Playing With The Big Boys

Ashley Gaudet is Springfield’s go-to adventure-racing girl.

What Ashley Gaudet and her teammates do for fun is going to sound amazingly, perfectly miserable to you if you’re not a marathon runner already. It is so exhausting-sounding, in fact, you might want to take a nap when you’re through reading this. Go ahead, find a couch.

Here’s a little summary of what their favorite recreational activity entails: Go to a race where you have no idea what you’ll be doing or what order you’re doing it in. Get a map, figure it out, hop on your bike. Pedal your ass off for more than an hour through the Ozarks hills, then run for another hour or so, then go to the middle of a forest and find your way through woods with a compass and map (all while running, of course). Then cross a flooded river, climb a steep, muddy hill, grasping for every rock and patch of grass to be found. If you’re not exhausted enough at that point, run some more, ride that bike for another hour at least, run up a steep hill for yet another hour, then fight a wild bear at the end.

Okay, so the bear part was a lie and maybe that’s not the exact order —but you get the gist, and you do have to go through some kind of random gladiator-like obstacle course before it’s finally through. All told, an adventure race is about 8-16 hours (some go up to 10 days) of nonstop physical exertion. Again I repeat, they do this for fun. They might be crazy.

That said, Ashley Gaudet is a bad ass bitch—and I mean that in the most respectful way possible. She may spend her days pushing real estate for Carol Jones, but this girl is about as extreme as they come. As if skydiving and rock climbing weren’t hard core enough, she participates in adventure races, the aforementioned activities from the first paragraph; most recently, the Ozarks Greenways Race in May. It’s an eight- to 17-hour endurance race through the Ozarks on bike, foot and on water where participants push their bodies to the limit.

To train for the Greenways race, Ashley attended a two-month prep course at Dynamic Earth, at which point she was invited to join the  Marsupials’ team and eventually run the race itself. Teams are four-person, co-ed groups; the right mix is to have exactly three guys and one girl—the key to a good team is having a skilled female athlete who can keep up. Jerry, Shawn and Mark (the three male Marsupials) were in it to win, so they didn’t want some soft girly girl holding them back; they needed a hard, mean, runnin’ machine like Ashley. So was she up to snuff?

Mostly, yes. She says there was a rough patch during the third hour when she didn’t think she could keep going, but with the encouragement and obligatory jabs from her teammates, she muscled on (Five. More. Hours!) and helped the Marsupials to sixth place—an amazing feat, considering there were 68 teams they were up against and two of their members were new to the sport.

Adventure racing is not for just any Joe Blow off the streets—though Ashley would beg to differ, suggesting I try it… p’shaw! You have to be in at least decent shape so you don’t go in all gung-ho and have to be choppered out. Even the strong get nicked, though; Ashley herself is nursing an injured knee at the moment, hoping it will heal in time for her and the team to run the Berryman Adventure, a 24–36 hour course through the Mark Twain National Forest where they’ll do the same thing, just for longer and without sleep.

Where’s that couch again?