XTERRA Brasil - Interessanter Artikel im Lava Magazin

BY JENNIFER WARD BARBER

HOW A QUICK AND DIRTY TRIP TO BRAZIL'S WILDEST ENDURANCE EVENT WON ME OVER, FATTENED ME UP AND CHILLED ME OUT.

NO ONE HAD RUN A SINGLE STEP, THOUGH A MOB OF SWEATY RUNNERS PRESSED AGAINST ME FROM ALL SIDES. As if ringing in the New Year, they counted down: Três! Dois! Um! Then a Brazilian sol-ider only 15 feet in front of me raised his machine gun and fired off that rapid succession of shots most of us only ever hear in the movies. The 90-degree night had come alive.

Cannons, sure, but this was a new one. Armed with cheap headlamps, British triathlete Sam Gardner and I set out on our 5K night run through a parcel of jungle in the city of Manaus, Brazil.

We were, most likely, two of the most beat-up runners out there. Gardner had clocked a podium performance at that morning's XTERRA triathlon, and I'd ended 35 hours of travel with a restless night in a hammock. But more on that in a minute. Earlier, trying to talk ourselves into doing the race, we'd asked ourselves when we were next going to get the chance to run through a rain forest with 1,700 Brazilians who'd consumed a few too many Red Bulls. Probably never. That's how five kilometers, 52 minutes and a few hundred feet of barbed wire later, we ended up emerging from the forest, mud splattered up our bare limbs like tribal tattoos, marking us victors—or at least finishers. It took me an hour to clean my shoes.

SELVA! The jungle. Guns N’ Roses welcomed us to it. The Tokens crooned about its sleeping lions. Rud-yard Kipling and Joseph Conrad wrote of its impenetrable darkness. But to the 2,000 people attending what the race program called “the biggest outdoor sports event of the planet,” it was selva!—the most important Portuguese word I would learn, shouted always with militant gusto.

As Gardner would later write on his blog, the Amazon stop on the World Tour puts the “X” in XTERRA. In only its second year, it has already made a name for itself—even if only in Brazil. But as the fifth-largest country in the world in size and population, that's no small feat. And the sport is growing: 2005, XTERRA Brazil's first year, saw about 200 people register for one race. Six years later, they've added 10 more races, some attracting as many as 3,000 athletes.

This year, XTERRA Amazon was moved deeper into the jungle, where it was produced through a partnership with CIGS, a Special Forces division of the Brazilian military that stands for “Centro de Instrução de Guerra na Selva,” (Center for War Instruction in the Jungle). The unit was created in the 1960s when the need for soldiers schooled in jungle combat arose. Its mission ever since has been to prepare troops for the “complex operational environment (of) inestimable strategic value” that is the Amazon rainforest.

On Saturday, June 11, a portion of the jungle would become, in the words of one of the generals, “another respectable opponent to be overcome by competitors.” The race program promised, at least, “always a unique moment.”

That's one way of putting it.

JUNGLE SCHOOL. By the time Gardner and I were dodging barbed wire and mud pits I'd only been in Brazil for 24 hours. I'd been whisked immediately from the airport to the military base (where the run was held) in Manaus, the capital of Amazonia—Brazil's largest state. Hot, hungry and dragging a suitcase, I scoured the expo looking for someone whose name sounded, apparently, like a lot of other Brazilian women's names. I finally found her.

and with a hug and kiss she told me to pack my backpack: we were leaving for the jungle shortly. Along with some other members of the media and a handful of hardy athletes, I’d signed up for a night in the jungle, and that's where I was heading. My hotel room would have to wait. I dumped the contents of my suitcase out on a slab of concrete, inhaled an energy bar, and quickly packed up everything I thought I might need over the next 24 hours.

We were then herded into an auditorium for an hour-long athlete briefing, which, based on the reactions around me, seemed to be incredibly educational and entertaining. Too bad I didn't understand a word of it. Thankfully I'd done my homework, and recognized the slide of the can-diru. This leech-like thing, also called the “vampire fish of Brazil,” is attracted to urine and swims up bodily orifices to lodge itself inside and slowly deplete the victim of blood. I didn't need Portuguese to understand the athletes’ feelings about that one. After a few more inspiring slides, my fellow jungle warriors and I were called by name onto the stage and given canvas hats and dog tags. After a few more enthusiastic rounds of Selva!, we were packed into a bus and shipped off to one of CIGS’ outlying instruction bases: Base de Instrução N°4—Pedro Teixeira (B14), the site of the next morning's triathlon.

What seemed like hours later, we arrived in a dim fishing village on an arm of the Amazon River. We peeled ourselves from the plastic seats and arranged ourselves into four motorboats. After what I'd soon learn was the customary half-hour wait (during which I inhaled a lifetime's worth of diesel fumes), our camouflaged caravan sped off into the dark.

Our final destination turned out to be more M*A*S*H than Avatar—a bare-bones clearing with a few concrete buildings and flickering light bulbs, surrounded by the world's largest rainforest, which hummed with one-third of the world's species. I followed along on the two-hour crash course in guerra na selva, or jungle warfare, as best I could—grateful that one of my jungle mates deemed it necessary to translate the advice to keep my things off the ground if I wanted to keep scorpions out of my clothes. She didn't mention the other bugs I'd read about, which, though my homework didn't go much beyond David Grann's The Lost City ofZ, left me with a few concerns: “It wasn't the big predators that [famed Amazon explorer Percy Fawcett] and his companions fretted about most,” Grann writes. “It was the ceaseless pests. The sauba ants that could reduce ... clothes and rucksacks to threads in a single night... the red hairy chig-gers that consumed human tissue. The cyanide-squirting millipedes. The parasitic worms that caused blindness ... the ‘kissing bugs,’ which bite their victim on the lips, transferring a protozoan called Trypanosoma cruzi; twenty years later, the person, thinking he had escaped the jungle unharmed, would begin to die of heart or brain swelling.”

Somehow, everyone seemed more concerned with drinking water from tree branches and extolling the virtues of the jungle than teaching me how to keep my brain from swelling at 50. Just when I thought I couldn't bear to watch another triathlete try to start a fire using wire, gauze, and gunpowder, our instructor approached a collection of otherworldly-looking fruit that had been tempting me. Finally, he cracked open the cacao, cupuaçu, and car-ambola. There were no handy labels, however, for the way these things tasted, just stabs at familiar things: coconut, banana, passion fruit, chocolate. It was all washed down with fresh açaí juice sipped from a gourd. Then, bedtime. After stowing my backpack in a tree and giving my thin cloth hammock a quick shake to clear it of cyanide-squirting millipedes, I was out.

By 6 a.m., the athletes were arriving by the boatful and had already started chowing down on breakfast. As the heat and humidity battled it out all day, so too did the 300-strong, mostly Brazilian field. I watched the familiar parade of brands go by, but noted some differences: More skin, tiny Speedos and M-dot tattoos invoking Jesus. There were plenty of foreign faces on the podium, however, with Aussie youngster Ben Allen and XTERRA Saipan champ Sam Gardner taking first and third, respectively, in the men's race (Brazil's Felipe Moletta took second), and Austria's Carina Wasle stealing first from Brazilian runners-up Sabrina Gobbo and Manuela Vilaseca.

From my conversations with athletes I learned that the Amazon is almost as little known to Brazilians as it is to gringos like me. Even Bernard Fonseca, founder of XTERRA Brazil, had never been in the jungle before he put on last year's race. This year he got the full immersion and spent 10 days on the CIGS base during the days leading up to the race: marking the trails, setting up, and planning athlete transport. Looking back on his experience he said he’d begun to understand more clearly “what is the meaning of Amazon,” and our duty to take care of it. “These guys are completely in love with the jungle,” he said of the CIGS soldiers. “They really protect it.”

In retrospect, I probably would've been quite happy spending the rest of my time in Brazil making cacao fruit smoothies, but there was more Brazil to discover.

There's the Brazil where an aged opera house hints at the glory days of the 19th-century rubber boom, a time so prosperous it's said horses were watered on champagne. The Brazil of cracked sidewalks and Brahma beer and cheese—so much cheese—grilled, fried, and drizzled on poor excuses for pizza. The Brazil that runs on “BST,” or “Brazilian Sort-of Time,” where you might wait three hours to get into a club and by the time you get dinner it's time for breakfast.

A day in the jungle had captured our imaginations, but we had to return to the once-great city of Manaus (formerly the “Paris of the Tropics") where one afternoon you can witness drunk people pole dancing on the 120 bus and the next watch two rivers—the Rio Negro and the Rio So-limões—flow side by side until they become the mighty Amazon, their waters distinct as two shades of oil paint.

Unlike Colonel Fawcett and hundreds of others for whom the Amazon's secrets proved lethal, I got out with only a few extra cheese-induced pounds, some new friends and a bunch of reasons to visit again someday. That is, if the kissing bug didn't court me in my sleep. Check back in 20 years. If the Amazonian selva didn't get me this time around, I might just be back to swim with the piranhas.