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

Text by Andrea Minarcek; Photographs courtesy of J. Andrés Vargas

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.

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Comments

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