by Don Mann
He sat in the backseat and let the two guys sit up front. They drove to an intersection, stopped the car, and pulled Christian out. According to witnesses, this took place at around four forty in the afternoon.
The driver pulled out a revolver and shot at Christian six times. One bullet tore into his elbow, another ripped into his abdomen.
Christian lay on the ground screaming, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot!”
A small bespectacled man in his fifties named Bill heard Christian yelling and ran out of his house. He saw the shooter reloading his revolver, ran up to him, and tried to push the pistol out of his hand.
Bill’s actions were heroic, but the shooter was stronger. He shoved Bill aside and raised the pistol.
As Bill yelled, “Don’t! Don’t do it!” the gunman shot Christian in the head.
Later, Marc was overheard bragging in a bar that he had executed the hit for two hundred dollars.
Reports of Christian’s death were all over the evening news, along with footage of his blood on the street. Dawn watched, and then turned to me and said, “Don, I want to go there.”
I said, “No, sweetheart. You don’t want to go there now.”
But she was determined to go. So I drove her to Norfolk and found the intersection. We saw the bloodstains, the bullet holes in the road, and the chalk marks the police had drawn. Dawn even got down on her knees and touched the dried blood. Then she said, “I want to ask the neighbors if any of them saw this.”
We found seven eyewitnesses. One of them told us, “Stuff like this happens around here all the time. It used to be a nice neighborhood, but the gangs have moved in.” When we met Bill, the man who tried to save Christian’s life, Dawn hugged him and told him he was an angel.
A week or so later, we attended what would have been Christian’s graduation ceremony from Old Dominion University. Governor Mark Warner of Virginia called out Christian’s name, walked over to where we were sitting, and handed Dawn her son’s diploma. Christian had graduated with honors.
All of us who had known and loved him were devastated.
As Dawn was going through Christian’s things, she found his diary. In it he described in detail how he was trying to turn his life around. He wrote about his discussions with the police and about the drug dealers he’d turned in. One of them was named Marc. In the last entry, Christian wrote, Marc is going to have me killed.
He knew.
Tremendous anger mixed with guilt burned inside me. I kept thinking to myself that I was the one who had convinced Christian to talk to the police and turn in the drug dealers.
I felt that I had to track Marc down and kill him. It didn’t take me long to locate his address in Virginia Beach, where he was living with his two young daughters.
I didn’t want to harm his girls but I had no problem ending the life of the scumbag drug-dealing murderer who’d killed Dawn’s son. After watching Marc’s house and tracking his movements, I came up with three options for taking him out:
I’d knock on the door, ID him, and shoot him with my .45—twice in the chest, once in the head, the Mozambique drill.
I’d take him out from across the street with a long shot from my M4.
When I was sure that his daughters weren’t home, I’d blow up his house with explosives.
I settled on the first option and had an alibi all worked out. But Dawn knew me well enough to intuit what I was about to do and asked me not to. She said, “I don’t want his daughters to grow up as orphans.”
She’d been following Marc’s case in court. Once, when she was at the courthouse, she’d passed Marc on her way up the stairs. He turned and looked at her with a smirk, as if to say, Yeah, I had your son killed, and no one’s gonna touch me.
I asked her to stop going. Marc was eventually arrested and served a jail term for another crime.
But the incident left terrible emotional scars on all of us.
A couple months later, Dawn and I traveled to Hawaii. While we were there we met an actor from Baywatch who told us that a huge storm was blowing into the northern shore, and it was attracting surfers from all over the world. He explained that it was a weather phenomenon that happened every six or seven years and suggested that we go surfing with him.
I said, “Thanks, but I’m not a surfer.”
He said, “That’s okay, dude. I’ve got this big board with me. And since you’re an athlete, you’ll be fine.”
Dawn didn’t want me to go, but I couldn’t back down from a challenge. As soon as I got in the water, I started to realize that I’d made a mistake. The waves were immense, and the undertow was powerful.
Wearing a leash that connected my foot to the board, I paddled half an hour until I was almost half a mile out, past the surf zone where most of the waves were breaking.
I was so far out, I couldn’t see Dawn, who was nervously pacing the beach, hoping I didn’t hurt myself badly.
Exhausted by the long paddle against the current, I lay on the long board and watched the expert surfers—many of whom were Hawaiian—surf the pipeline the half mile into shore.
As I was lying there on my board, one of the Hawaiians gave me the thumb-and-pinkie Hawaiian wave and pointed to the wall of water behind me. “Hey, dude. This one is going to get you.”
I looked behind me and saw this enormous wall of water collapsing. It hit me like a freight train, causing my board to shoot up and pull me with it into the air. Then I slammed down into the water. I felt like I was stuck in a huge washing machine, going up and down and spinning. All I could do was pray that the board didn’t smash me in the head.
It reminded me of running out of air under the ship. I couldn’t wait to surface and breathe, and I tried to remain calm.
When I started getting close to shore, I got my feet under me, grabbed my leash, and pulled it. At the end of it was a two-foot piece of surfboard. That’s all that was left.
Dawn, who had seen pieces of my surfboard wash up on the beach, looked very relieved when she saw me emerge from the water in one piece.
She said, “Don’t you ever, ever do that again!”
“Don’t worry. I won’t.”
We were married that weekend.
In August of 1998, I reached my twenty-first year in the Navy. Twenty years served was the minimum requirement for retirement. Since there wasn’t a lot going on in the teams, I decided to retire and dedicate myself to adventure sports, racing, and climbing.
It was a difficult decision, which meant letting go of the only job I had ever wanted—being a Navy SEAL. It also required my turning in my weapons, dive and jump gear, and beeper.
I could have stayed for another nine years and probably retired as a CWO5 instead of a CWO3.
But I figured that I was still young and fit enough to complete many of the great adventures I’d been dreaming of doing—including climbing the seven summits, starting with Mount Everest. I’d also have more time to spend with my family.
I didn’t know how I’d make money, but I would work that out later.
Usually when guys retire from ST-6, it’s a big deal with a formal ceremony. But I knew my parents couldn’t make the trip, because my mom was ill with emphysema. So instead, I wrote a letter to all the guys at the command. I talked about how much I respected them and had enjoyed working with them at ST-6. I explained why I didn’t want a big ceremony and ended by saying, This is my good-bye.
I was only forty years old and in excellent physical condition. I thought I’d be spending the next decade or two of my life training, racing, and climbing all over the world.
Chapter Sixteen
The Dirt Circuit
We rejoice in our suffering because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, character produces hope. And hope does not disappoint us.
—Romans 5:3–5
I put the same energy and commitment I had for SEALs into extreme ultra-distance endurance sports. Since I’d paddled, run, and biked the
mountainous terrain of Virginia and West Virginia many times, I knew it was the perfect setting for a long-distance adventure race. It wouldn’t be as dramatic as an event staged in a foreign country, but I figured by holding it in Virginia, I could keep the cost and entry fees low. Instead of having athletes pay twenty thousand or more each and race five hundred miles in ten days overseas, why not produce an event that was just as challenging, three hundred and fifty miles in five days here in the United States?
Together with Joy Marr, one of the first female river guides in the United States and an incredible athlete and event organizer, and Mike Nolan, another exceptional athlete, we founded a company called Odyssey Adventure Racing (OAR) and staged our first event—the grueling Beast of the East. Soon, Dawn joined our team and managed all of the race operations.
I had to sell my beloved Harley-Davidson and mortgage my house to help finance it, but the Beast of the East was a great success. Soon after, my phone started ringing off the hook. Athletes loved the concept of my low-cost, grassroots adventure race and wanted to know if we could organize a shorter race that could be completed over a weekend.
So OAR produced a two-day race, the Endorphin Fix, which became known as the world’s toughest two-day adventure race. Before we knew it, Odyssey Adventure Racing was producing up to twenty-one extreme sporting events a year—including Mega Dose, Odyssey One-Day Adventure Race, Jeep Kentucky Adventure Race, Jeep Kentucky Sprint Race, Expedition British Virgin Islands, Odyssey Triple Iron (7.2-mile swim, 336-mile bike ride, 78.6-mile run), Odyssey Double Iron, Odyssey Half Iron, Odyssey Off-Road (Xterra Qualifier), Odyssey Off-Road Iron (the world’s most difficult triathlon), and the Odyssey Off-Road Half Iron.
The company motto was Your Pain Is Our Pleasure, and I meant this literally.
At OAR, we trained thousands of athletes and helped grow the sport of extreme ultra-distance racing. By the year 2000 OAR had become a burgeoning business, and adventure racing was starting to gain mainstream appeal in the United States.
But we had a competitor in Hollywood producer Mark Burnett (who went on to fame and riches with the TV show Survivor and many others). Mark saw money to be made in the burgeoning sport of adventure racing and organized a televised race called the Eco-Challenge. But many of the serious competitors considered the Eco-Challenge to be a camping trip compared to the Beast of the East.
Mark started calling me all the time. He said, “Don, you’re the hamburger stand down the street that everybody likes going to, but let’s face it, I’m the McDonald’s. Let’s join forces. If anybody wants to do an Eco-Challenge they’ll have to qualify by doing the Beast first.”
The idea appealed to me, but there were two problems. One, I was in it for the love of the sport, and he was in it to make money. And two, he wanted a big cut in my sponsorship money and race fees, which meant that I would lose control of my own events.
Meanwhile, Odyssey Adventure Racing was planning the first world championship, Beast Alaska. Soon, I started getting phone calls from some of the world’s greatest adventure racers. It turned out that Mark had contacted many of the athletes who had registered for the Beast Alaska and were listed on OAR’s Web site and offered them free airfare and sponsorship if they did the Eco-Challenge instead.
One of the most accomplished women in the sport, Jane Hall, called me from New Zealand in tears. She said, “Don, I’m so sorry, but I’m just a poor athlete and had to accept Mark’s offer.”
My next call was from world-champion adventure racer Ian Adamson. He also told me he had received a call from Mark and was dropping out of the Beast Alaska to race in the Eco-Challenge.
Over the next couple of weeks, we lost many of our competitors and a potential broadcast deal with the USA Network. They signed with Mark Burnett instead.
In 1998, I received a call from the U.S. Navy Recruiting Command. They said, “Hey, Don, the Marines have the Marine Corps Marathon. The Army has the Army Ten-Miler. Do you have any ideas for the Navy? We need a way to recruit SEALs.”
I said, “I train guys who want to become SEALs all the time. I put them through two-day-hell weekend training. ”
A few weeks later, I sat down with the people from NRC, a group of lawyers, and some Hollywood producers and presented my plans for a televised forty-eight-hour event called the SEAL Adventure Challenge that would include running through mud and sand, PT drills, diving, and shooting.
They loved it.
I said, “Whatever you do, be careful. Because if Mark Burnett hears about this idea, he’ll steal it.”
Months later, Mark Burnett announced that he was developing a new TV show called Combat Missions, which was very similar to SEAL Adventure Challenge. Combat Missions ran for one season and disappeared.
Despite the challenges I faced in the business end of the sport, my love for extreme-distance adventure sports only grew stronger. It helped that I was training and competing with the world’s most elite adventure athletes.
In April of 2000, I competed with Team Odyssey in the tenth Raid Gauloises, in the Himalayas. Rounding out the team this time were the Crane brothers—Adrian and Dick—Terri Schneider, and Andrew Matulionis. Back in ’83 Dick and Adrian had trekked the length of the Himalayas (3,500 kilometers) in 101 days, carrying only ten pounds of gear, including a camera, one water container, and a pair of socks and one outfit each.
The rivalry between the brothers, who are also best friends, was intense. In 1985 Dick rode a bicycle up Mount Kilimanjaro (19,500 feet), thereby setting the world record for the highest altitude cycled. Adrian broke that record two years later when he bicycled up Chimborazo in Ecuador, approximately 20,500 feet.
Both Terri and Andrew were elite adventure racers. Terri was an Ironman champion, while Andrew was the Iditasport one-hundred-mile champion.
Sixty-nine teams took part in the tenth Raid Gauloises. After two days of acclimatizing to the high altitude of the Tibetan Plateau (average elevation: 14,800 feet), we started on foot with Mount Everest at our side, then completed 800 kilometers of horseback riding, mountain biking, and more trekking. By this point all of us in Team Odyssey were suffering from altitude sickness.
We’d also been warned before the race about possibly running into Maoist rebels who were fighting to overthrow the government of Nepal. During a fifty-mile trek/run section of the course that ended at the Nepalese border, I had to take a bathroom break and told my teammates to continue without me. So I set down my Kelty pack and trekking poles and ducked behind a tree.
But when I returned, I encountered two very unfriendly-looking fellows armed with machetes standing over my pack. When I moved to pick it up, they blocked my way. I started to back off, then quickly lurched forward and grabbed my trekking poles. Now I had something in my hands to defend myself with.
They tried to stare me down, but I wasn’t going to back away. Nor was I going to let them walk off with my pack. I mean, I had a race to finish!
After a few seconds, they turned away and disappeared down the trail.
I caught up with my teammates, and after reaching the Nepal border near Kodari, we continued, canoeing, white-water rafting, and kayaking down the turbulent Sunkosi River. This section concluded with three kilometers of canyoneering, where at one point we had to rappel down a six-hundred-foot waterfall.
Our next challenge was a twenty-three-kilometer section of white-water swimming, where we used fins to help us negotiate the rapids and avoid large boulders. It was like riding a very cold, wet roller coaster.
The race ended in Janakpur, Nepal, after 827 kilometers. Team Nokia from Finland won with a time of six days, twenty-two hours. Despite our best efforts, we finished more than two days later.
In late 2000, Dawn and I went to Hawaii to conduct a team-building event for Seagate Technology, the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives. CEO Bill Watkins had hired me to spend a week training two hundred of his employees in hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, and rappelling, in preparation for the corporate Se
agate adventure race. He saw the race as a way to instill a greater sense of teamwork and accountability throughout his company.
After the race, Bill approached me with an offer. He said that he was willing to invest a million dollars of his own money if I would help create the world’s greatest adventure race—which would be named Primal Quest.
Together with my wife, Dawn, our incredible race staff, and over two hundred volunteers, we planned, conducted, and directed Primal Quest Utah (2006), Primal Quest Montana (2008), and Primal Quest Badlands South Dakota (2009).
Primal Quest Utah turned out to be particularly intense, because competitors faced a course of approximately 420 miles and temperatures exceeding 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The four-member coed teams weren’t allowed to bring support crews, so they had to carry more gear and all of their food.
Race disciplines included mountain biking, trekking, horseback riding, technical rope skills, mountaineering, kayaking, and white-water swimming. The event was broadcast internationally as four one-hour episodes on ESPN2, with a one-hour recap and finale on ABC Sports.
The extreme temperatures had a tendency to produce hallucinations. At the end of one seventy-mile paddle section, a participant thanked me for carving the faces of his family members in stone cliffs along the river.
Also, someone captured videotape footage of a snake crawling onto the hot sand and burning to death. Fortunately our competitors fared better, though we did experience one close call when a male racer suffered heatstroke and fell off his bike as he rode into the town of Moab.
He quickly slipped into a coma and was immediately flown to the regional hospital, where they intubated him and attached him to a respirator. Days later, the athlete started to mumble. Someone handed him a pad and a pencil. He wrote that he wanted food.
Shortly after I retired from the Navy, a retired SEAL buddy called me and asked if I would be interested in serving as a weapons and tactics instructor. I didn’t want to be tied down to a full-time position, but accepted his offer. Soon I was working as an independent contractor teaching weapons and tactics all over the world, including in Serbia, Ethiopia, Romania, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other countries.