My teammates and I were lined up on a beach in Tierra del Fuego with 56 other athletes at the start of the Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race, one of the world’s hardest and most remote adventure races. I’d been physically and mentally gearing up for it since the minute I, along with two other YogaSlackers, was given the opportunity to join Team GearJunkie six months prior. It would be the race of my life.

Two days before I was due to catch a plane to South America, I found myself in the emergency room crying as a doctor told me that I could kiss Patagonia goodbye. In the span of two minutes, I learned the following:

My I.U.D. had failed.

I was 16 weeks pregnant.

I was having a miscarriage.

My insurance had been canceled.

As my body convulsed with the searing pains of contractions, my mind went numb. Jason, my partner in love, adventure and life, and I had had no idea. For the past four months, I’d done three races and taught two advanced AcroYoga Immersions without even knowing. I’d felt off at times—heavy, nauseous, sluggish and moody—but attributed the symptoms to other causes. I’d spent most of my Christmas holiday treating myself for a perceived ulcer as I experienced what I now know was morning sickness.

~

By the next morning, the worst had passed, and I had a new doctor. She had taken the time to visit our website and read through our blogs and had a better idea of my active lifestyle. “I can’t recommend that you do this race,” she said, “but after reading what you are capable of, I won’t say that it isn’t possible.”

In the two days leading up to the race, I was indecisive. My body still had significant healing to undergo, and my emotions were all over the place. I felt like I was going insane. One minute I would be sorting my gear for the race, and the next I would be in the bathroom, trying to find the answers in my own reflection—staring into my tired eyes, as if the solution was going to come pouring out with the tears. I had all the support in the world but still felt weak, scared and very much alone. I clung to Jason more than ever. During the entire hospital stay—the miscarriage, the ultrasound, and even while I was sleeping—he had never stopped holding my hand.

It wasn’t until we had dinner with a local woman who was a possible substitute for me that a switch went off in my head. Wait a second, I thought. This girl is going to compete with my team? She’s gonna be muddy and exhausted, huddled up in a tiny tent with my boyfriend? And I’m going to be sitting in a hotel room, missing out on the race of a lifetime?

Something clicked. The next morning, Jason asked what my decision was.

“We’re going to race!” I said, smiling for the first time in over a week. Jason became solemn.

“You have to want this for you,” he said. “Not for me, not for Daniel, not for Stephen (our teammates)—for you.”

I could see in his eyes how scared he was, how torn, and how hopeful. All I wanted was to keep his hand in mine like it had been in the hospital. And I was willing to cross Patagonia to do it.

~

On the morning of the race, we woke up to a breakfast of champions: white bread and jam with instant coffee. We ate quickly and boarded the bus to the northern tip of the island of Tierra del Fuego, the launch pad for theWenger Patagonian Expedition race, a 350-mile journey through the unexplored river valleys, tangled forests and towering peaks of remote southern Chile. Our footprints would be among the first human ones in the area.

I stepped off the bus with butterflies in my stomach and a hesitant, almost preternatural sense of uncertainty about my ability to handle the trials to come. The barren, rocky beach looked like it belonged in a scene from the post-apocalyptic film The Road. But the austere desolation was not without a wild beauty. I felt like I had crossed into another dimension—like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

Race officials gathered the teams for a final briefing. After a few last-minute instructions, the director shouted, “Welcome to Patagonia!” and fired the gun.

The race kicked off with a burst of color and life as 56 athletes from 10 different countries struck out into the unknown. We are insane, I thought, as I sprinted down the rocky beach, careful to not trip. Glancing over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of Jason, running in the awkward focused gait I had grown to adore.

~

The day I met Jason, I had been driving for 22 hours straight. I walked into the yoga studio for the orientation of my yoga teacher training, blurry eyed from my ultra-marathon behind the wheel. Sitting on my mat, I felt a familiar energy coming from one of the teachers who sat across the circle from me. I stole a glance. A scruffy, weathered face framed with unkempt curly hair gazed back; our eyes locked.

During the break, I introduced myself. I had just biked through Alaska and had spent the last few years guiding rivers and playing in the mountains. I assumed by his earthy smell and wild hair that he liked to play outdoors as well. There was something special about this stranger, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it.

~

The first 36 hours of the race were windy and defeating. Every joint in my body hurt. I can’t remember ever feeling so hungry. I was so weak that Stephen had to carry my pack for the first 13 miles. My weakness frustrated me, and my frustration seemed only to intensify it. Despite the fact that I’d been lying in a hospital bed only five days before, I felt I needed to be as strong as the boys. I wasn’t. My breathing was labored. I repeated the mantra “You got this, Chelsey,” over and over again, but it did nothing to ease my pain or calm the howling winds.

The landscape of northern Tierra del Fuego is a lot like Jason’s home in North Dakota, only with stronger winds. During the first leg of the race, I had to crawl across the high ridgelines while clinging onto my teammate Daniel’s arm just to keep from sailing off the cliff edges. But the whipping winds were a stern midwife, refusing me the luxury of dwelling too much on my emotions. Whenever my mind wandered back to the hospital, the thought would be torn away by a 60-mile-an-hour gale. Like a pumice stone on my body and mind, the wind cleared away all that wasn’t fastened down. For much of the first days of the race, I was silent.

~

My fourth date with Jason was my first adventure race, a 15-mile dash through the mountainous terrain of Reddington Pass just east of Tucson, Arizona. We won the race, and we fell in love. Over the next two years, we helped to develop Team YogaSlackers, an eclectic group of mindful adventurers who use yoga, slackline, acrobatics, endurance sports and expeditions to challenge people (and ourselves) to transcend perceived physical limitations.

Growing up in a small town in Alaska, I always dreamed of having a partner in crime, someone with whom to share my active, spiritual lifestyle. Traveling across the country, I watched Jason bring whole communities together through his compassionate, honest and exploratory teachings. He seemed almost too good to be true.

~

We’d been racing for 32 hours and had been out of food for the last four. We stumbled into the third transition area, ravished the food bag, put our bikes together and were off again. Oh, the bliss of using new muscle groups and having food! The race had demanded my constant attention, allowing me to push all other thoughts to the side. For the time being, I was a happy girl, and was proudly starting to feel my “zen” zone coming on.

We followed muddy trails downhill for miles, racing against the impending darkness. My legs spun circles, and my tires threw muddy bits of Patagonia across my face. When the shadows started playing games and our eyelids grew heavy, the four of us squeezed into a two-person tent to sleep for a few hours. It was my first real rest since starting, and I felt safe burrowed in the dank womb of bodies around me.

~

Upon completing the bike leg, we found ourselves at the start of the infamous “monster trek section”—a 75-mile bushwhack through the heart of the Darwin Mountains, a mostly unmapped area with no trails. The race director had warned us all of difficulties, and despite the field of world-class athletes, he expected fewer than half to make it to the other side.

We set out with enough food, gear and optimism to sustain us for two and a half days. Jason assured me that we would be done in 48 hours. After bushwhacking (technical and dangerous jungle cliff climbing) straight up for five hours, I had a strange urge to paint mud stripes on my face as if I were about to go to war. My handholds had either been a trekking pole, Daniel’s shoe, moss or tree roots—and if any of us had slipped, the consequences would have been dire.

The bushwhacking continued on for the next three and a half days. There were times when we would be averaging less than 1 mile an hour. We hiked up and over mountain passes, crossed rivers, balance-beam walked across hundreds of beaver dams and trudged through miles of turbal (peat bog). The turbal was especially treacherous, with random pockets of thick “quick-mud” that could have swallowed me whole. There was no easy route, and certainly no prescribed one.

~

A few days before my miscarriage, Jason and I had our first real fight. Months on the road with friends and family had worn me down, and I felt like it had been a lifetime since we’d spent time alone together. We’d just arrived at Daniel’s house after a week of team training in San Diego, and the thought of sleeping on another pullout futon was too much. Without warning, I attacked.

“Why don’t you want to spend more time alone with me?” I yelled at Jason, unleashing my pent-up frustrations in a wave of unwarranted emotional fury. “Why is it always us together with your friends?” Jason looked like he had just been Tasered.

I was too angry to wait for his reply. Instead, I walked away. My heart was in my stomach. My head was in a haze. My ears rang. As a yogi, I wasn’t used to succumbing to raw negative energy like that. I sat on the curb, laid my forehead on my knees and started sobbing so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I had committed my first “hit and run.”

Minutes later, I felt Jason’s hands on my back. He kept his hands there until my heaving calmed.

“Are you happy, Chelsey?” he asked. “What can I do to help? Let’s figure this out together.”

~

Jason had been really attentive, and it was comforting to feel him near me in the vast Patagonian wilderness. I stayed close to him, but at the entrance to a canyon named Valle Profundo (Profound Valley), we were challenged with a 150-foot rappel down to the valley floor. As I watched Jason disappear over the edge, I felt a little twinge in my stomach. When it was my turn, I threaded the single tattered rope through the gri-gri, and began to descend cautiously, careful not to knock any of the loose rocks off of the edge. But halfway down, I was stopped mid-rappel when my own hair became stuck in the gri-gri.

Suspended 50 feet in the air, I screamed out. I was scared and alone. Flashbacks from the excruciating cramps and labor pains came flooding back, but this time Jason’s touch and reassuring voice were 50 feet below me.

“You’re OK, baby. You’re OK. What can I do?”

But there was nothing he could do—nothing anybody could do. I was hanging there, alone. I screamed and cursed in pain and frustration, unable to control the words that were coming out of my mouth. My strength reserves sapped, fear and adrenaline took over, making my core shake, forcing out tears. I wanted to go home—but I didn’t even know where home was anymore.

I took a deep breath and grabbed a thick lock of the trapped hair and tore it free from my scalp. I watched as the strands fell through the air. I could see Jason’s faint silhouette down below, helplessly pacing back and forth. I watched the hairs float down toward him and wondered if he would see what I’d done. Then a gust of wind whipped up from the base of the canyon and scattered the hairs across the wilderness. I felt an overwhelming emptiness and sense of loss.

There, at the end of the world, hanging 50 feet above solid ground with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, it hit me. I had lost our baby.

~

A doctor who had heard about my condition was manning the next checkpoint, which was the last point from which a team could be reasonably rescued. If we went on, we would truly be on our own. If something were to go wrong, it would take days before help could reach us.

“You’re looking great!” he said. “Do you feel like you can continue?”

I hesitated, suppressing my body’s and rational mind’s desires to scream, “Of course not! Get me the hell out of here!” Then I looked at him and said, inexplicably, “Yes, I do.”

Obeying some ancient, instinctual command, I was driven to see it to the end—either the race’s or my own. He smiled and nodded. “I had a feeling about you. Good luck!”

The next day, a guanaco (a sleek llama-like animal) appeared on a mountain pass that we needed to cross. We were only halfway through the trek, and Jason’s promised 48 hours had come and gone. Food supplies were low, and the terrain was becoming more difficult. But none of that seemed to matter. The guanaco showed us the way. Following its network of trails, we started to embrace the environment, rather than working against it.

By 2 a.m. on the third night, we had scrambled up to the highest checkpoint of the race, an alpine lake just over 2,000 feet in elevation. One more treacherous pass awaited us and then, according to the maps, it was mostly flat or downhill. A cold hard rain started to fall, and we pitched our tents.

It was blissful to be horizontal. My body had been rocked, my feet were throbbing, and I shivered with a wet cold. I was dirty, smelly and wind-burned, but I was also huddled up with Jason. The empty feeling in my belly was filling up with all the raw, untouched beauty that surrounded me. There was no place I would have rather been.

~

“Daniel, wake up!” Jason shouted. “I’m standing barefoot outside your tent in three inches of snow. It’s a damn blizzard out here, and the Finnish team just passed us! I need a needle, duct tape and Hydropel stat! This shit just got real.”

It was seven in the morning and already fully light—we’d slept through all three of our alarms. Jason was upset. The feelings of complacency and comfort shattered as soon as I looked out of the tent flap. I wanted to close my eyes and go back to warmth and darkness, but Jason started tearing down the tent while I was still in it. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” he said over and over. In his rush, he lost what little organization he possessed. I crawled out of the tent to find him sitting in the snow, barefoot, trying to pop a blister with an old safety pin. “We gotta go!” he shouted.

“It’s gonna be OK,” I said, pulling on my jacket.

Jason was shivering as he stuffed gear into my pack and his own. “Two hours gone!”

The snowflakes pierced our eyes, reducing visibility to less than a foot. For five hours, we marched, inches apart, using one another as windbreaks. Jason, in the lead, was nearly blind in the whiteout. After trekking on turbal for 20 miles the day before, I thought I’d paid my dues. I was wrong. Each step caused our feet to break through the snow crust into the frigid swamp water. But we couldn’t stop. Frostbite and hypothermia were a reality, and we needed to get out of the mountains. We needed to get dry.

The hellish blizzard finally gave way, and the next checkpoint felt like a temperate heaven—complete with a real angel. There, in the middle of the Patagonian wilderness, was a cabin—and a guy in it who made us hot coffee. It was our first warm substance in five days. His coffee, along with the news that there was a rough trail to the end of the trek, was like being reborn. After gulping down our coffee, we took off—and for the next 20 miles, we ran.

~

With only five miles left in the leg, I hit my wall. We were running on an animal trail along the jagged coastline, but it could have just as easily been quicksand. It became harder and harder to pick up my legs. I felt as though someone had strapped 5-pound weights around my ankles. As my legs grew heavier, my spirits sank. Self-loathing and self-doubt dominated my inner cheerleader, shouting, “You are weak.”

Then Jason broke through my inner voices, insisting that I accept a tow. Usually I was happy to be put on tow—the gentle pull from the bungee cord helped me keep pace with the guys. Not this time. In my insecurity, I became jealous and hateful toward Jason. Why was he always so strong? Why was I so weak? I tried to fight off the negative thoughts, but the harder I fought, the angrier I became. Soon, I was yelling at him.

When we finally got to the transition area, I was dazed. We’d just completed one of the hardest, most brutally amazing treks in the world. Despite my mental meltdown, Jason and the rest of the team were all smiling at me. As the media crew converged on us with cameras, Jason and I posed for a kiss—it was Valentine’s Day.

We ate and slept well that night, knowing that only two legs remained—a 49-kilometer kayak through the rough Beagle Channel, and a final trek across the beautiful Isla Navarino.

Snuggled up between Jason and Daniel that night, I felt a bittersweet sense of relief. I could taste the end. I knew that we would finish the race. But I was conflicted. I’d been so focused on finishing that I hadn’t had time to process our loss. I was scared of facing the reality that would come in the quiet after the race.

~

Our kayak bobbed in the choppy waters of the Beagle Channel; with Daniel as my co-pilot, I felt invincible. I was in my element. Jason and Stephen, on the other hand, were struggling.

“Chelsey, I need to switch paddles with you,” Jason hollered over the waves and wind.

Angry thoughts filled my head again. I was the smallest and therefore needed the lightest paddle. I closed my eyes, fighting the selfish desire to lay claim. I knew he could get a more powerful stroke with it, which is what he and Stephen (and our team) needed. But still!

I could see the other teams gaining on us. Then I realized something: Jason had suffered just as much as I had, if not more. We were in this together, and now it was my turn to be strong. I handed over the paddle.

~

The last leg to the finish line was a furious scramble over a slimy, rocky beach covered in razor-sharp mussel shells. It was nighttime; I was exhausted; and with no light, the danger of injury was high. My stomach was tied in a knot. It hurt to drink. My trembling legs no longer obeyed. I had lost my ability to balance and was forced, exhausted, to observe my own body helplessly as it pushed in exaggerated, lumbering steps—each accompanied by a stinging pain—toward the finish.

Jason was a short distance in front of me. Daniel and Stephen had run up ahead to shine a light back for us, but there was no sign of them. Breathing in short, labored puffs, I pushed through the darkness. I slipped and crashed and rolled my ankle. I stumbled and crawled across the beach, pushing harder and harder for the finish. Two hundred yards from the finish line, a mussel slashed the outside of my ankle. I fell to the ground and let out a howl. Jason scrambled back to my side, but while attempting to steady me, he slipped and sliced his hand on a rock. We stood up as one, our extremities streaming blood. Screaming and grunting in pain and exhaustion, we pushed with everything our bodies had toward the final embankment.

Then, in an explosion of illumination and relief, it was over. As we crested the hill to the finish line, bright lights washed over our filthy, broken bodies; cameras flashed in our faces and champagne glasses twinkled like constellations. Jason and I shared a glance. We were speechless. There were no words, no kisses. As we sat there in bewilderment, he simply reached out and held my hand. The race had ended in an instant—and suddenly I realized that, after almost seven days of constantly going, there was nowhere else to run.

~

Immediately following the race, the anxiety set in. I was worried about transitioning back into the real world alone. Things like bills, cars, computers and even grocery shopping made no sense. After experiencing life in the wilderness, society seemed pallid and gray.

The next afternoon, we were transported to a cute little fishing village called Puerto Williams, where we were met by dozens of men, women and children, all of whom were glowing with what seemed to be a sense of what we’d just been through. It felt like going home to the tiny Alaskan towns of my youth, even though, geographically speaking, I couldn’t have been farther away.

At the closing ceremony back in Punta Arenas, Jason proposed to me. On the stage, accepting our medals for a fourth-place finish, he quieted the room. He started out his speech by talking about how hard the trek had been, and how far we had come as a team—then, before I knew it, he was down on one knee.

“Chelsey, if you could survive that trek, then maybe you can survive life with me,” he said, smiling. “Will you marry me?”

My heart was pounding so hard I thought it was going to leap out of my chest. I let out a teary, muffled “YES!” and then we kissed to the roar of the crowd.