Adventure Racing: Costa Rica’s Coastal Challenge Rainforest Run Recap

Text by Andrea Minarcek; Photographs courtesy of, from top: J. Andrés Vargas (2); Jeff Akens (2)

It’s day four of the Coastal Challenge (TCC) Rainforest Run—a six-day,
145-mile stage race across Costa Rica—and people are starting to wear
out. Most of our feet are covered in blisters, and at only 8:00 a.m.,
the temperature’s shot well past 90. We’ve already been hiking for the
better part of an hour when we come to a jungle-cloaked stretch of
single-track that seems to shoot straight up into the sky. Our
motivation evaporates.

It’s at this moment that Robyn Benincasa (pictured, right) reveals what the rest of us
have been suspecting all week: The woman is superhuman. Benincasa, 42,
one of the world’s premier adventure racers, straps one of her
teammates, who is (understandably) struggling a bit, on to a towline
attached to her backpack and cheerfully starts bounding up the
mountain, literally pulling her up the slope like an ox. The path
climbs 3,000 feet in a mile and a half, but Benincasa barely breaks a
sweat. “It just feels so good to know I’m back up and running!” she
says.

It’s hard to imagine any hint of weakness when you look at her (she
works full-time as a firefighter in San Diego), but Benincasa is
officially on the mend after hip resurfacing surgery in 2007. And for
a time, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to return to adventure
racing, a sport she’s dominated for well over a decade, with wins at
the Eco-Challenge and Raid Gauloises to her credit. But during the
week I spent racing with her in February, she showed no signs of
slowing down.

Last year, she helped established Project Athena (projectathena.org),
a nonprofit dedicated to helping survivors of life-threatening
illnesses or injuries fulfill their athletic dreams. (Think of it as a
Make-A-Wish Foundation for adult women—with an adventurous slant.) She
co-founded the organization with her friend and fellow firefighter
Melissa Cleary, a veteran of 40 marathons who continues to run with
rheumatoid arthritis. Now in its first full year of operation, Project
Athena is funding two women’s dream trips, starting with this weeklong
trek in Costa Rica. The grant recipient, Sara Jones, 36, is a two-time
breast cancer survivor and retired firefighter from Norfolk, Virginia.
Along with Benincasa and Cleary, Jones raced in TCC as part of Team
Project Athena, which also included triathlete Florence Debout
(herself a two-time cancer survivor), adventure racer Masha Glanville,
and runner Jonea Mounsey. I tagged along with them for the week.
(Jones, amazingly, was still undergoing chemo treatments when she
competed in Costa Rica. You can read more of her story at
projectathena.org/athenaship_recipients.php)

The Coastal Challenge was split into two events: The Expedition length
race included the full 145 miles, while the Adventure category offered
an abbreviated 78-mile option across much of the same terrain. (Of
course Benincasa embraced the full Expedition challenge.)

We started on Costa Rica’s central Pacific side, on Quepos Beach, and
snaked our way south down the coast, along the beaches and back inland
through rainforests and the fat green peaks of the Talamanca Range.
The landscape was spectacular—and we earned every view: The days could
be long and tough—on our hardest, we covered 33 miles and climbed
7,382 feet—but the campsites that greeted us at day’s end were really
rewarding. Over the course of the week, we stayed in the
jungle-fringed Savegre Valley (pictured, at top) and the beach town of Dominical. The
race directors saved the best for last: The final day was spent
looping lush Corcovado National Park on C.R.’s Osa Peninsula, said to
hold two percent of the world’s biodiversity. (I heard howler monkeys
but am probably one of the only people on the trip who didn’t spot
one.)

Fifty-eight racers crossed the finish line February 6 on the beach of
Drake’s Bay—34 in the Expedition category and 24 in the Adventure.
Eight countries were represented, but the locals came out on top: A
quiet 45-year-old farmer from the central Costa Rican mountains,
Javier Montero, won the men’s Expedition title for the second year in
a row. He dominated from start to finish with a near sweep, winning
the first four days and securing his title with a cumulative time more
than an hour ahead of the pack.

David James, 30, from Bridgeport, Connecticut, took 2nd place, and
ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, 35, of Seattle, took 3rd. After the race,
Jurek, a Brooks-sponsored runner who’s won the Badwater Ultramarathon
and Spartathlon, joked that, in comparison to ultras, running a
multi-day race felt “like breaking one’s hand one finger at a time,
versus breaking the entire hand at once.” Jurek came to Costa Rica in
pre-season training mode, in prep for his summer race season, which
will include a return to the epic Western States Endurance Run, a
100-miler he won from 1999-2005 and where he still holds the course
record. James will be racing the Western States this year, too, on
June 27 (ws100.com).

Costa Rican Ligia Madrigal—who had a baby just eight months ago—won
the women’s division, finished 7th overall, and helped her all Costa
Rican team secure first place in the group category. Team Project
Athena took 2nd.

This fall, TCC Adventures is heading further south, with their first
Island Run across Panama’s Bocas del Toro archipelago, in September
(tccislandrun.com). The three-day stage race will loop a different
island each day, and as race director Tim Holmstrom told me, be a bit
less strenuous than TCC’s Costa Rica offerings. Racers in Panama will
run fewer miles and bunk up each night in a cushy locally-run
hotel—rather than camp out (or hammock) like we did in Costa Rica.

Still, I can’t imagine a better week than the one I spent in C.R. Next
year’s version will cover their Route of Fire course, which hits the
volcanic regions in the country’s north. Rumor in the jungle had it
that the Route of Fire course—which was raced by some veterans in
TCC’s 2008 Costa Rica race—is a bit easier than the Coastal one we
were on. But I don’t buy it. I suspect Holmstrom & Co. will make it
just as challenging. See (and register) for yourself:
thecoastalchallenge.com.

Next up for Project Athena is the Great Wall of China Marathon this
May. The women are sponsoring Kerrie Larson-Kerkman, a 35-year-old
from Appleton, Wisconsin, who suffers from a degenerative spinal
condition. Athena’s Cleary will run the race with her in China’s
Tianjin Province on May 16.

In addition to Project Athena, Benincasa will also captain Team
Merrell/Zanfel Adventure at this year’s Primal Quest race in the
Badlands, August 15-24. I know I’ll tune in. The woman blows me away:
While the rest of us limped home to recover after six days of
145-miles and 33,800 feet of elevation gain, Benincasa hopped a plane
to Big Sky—for a few wind-down days of snowboarding.

Photographs by the exceptional racers at the event (we’ll add your specific credits on Monday!)