Xtreme Teams

So how does the team work? Every decision is made by consensus. If that means that the whole team stops to spend an hour debating which way to head through a canyon, so be it. "Over the course of six or seven days of nonstop competition, you can't look to the same person for everything," Nagle explains. "Part of our success lies in having tremendous redundancy within our team. So we just allow leadership to flow, hour by hour, to whoever is strongest at the time."

The same holds true for many of the "hot groups" that Leavitt and Lipman-Blumen have studied. "You get pluralistic thinking," says Leavitt. "You get a multiple brain that is likely to be more creative than a single one."

A more important rule for EcoInternet's members is that they let go of a decision once it has been made -- no matter how it turns out. "You have to treat mistakes as the next challenge, rather than as a self-inflicted problem," Nagle says. "So we tend to say, 'Okay, we decided to come over this ridge instead of following the valley around. It's a lot worse than we expected. But that doesn't matter. We just have to deal with this circumstance and move on.' "

Which doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of postrace feedback. "We come back after each race and analyze every decision in a very honest and pretty raw fashion," Nagle says. "We talk about why people acted the way they did, why we made particular decisions, and how we ended up in particular circumstances."

In preparing for a 1998 race in Ecuador called the Raid Gauloises, the team miscalculated how much food it would need for the nine-day trip. Upon entering the final two days of paddling, EcoInternet was in first place. One team was within 15 minutes of EcoInternet, while the rest of the teams were all at least a day behind. EcoInternet had figured that each team member would need about 10,000 calories a day for the paddling stretch -- and the team had just 500 calories' worth of food left.

"We looked in our bag and said, 'My God, there's no food,' " Nagle says. "But as a group, we knew that it wasn't a problem. It may seem amazing, but we knew that we would find a way out of that mess. And just knowing that is tremendously reassuring. You just have this sense of calm that you will find a way -- that you will find a solution. That's how much faith we have in the team."

That evening, most of the team camped by the river's edge while Nagle and a teammate hiked into the jungle, where they found an Ecuadorian farmer. In broken Spanish, they explained to him what they needed, and then they traded some of their gear for food.

Ian Adamson, 35, describes the team mind-set as being almost entrepreneurial. "New Zealanders like to call it 'the eight-gauge wire solution': You believe that you can fix any situation with the resources you have on hand," Adamson says. "We've got a stick of chewing gum and some string. We're all set! We don't waste time whining because we don't have a hammer."

One tricky aspect of adventure racing is that a team can move only as fast as its weakest member. And since each race stretches over a series of exhausting days, every person on a team will be the weakest member at one point or another. The EcoInternet strategy: Shore up the weakest member at every point in a race -- so that everyone makes it through the race without burning out.

"Instead of worrying about my problems and managing them internally, I let them show, and I concentrate my effort on the other three or four members of the team," Nagle says. "That way, I have three people looking after me, rather than one. If one of us stumbles for the second time in 10 minutes, there's no question about what needs to be done: Somebody reaches into that person's pack and takes out some weight, and then we all just move on."

Team member Robyn Benincasa, 33, says that, unlike other teams that she's raced with, EcoInternet is free of internal competition. "All of us are of one mind -- one mind with 10 arms and 10 legs. And that really makes a difference," she says. "There's no pride in carrying other people's things. It's just what you need to do to get the job done. You're not the hero for taking on extra weight, or the schmo for needing help. You know that, three hours from now, the guy carrying all of your stuff may need you to carry his stuff."

Benincasa and Adamson have started a training program in Colorado that puts corporate teams through milder versions of adventure racing. "In adventure racing," Adamson says, "you go through every emotion that you'll experience in life -- only faster and more intensely: The highs are higher, and the lows are lower. If you can handle that, you can handle anything."