Mark Richardson’s latest adventure race experience had barely started when his mountain bike broke down on a muddy trail in a remote part of the Black Hills of South Dakota.

It’s a case typical of long-distance adventure racing: Be prepared for the unexpected. It’s a sport in which participants train, plan and prepare for worst-case scenarios and inevitably run into surprises along the way.

In a way, it’s like his job as a captain with the Tracy Fire Department, where he has responded to medical emergencies, car crashes and fires for 18 years.

“You have to improvise through Plan B and Plan C,” Richardson said. “Make adjustments and just keep going. You can’t walk out.

“You roll through your options and think on the fly and adjust your planning. It’s very much the same thing we do in adventure racing.”

For Richardson, 45, and his three teammates, the Primal Quest Badlands 2009 adventure race last month was a nine-day-plus journey through Black Hills National Forest and into Rapid City. It started with a 26.2-mile marathon race, complete with barbed wire fences and a local sheriff who warned them about trespassing.

After that, most of the 600-mile race was series of mountain bike courses. Richardson and the rest of Team Tecnu Extreme/StaphAseptic — including Charlie Kharsa of Davis, Jared Hanley of Eugene, Ore., and Melissa Griffiths of San Francisco — also traveled 162 miles on foot, paddled kayaks for 60 miles, swam 5 miles, covered 5 miles on a ropes course across towering rock formations, and had to find their way through 5 miles of caves.

The bike breakdown on the second day could have knocked the team out of the race, but the determination to keep going compensated for time lost on the trail. The four were headed up Crooks Tower, the second-highest peak in South Dakota, just before nightfall when the rain started.

“At least 12 teams had zipped up there and ridden away without encountering that mud,” Richardson said. “We had to stop constantly and take sticks and scrape mud off the tires to even be able to push them.”

On the other side of the hill, they became even more frustrated knowing that they should have been able to ride at up to 10 mph but instead were on foot lugging mud-caked bikes.

“We tried riding again. I start pedaling along, and I heard ‘snap!’” Richardson said.

He looked back to see that the derailleur hanger — a critical piece of the bike’s rear-wheel assembly that helps tension the chain — had broken off.

“We probably had a good 20 miles to go, and only about four of it was downhill that I might be able to ride.”

They adjusted the chain so the bike would work as a single-speed. That held for most of the way until they reached the next checkpoint. Richardson was then able to borrow a bike, and a local shop repaired his cycle and brought it back later in the race. But the team had lost more than 12 hours.

Now it was a race against the clock. In some cases, Team Tecnu Extreme rolled into checkpoints just minutes ahead of cutoff times to stay on the long course.

At the end, the team finished 10th out of 32 teams that started the race Aug. 14. Twenty-one teams finished, and only 10, including Team Tecnu Extreme, completed the long course.

A long-race veteran

This is Richardson’s 10th year as an adventure racer.

In 2000, he joined a couple of Tracy police officers at race at Lake Del Valle. That experience made him want to try longer courses, and soon he was involved with the Cal Eco adventure race series. The races are billed as 24-hour events, though the best teams finish in about 14 hours and most finish in 18 hours or less. That was where he discovered he could race beyond physical and mental exhaustion.

“As the race went on, I kept feeling stronger. I really enjoyed it and looked for the opportunity to do more of that,” he said. “You get tired, but you get into a zone where you keep plugging along. The longer a race, the more you get the roller coaster, the highs and the lows, where sometimes you’re just barely keeping up and other times you can barely wait for your team.”

In 2004, Richardson signed up for his first multi-day expedition race, hosted by Primal Quest on Washington state’s San Juan Islands. That race would test his ability to read a map and select the best course for his team.

“I learned a lot from my mistakes in that race,” he said. “I was able to do a pretty decent job of navigating in a 24-hour race, but in that one, I was in over my head.

“I also learned that no matter how good a navigator you are, if you’re going to be racing for nine or 10 days, you need a backup,” he said. “You just can’t be sharp for days in a row like that.”

Since then he has become one of the promoters and course designers for Gold Rush Adventure Races, which runs events in Stanislaus National Forest, including “The Mother Lode” four-day race from Nov. 4 to 8.

“That’s where I get my navigating practice … traveling around and trying to find a good course, and also saying, this is where we want competitors to go, but where else might they go?”

Each race is a test of endurance, and Richardson said racers show up with the determination to finish.

“Just preparing for it and the expense of getting there … you’ve already invested so much to even show up at the starting line that it’s really hard to walk away from it,” Richardson said.

“Before one race I did in Mexico, the promoter said, ‘Remember, the problems always seem a lot bigger on the course than they do on the plane ride home,’” he said. “You’re going to kick yourself for dropping out later on, and you’ve got to know that. I think most competitors in the race do.”

• Contact Bob Brownne at 830-4227 or brownne@tracypress.com.