All I could think about, waist deep in a swamp in Pocahontas State Park, was the ominous prerace briefing from race director Joe Moerschbaecher: "We saw a lot of snakes out there, so be careful."

That and a scene from the classic'80's movie "Stand By Me" that takes place in a mucky marsh similar to the one I was in and ends with this realization: "Leeches!"

Funny where the mind goes when the body is put in bizarre circumstances.

I was in this bog with teammate and college friend Jay Miller, looking for an orienteering checkpoint during the inaugural Primal Quest Sprint Series adventure race - a roughly six-hour mental and physical trial that brought pain in the form of running (10 miles), mountain biking (15), flat-water kayaking (4), navigation, a ropes course and various challenges that involved hoisting a huge log. As you can imagine, we were in for a long day.

It was a strategic decision that brought us to this soggy crossroads: Find the checkpoint and get a 20-minute time credit. Fail and all that slogging through snake-infested waters would only put time on the clock and fatigue on the legs.

"Dude, do you see anything?" Jay asked.

"Nothing," I said. "But it's got to be here somewhere."

We never located that checkpoint (or any snakes), but we did find the other three navigation points during the run portion of the race. They bought us an hour's worth of time credits, but we probably spent 45 minutes looking for them. Still, the time bonus jumped us from 24th (next to last) to 18th when we broke the tape 6:39 after starting - not bad, we thought, for our first race.

Chris Caul is the race director for the 10-day version of this race, the original Primal Quest, which bills itself as "The World's Most Challenging Human Endurance Competition."

This year's event - 500 miles and more than 100,000 feet of total elevation gain - goes off in a little more than a month in Montana. Every year, the race draws great interest and gets solid TV ratings, but, Caul said, they've seen a leveling off of interest in adventure racing nationally.

"No matter how many people want to watch it on TV, there's only a small group that's interested in doing those [expedition-length] events," the Goochland resident said. "We see that a lot of new folks are not getting into the sport because I guess they're challenged by the idea of doing such a long race. We wanted to figure out a format that would be both fun and challenging for both seasoned athletes and new folks."

Primal Quest owner Don Mann, a former Navy Seal who lives in Williamsburg, came up with the idea of putting on "sprint" distance Primal Quest races around the country. He wanted the events to be tough, but not so difficult that they drove away interested athletes. Of course, only in the slightly insane world of adventure racing is six hours a sprint.

"A 10-day, 500-mile race seems like it's tough," Caul said to me after the race. "But you did a six-hour race, do you think you could do a 24-hour race? And if you could do that, you could do a five-day race. And if you can do one of those, Primal Quest is not far off."

That's the kind of thinking that's gets people bitten by snakes and leeches. But Caul wouldn't have it any other way: "I'm one of those people who like leg cramps. They refresh you and make you know you're alive."

This year PQ will put on similar races in Pittsburgh and Charlotte, N.C. They plan to expand to eight events in 2009.

By 2010, who knows? When they introduced the idea to the adventure racing community through the Primal Quest Web site, they got responses from groups that wanted to host a race in 50 states and three countries. The demand, and room for growth, clearly is there.

Based on Saturday's race, they already have a solid foundation. Almost 70 percent of the teams were first-timers such as Jay and I. And like the two of us, they had to work through the inevitable ups and downs of a race this long.

We both felt strong during the run and navigation portions of the race. We made sure to fuel up during the transition to the mountain bike. But Jay struggled through leg cramps and lack of energy during the bike leg. I returned the favor on the open-water paddle on Swift Creek Lake, complaining bitterly while Jay plugged along and kept us afloat. When we got to the logs and ropes, we each took a turn cursing our fate but finally touched the finish line together.

Adventure racing truly is conflict resolution on the fly.

Matching personalities is as important as matching athletic ability. Negativity will kill the spirit faster than any physical challenge.

As Caul said, "You just have to have in your mind that anything, in fact, everything, is achievable."

We may not have been the fastest team, but we worked well together and, later that night, reflecting on the race, we were actually able to say we enjoyed the experience.

Of course, had you asked us when we were waist deep in that snake-filled swamp, you might have gotten a different response.