Every year around this time, Chris Caul feels a little twinge of regret. The 41-year-old Goochland resident is the course director for Primal Quest, the premier adventure race in the United States, but he's also a serious adventure racing competitor.

"I almost kick myself every time I sign on to work one of these events, because it means I'm not going to be racing it," the Covington native said. "I just hate that I'm not going to race this because I do love it."

Caul started mountain bike racing in the 1990s, which led to off-road triathlons and eventually to adventure races. In his first race, he and his team got completely lost within 12 hours, because no one knew how to navigate.

"Since then, I've fallen in love with it," he said. "You almost live day-to-day life through adventure racing. My little boy walks around the house with his compass. He's 3 years old."

Primal Quest recently announced that the 2008 race will take place in Montana. And while Caul won't toe the start line with one of the 80-90 coed teams in the field, his consolation prize, if you can call it that, came in October when he and a few other Primal Quest employees did a test run of the course.

"It was just a brutal, brutal 10 days," he said. "We do a lot of map work leading into it, but we hadn't looked at total elevation gain, we weren't that specific at that point. As we started doing it, we realized there'd be about 100,000 feet of elevation gain."

That's not a typo. That's up Mount Everest more than three times. It's the most total elevation gain for any race of any kind - ever. The fastest teams will finish the 450-mile, multi-discipline adventure in five to six days. The cutoff to be out on the course is 10 days. The suffering - disguised as biking, hiking, whitewater swimming and kayaking, rock climbing, rappelling, orienteering and more - begins June 21.

Caul and PQ race director Don Mann, a Williamsburg resident, settled on Montana after looking into possible courses in Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming and Arizona. They wanted the 2008 race to offer different challenges than last year's event in Utah. The vastness of Montana set it apart.

"Our last race was just a phenomenal course. Everyone loved it, and we thought it was going to be hard to match that," Caul said. "When we looked further at Montana, we started realizing that this was not only going to meet Utah but probably exceed it. Once we got on the ground, we found that it exceeded it in every dimension."

The temperatures should be in the 70s and 80 during the day and the 40s at night, a far cry from Utah's 115-degree heat. Caul said competitors definitely will race through snow, even in June. And this being the remote backcountry of Montana, competitors could encounter grizzly bears and mountain lions.

Richmonder Jeremy Kuhlen holds down a day job as a financial planner while training for and competing in adventure races. His team came in 35th in last year's Primal Quest and is shooting for a top-20 finish this year. He'll start ramping up his mileage regimen soon, with the race just seven months off.

"It's just kind of nonstop," he said of the training requirements. "I've been doing endurance racing my entire life, so I've got a pretty good base to build off of. I primarily train in the city of Richmond. The James River Park is my home base."

Like a high school football player in August, Kuhlen will put in two-a-days this spring, biking the city's trails in the morning, then loading up a 30-pound pack and going for a twoor three-hour hike in the afternoon. Some days, he'll add in a paddle in the James River.

Kuhlen and his teammates still are "chasing the demons" from last year, when a mechanical difficulty with a mountain bike cost them half a day of racing. He estimated his team slept 10 total hours in eight days in the Utah desert.

"Some of the longer races, you actually start to feel better toward the end," he said.

That probably seems unlikely, if not outright ridiculous, to those for whom a single all-nighter hasn't happened since college. When you add the element of constant racing to the equation, the challenge Primal Quest poses beggars belief.

"Every aspect of the race is going to be, you almost hate to use the word, but 'epic,'" Caul said. "Epic in elevation gain, and epic in scenery. You can stand in places and see 360 degrees for hundreds and hundreds of miles. You're not going to see a house anywhere."