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editor note: race director Don Mann is a former SEAL and founder of Odyssey Adventures and our partner SEAL Training Adventures.
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Welcome to adventure racing -- 450 miles of no Starbucks, no sleep

I have never seen a chipmunk carry a microwave across a hiking trail. But Donato Polignone of Petaluma has.

"It's my go-to hallucination," Polignone said.

You must admit, when you have a go-to hallucination, your first thought would be to strap Polignone to a gurney and ask him to count backward from 100.

Or, intrigued, you might want to alter just slightly this famous line from the movie "When Harry Met Sally": "I'll have whatever he's having."

Welcome, folks, to the wonderful and wound-up world of adventure racing, where Polignone and three of his pals are right now in the Montana wilderness hallucinating, kayaking, trekking, biking, fording, swimming, climbing, descending and river boarding through 450 miles of no Starbucks and no sleep.

Actually, the Dirty Avocados -- yes, that's their name -- do sleep. Two hours a night, after they go the first 36 hours without sleep. The Dirty Avocados -- don't you just love the name? -- are one of 58 teams that began Monday on Primal Quest Montana.

Within the first 24 hours two teams had withdrawn and three others were close to withdrawing. Primal Quest Montana is shorthand for: If you ain't hallucinatin', you ain't tryin'.

"I guess there might be a little ADD (attention deficit disorder) in all of us," said Polignone, 40.

The course is designed and the race is organized by an ex-Navy SEAL with an airtight guarantee that competitors will be pushed to the point that everyone will have a go-to hallucination before it's over. There will be 100,000 feet of elevation gain by the time the Dirty Avocados hope to finish next Monday. A third of the course is run at 9,000 feet or above, where snows have accumulated to 10-foot drifts. Temperatures are below zero at night.

"A course setter (planner) was attacked by a grizzly and a black bear," said Adam Doti, another Petaluma resident. "Normally in these type of competitions, we just camp wherever we are for two hours sleep. But because of the bear problem we will stop only at checkpoints."

Where, the assumption is, an ex-Navy SEAL who looks and talks like Jesse Ventura will be there with a loaded firearm.

But other than the occasional Navy SEAL who may wander by, Polignone, Doti and San Franciscans Jen Rigoni and Adam Armijo will have only a compass, a map, bear spray, their fitness and their wits to keep them alive and safe. Each member of the four-member team can stray no more than 100 meters from another. Each team must have at least one woman. Each team must finish as a unit. Each team will have a member with quirks unique and intriguing as the course itself.

"When I sneeze," said Rigoni, a planning manager for Apple computer, "I sneeze 20 times in a row."

Doti looks at a topographical map the way eating champ Kobayashi looks at a hot dog.

Armijo is known as the "kitchen sink" because his pack is legendary in size and weight. "That's why I walk a little crooked," he said.

Polignone is a cornucopia assemblage. He uses dry Swedish chewing tobacco to combat, he says (and can you believe it?), the boredom. He also, said Rigoni, is like talk radio. "DP can go from one subject to another flawlessly," she says. "For hours. Without stopping."

And then there's his hallucinations. They are his friends. Hallucinations, in fact, are everyone's friends.

"There are couches on the trail for me when I hallucinate," said Armijo, 34, EMT certified and a tech consultant. "I actually have to step over them."

Of course you do.

"I had a major hallucination in Baja once," said Doti, an Internet software consultant. "There was a guy on the cliff above me but it was late at night, I was tired and so when he started to descend I thought it was a UFO. When it landed, I thought I heard Jesus Christ talking."

And then later everyone sat around and watched Charlton Heston drink a Red Bull while parting the Red Sea.

Why not? When these four friends talked about their hallucinations, when Rigoni described what it was like to take 200 needles out of her thigh after falling into a cactus in Mexico, they did it with relish and zest. Their memories of laughter and pain and suffering have bound their mutual experience. Without those fragrant, delusional episodes, without the extraordinary tale that is adventure racing to tie them together . . .

"I wouldn't be doing it," said Polignone, who owns a specialty chemical company.

It is the juice of life they seek, of disabling the suffocation of their desk jobs for the open air of literally not knowing what's around the corner. For some of us, bowling is an adventure. The Dirty Avocados (there's also a Dirty Avocados II) find joy of entering the unknown where bears and hypothermia lurk.

"It's something about the variety of the sports and their locations," said Rigoni, somewhere around 29.

It's improvising. It's having a tow rope attached to the frame of one mountain bike pulling another Dirty Avocado on the other end.

"We've all been pulled," Doti said.

Embarrassment for slowing down the group, exhaustion from working 22 hours a day in the wilderness, asking for navigational help, it's all part of the rich fabric and lore.

"I don't think about it too much," said Brenda, Doti's wife, of the risks her husband and the others take. Usually when a person approaches middle age, the tendency is to slow down a bit. Adam, 34, has two sons and, frankly, "has ratcheted it up" the past few years.

Did Brenda know what she was getting into when she married Adam eight years ago? "To some extent," she said quietly.

Adventure racing is not a hobby or a weekend basketball game at the Y with the guys. It is not even doing Stairmaster three times a week.

"It's a lifestyle," said Doti, 34.

It's a lifestyle with a never-stated but always-understood dark side. A French woman drowned during an adventure race in Kyrgyzstan in 2003. An Australian man plummeted to his death in 2004 after being hit by a falling boulder in Washington. A Mexican racer drowned in an adventure race in Mexico in 2004.

"It's 11:30 at night at this race in Baja, I'm trying to get to a waterfall and I am traversing a ledge this wide," said Doti, placing the palms of his hands about six inches apart. "And I remember thinking to myself, 'What am I doing here?' "

Doti knew why. He was being pushed to the brink, where sanity becomes unhinged, and then to come back from the edge and being able to live and tell. Like being chased by little people.

"We call them sleep monsters," Armijo said proudly.