Ethan in Wild Onion Competition
From http://www.nypost.com/living/979.htm
June 12, 2003 — TOMORROW at 2:30 p.m., about 180 people will dash out of Grand Central Terminal and scatter onto the streets of Manhattan wearing backpacks, headlamps and numbered bibs.
By Saturday morning, they might be kayaking to the Statue of Liberty, scootering madly down Fifth Avenue or boarding the Q train with mud-encrusted mountain bikes.
And around noon on Saturday, they’ll ride a 200-foot mountaineering rope called a zipline from the aircraft carrier Intrepid to Pier 84, the finish line.
No, they’re not commuters gone mad by the fare hikes - they’re competitors in New York City’s first 24-hour, five-borough urban adventure race.
The Wild Onion, first held in Chicago in 2000, is modeled after the Eco-Challenge, a grueling seven-to-10 day adventure race most recently held in Fiji.
But in the Wild Onion, racers navigate the urban jungle. Coed teams of three race 135 miles through parks, streets, rivers and buildings - including Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall - before reaching the end.
Racers learn the exact course only three hours before the start, when they’re given topography maps and coordinates of checkpoints to find. At each checkpoint, they’re told how they have to get to the next one - whether on foot, scooter, bike or kayak.
The winning team takes home $12,000, but only 10 to 20 percent of the field is expected to finish. The rest will drop out due to fatigue, missed checkpoints or navigational errors.
“My co-workers think I’m insane to do this,” says investment analyst David Hulme, 35, whose team won the inaugural event in Chicago.
Hulme has been training seven hours a day on weekends. During the week, he rides his scooter six miles from his home in Harlem to his office in Midtown.
After hours, he runs up and down the 31 flights of his office building.
But being in good shape is just part of adventure racing. The ability to read a map and a compass is just as important.
“Country teams struggle in the city,” Hulme says. “A lot of people get lost.”
“I hope we go around Greenwich Village, where the streets are all higgledy-piggledy,” he adds.
New York’s waterways can be equally treacherous.
“Currents move quickly when you’re kayaking in the Hudson,” says stockbroker Joshua Bailer, 28.
“The swells are huge, and steering around the barges and ferries is like playing that video game Frogger. You never realize how large one of those is until you’re next to it in a kayak.”
The outer boroughs are more baffling even than the wilds of Kenya to the Wild Onion’s most famous contestant, Ethan Zohn, 28, a former pro soccer player who won 2001’s “Survivor: Africa” and competed in the Fiji Eco-Challenge.
“I’ve heard of The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island,” jokes Zohn, who hails from Massachusetts.
“I know they’re around Manhattan somewhere.”
Of course, getting lost in the city is easier than it would be in the jungle.
“If you’re stuck in the woods, you can’t go buy an egg sandwich,” says venture capitalist Ian Sacks, 32. “If we’re hungry at Coney Island, we can always have a hot dog at Nathan’s.”
One of the best parts of dashing through a city is the reactions from passersby.
“It’s hilarious,” Hulme says. “In Chicago, people were cheering as we scootered down Clark Street, a posh neighborhood, at two in the morning.
“Here we’ll have all the smokers outside cheering us on.”