaked clothes. Running, paddling and riding for 20 hours straight. Dead legs and arms.

And still with 20 miles to go to the finish line.

It is a miserable existence.

At the same time, the four-member adventure racing team known simply as BDAR wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Dalton resident Jason Finnell and teammates Zach Ballard, Adam Rains and Ben Smith, all of Cleveland, Tenn., have enjoyed success by keeping up with some of the best-known professional squads in the country. And despite remembering each low point and painful moment from the previous race, they still act as the perfect example of a group competing solely for love of the sport.

“I wouldn’t pay money to do this if I didn’t like it,” Rains said.

The first time all four competed together was in May at the Atomic Elite 30-hour adventure race in Blue Ridge. BDAR finished first in the four-person all-male division and sixth overall with a time of 25 hours, 7 minutes and 6 seconds.

While they did well, it wasn’t pleasant.

“It’s a 30-hour suffer session,” Finnell said.

And all four agree on the point when it was worst.

“It’s about 2 or 3 a.m.,” Ballard said. “It’s 52 degrees. It had been raining for five or six hours. It’s black dark. The wind is just howling up there. We really didn’t have, and part of it is my fault, we really didn’t plan for cool, wet weather. So we’re soaked to the bone and even our jackets are just cold.”

But BDAR was leading the race after 10 hours and knew it, which is unordinary for adventure races.

“We were (in second place) 16 hours into it, and we’re beating pro teams,” Smith said. “We’re four guys who just like to beat each other up and ride mountain bikes. We were curb-stomping pro teams.”

It was a “long race,” which is anything more than a full 24-hour cycle, and eventually the team hit a “low point,” as the four call it, and had to skip part of the remaining foot course, meaning they didn’t reach all the necessary checkpoints.

It is just an example of how doing well in long races comes down to whether the team can withstand adversity.

“That’s all it is,” Finnell said. “Just making up your mind that you’re not going to stop and continuing to go. I won’t say it’s easy but it’s simple.”

Said Ballard, “You’re going to get depleted. You’re going to get dehydrated. You’re going to feel (bad). Someone is going to have a low point and you have to, as a team, carry them through that.”

For Smith, mental toughness is a key part of passing the physical test.

“When we were way up on top of a mountain, it was cold, we were at 3,400-foot elevation and we’re sitting there going, ‘We’re 30 miles, 40 miles away from the finish and we still have a foot section left,” Smith said. “We’re past the 20-hour mark and we’re going, ‘This is ridiculous. What am I doing?’ And you’re going to have that moment in every race, whether it be from heat or cold or your hurting. That’s when other teams drop out. That’s when we’ll dig in and go, ‘All right, we’ll slow down and then we’re going to dig our claws in and go.’”

‘You could die’

One key is how well the team meshes. If one guy slacks off or drops out, the team is done. If one guy is significantly better, it can ruin the chemistry of the unit.

“I’ve heard horror stories of teams where people will never race with them again,” Ballard said. “Everyone is going to get (upset). It’s hot. You’re cranky. You’re going to make a wrong turn. Sometimes we make a wrong turn, and I’m the navigator so I say, ‘Guys, we went half a mile out of the way.’ ... It’s going to happen. Chemistry is very important.”

Ballard said the sport has been called “off-road triathlons,” but that’s somewhat misleading. Everything must be done as a team, with most races requiring teammates to stay within 100 yards of one another. The team gets a map either the night before or day of a race with checkpoints it must reach, either in order or at the team’s discretion, using one of the three race techniques: running, mountain biking and paddling.

“And the X-factor of the entire thing is navigation,” Ballard said. “You have to have a guy with a map and compass who knows where he is going. We’re not the fastest athletes by any means. ... But if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how fast you are.”

Ballard, the navigation guru, is also the fastest biker. Smith and Rains are solid runners, while Finnell does a bit of everything.

The toughest for the team is the paddling. They tipped both their canoes over in the Atomic Elite race, with all of their equipment falling out.

“(Ballard and Smith) were in the same canoe,” Rains said. “I was with Jason. So we were following them and they went through some stuff that looked really tough. And then they’d make it and I think, ‘Well, me and Jason are about to die.’ And we went through some stuff that I didn’t think we had any business making it through without flipping. And then we went through some stuff that didn’t seem that tough and it ended up wrecking us.”

Smith is succinct.

“You could die,” he said.

A painful pleasure

With Ballard planning a return to graduate school, the same group may not compete again for another two years. However, Finnell, Rains and Smith don’t plan on stopping.

“We’re already signed up for two or three other races,” Smith said.

And they don’t plan on stopping.

“It’s an outlet for us to compete,” Finnell said. “Because there are three different disciplines between the running, biking and paddling, we get to train on the weekends. For a race that long, everybody is going to have highs and lows. You need to have a team that will pick you up and carry you. I don’t have to worry about someone laying down and saying, ‘Oh, I quit.’ It’s probably more about hanging out with each other and pushing us a little bit.”

“Even at its worst part, you’re not thinking, ‘Man I wish I was somewhere digging a ditch.’”

Said Ballard, “It becomes an addiction. It’s all you think about when you’re at work. When you’re signed up for a race, you’re looking at aerial maps to see an aerial view of what it could look like.”

All four graduated from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga — Finnell, Rains and Smith in 2003 and Ballard in 2005 — and the 2003 grads all wrestled for the Mocs. Ballard was the first to start competing in the sport and he drew the other three to it.

“He got us into it,” Rains said. “We had been doing some trail races just for fun.”

Said Ballard, “I had heard about it from a friend back in 2008. He told me, ‘You need to sign up and do one of these things.’ I could barely ride a bicycle and didn’t have any gear and somehow we made the race work.

“Then I kind of tapped into the wrestling (network). These guys I knew were already good with fitness. I knew they were good runners and found out they were into mountain biking and all that. We all can’t race every race. It’s kind of who can do what at certain times.”

If you could ...

The professional teams, the same ones BDAR was beating in Blue Ridge, have sponsors and get paid to go adventure racing.

“There’s two governing bodies for adventure races: Checkpoint Tracker and USRA,” Smith said. “The No. 1 team in Checkpoint was in that race. They finished in fifth, one ahead of us. They’re sponsored. They train and they compete.”

Said Ballard, “These guys don’t have jobs. This is what they do.”

Not these four. Finnell is the development director at the Boys & Girls Club in Dalton and owner of Veritas Jiu-Jitsu. Ballard is a nurse, Rains is an assistant wrestling coach at Tennessee’s Walker Valley High and Smith is the head wrestling coach at Bradley Central High in Cleveland, Tenn.

All BDAR gets is bikes, jerseys and gear from their local shops — Scott’s Bike Shop and Trailhead Bike Shop in Cleveland, Tenn., and Bear Creek Bicycle Co. in Dalton — and the group is thankful for that.

The Atomic Elite race was not the first time a group racing under the BDAR name outshined other professionals, though. Ballard and Rains competed as a two-man team in a 2011 national championship race in Kentucky, the first 30-hour test for either.

“We kind of just went thinking, ‘Let’s just give it our best shot. ... Let’s see how we stack up against the best teams in the nation,’ Ballard said. “We ended up having a pretty smooth race, not too many mishaps. I felt like we could’ve gone faster on some legs. We cross the finish line — you don’t know the results until later that night. So we go to the awards ceremony and end up getting ninth place overall, second in the two-man division. It was just like, ‘What, where did that come from?’”

Said Rains, “It was funny ’cause, when we got the list, I started at the bottom and was working my way up.”

If they had the chance, would BDAR want to be like the professional teams? Ballard said his and Rain’s success at the national race was their first “splash,” while Smith said the sixth-place finish in Blue Ridge was in a race many East Coast teams circle on their calendars.

Would they give up their current lives for the sport? Finnell wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know,” he said. “If we had some sponsorships to help us travel to different races and pay entrance fees, which aren’t cheap, then we’d certainly do more of the races. As it stands, we can do about three races per year budget-wise.”

Smith and Rains were more convinced about their willingness to leave the working world behind.

“I would quit today,” Smith said.

Sports

Search Results

Discussion

Pain equals gain for Finnell, adventure racing teammates

Site Map

Contact Us