Cape man pushes body to the extreme in search of extraordinary adventure

It had been about 250 miles and more than 60 hours when Bryan Greaser reached the top of the world. Sixty hours since civilization. Sixty hours since anything that truly met the definition of "sleep." Sixty hours since a meal that any normal person's digestive system wouldn't consider an assault on its better nature. Sixty hours since his body had been in anything but survive-and-compete mode.

The sun was just beginning to set on the Wyoming horizon, and suddenly the mountainous climb became a tabletop in the sky. Greaser and his three other race teammates reached the summit and looked around at a vast, alien landscape. They knew they had been going up, but here, among the peaks, was nothingness.

"I was just looking around thinking this road looks like it just goes on forever, but we're high up on a mountain top," Greaser says. "It's just flat as you can see. Not a tree in sight, not even a rock in sight."

The 45-year-old Cape Girardeau lifer and his team looked out upon the mesa and began to push forward on their mountain bikes.

It is a key practice of expedition adventure racers -- CFM. Constant. Forward. Movement.

Cape Girardeau lawyer Bryan Greaser recently completed the Cowboy Tough adventure race, a 3 -day trekking, biking and paddling competition in Wyoming. Greaser was a three-sport athlete at Notre Dame Regional High School and played baseball for one year at Southeast Missouri State.Photo courtesy of Bryan Greaser

And then the storms. First, cloud lightning in a distance. (OK, no worries.) Then the electricity giving the Earth its lashes. Cloud to ground; jagged fissures in the nighttime sky. (OK, pulses rising).

With exactly nowhere in sight to offer cover among the sky and flat dirt beneath their tires, there was little choice. No choice, really. Constant. Forward. Movement.

"Lightning really is a threat in mountain environments, especially when there's no cover anywhere," Greaser says. "You can see that storm off in a distance and you're kind of putting your head down and keeping an eye on it.

"But at that point, we didn't really have a choice. There was nothing we could do other than keep blasting on."

The telling of his story indicates that Greaser won his game of chicken with nature, with death. It is, he says, the most worried he's been that his life was on the line and he was not in control -- not something to be taken lightly coming from someone who has been pushing his body to the limit for the past decade.

It's a far cry from Greaser's athletic beginnings in Southeast Missouri. Or from his current daily toil. But he's chosen to live his life by three simple letters -- CFM.

In mid July, with sweltering temperatures beating down on the banks of the Mississippi, Greaser's movement took him 1,000 miles away, upward and onward. Toward the mountaintops. Toward the sky.

"I really, really love the mountains. I can't put my finger on it. My wife asks me that, too," Greaser says with a laugh. "We're driving and they come into view and I'm just, 'Wow, look at that,' and she just kind of looks at me and says, 'It's not doing it for me here. What are you seeing?'

"I don't really know. Maybe my brain, it just hits a switch where, 'Adventure is in those mountains.'"

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A group of mountain bikers compete during the Cowboy Tough expedition race July 14-17 in Casper, Wyoming. Cape Girardeau's Bryan Greaser completed the 3 -day adventure race with his four-person team.Photo courtesy of Bryan Greaser

Greaser grew up in Cape Girardeau with seven siblings, all brothers. A three-sport athlete -- baseball, basketball and soccer -- at Notre Dame Regional High School, he played one season of baseball at Southeast Missouri State; he later earned his law degree from the Oklahoma City School of Law. He's been a lawyer for 18 years and runs his own practice in Cape.

His office is polished but unassuming, the adventure Greaser chases little but hints and whispers -- a globe in the waiting room, a smaller model on the bookshelf behind Greaser's desk, among legal tomes and photographs of his wife and two daughters.

Greaser migrated to endurance sports from his more traditional ball-and-stick upbringing, starting, as many do, with marathons. But, he says, that became too run-of-the-mill for his taste. He wanted something more exotic.

"Oprah Winfrey has done a marathon. Puff Daddy, or whatever he calls himself now -- P Diddy -- has done a marathon," Greaser says. "So I kind of said, 'OK, it's getting to be too normal now. I need to do something more extreme.'"

First there were ultramarathons, like an off-road 50K through the mountains of northern Arkansas. That slaked the yearning for a while, but like an addict whose tolerance grew with each outing, the itch for more persisted.

He took part in his first adventure race 10 years ago. More miles, more hours, more disciplines. Joining forces with a Russian and a Czechoslovakian he had found on the internet, Greaser helped the trio win its division and finish third overall in a 15-hour race in West Virginia.

It was a case of the big fish hooking him.

"I really enjoy pushing my body to limits that you really wouldn't think your body can handle," Greaser says. "I like to tell people the body is far more capable than the mind would have you believe. I love seeing how adventure racing illustrates that. It's incredible what you can do."

Adventure races last anywhere from hours to days to weeks; they involve multiple disciplines, most commonly hiking, biking and paddling.

"Whatever you enjoy most is whatever you're not doing at that moment," Greaser says with a smile. "When you're on your bike for miles and miles, you wish you were canoeing. When you're canoeing and your lower back is getting sore and you can't get out of that canoe soon enough, you're praying to get back on that mountain bike. And whenever you're trekking through thickets and bushwhacking on your feet for eight, 10 hours at a time, you're ready to get back in your canoe."

Greaser undertook his first multi-day adventure race, termed expeditions, in 2014 -- Untamed New England in the wilds of Maine's central highlands.

It was a competition that drew top adventure-racing teams from across the world and lasted four days. According to Greaser, even the planet's best teams called it one of the toughest races they'd attempted to conquer, and it was his first. His team couldn't even complete the race, and he was forced to jump to another team mid race.

That's the thing with expedition races -- there's winning and there's just getting to the finish line, and for many they're one and the same.

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Cape Girardeau's Bryan Greaser, in back, stops during a mountain bike leg of the 3 -day Cowboy Tough adventure race to take a photo with USMES teammates Ron Flick, Shannon Gaffney and Jim Weinstein. The competition sent the team over more than 400 miles around Casper, Wyoming on foot, bike and kayak.Photo courtesy of Bryan Greaser

The governor of Wyoming, Matt Mead, saw them off at 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning. Greaser and his fellow mountain bikers had been waiting since 4:30, eager, it would seem, to turn their backs on a good night's sleep.

They set out on a 30-mile ride down paved greenway trails out of Casper. As Greaser put it, those 30 miles were just "the tip of the iceberg."

They spent the next 3 1/2 days running on sleep counted in minutes rather than hours, fueled by gels and jellies rather than anything resembling food. Their most intimate friends would be each other, exhaustion, dehydration and malnutrition.

Within two hours, Greaser reached the North Platte River, where two-person kayaks had been laid out for the racers at what's called a transition area. This was TA1, and it signaled the 80 miles and 17 hours of paddling to come.

That was at 8 a.m. By the time Greaser and his four-person United States Military Endurance Sports (USMES) team -- Greaser the only non-military competitor in the group -- guided their pair of kayaks to the Glendo Reservoir, darkness was upon them, as was the cold. And the wind.

The danger of capsizing, and the resulting hypothermia, was real, so the team acted accordingly, pushing close to the shore and eventually, as they began to fall asleep in their boats, stopping to get some shut-eye.

"If you lose a teammate due to injury or something like that, you're not official finishers," Greaser says. "That's happened to me before. It's happened a lot. It's hard to keep four people healthy and cross that finish line."

And so the group pulled ashore. Sleep is a relative term on an adventure race. Racers don't carry sleeping bags in their packs, so the ground -- in this case, rocks -- is their only pillow; a mandatory fleece layer the only comfort as the team huddled together and closed their eyes. Sleep, though, rarely actually comes.

Within an hour, Greaser and company recognized that fact, picked up and hit the water again at 3 a.m.

After restocking calories and water at the next transition area, Greaser headed south-southwest on a 35-mile mountain bike leg with the race's first hike looming.

Cape Girardeau resident Bryan Greaser, second from right, poses with his U.S. Military Endurance Sports team at the Cowboy Tough expedition race July 14-17 in Casper, Wyoming. The lone non-military member of the team, Greaser helped his unit complete the 3 -day, multiple-discipline competition.Photo courtesy of Bryan Greaser

Ditching their bikes, the team bushwhacked -- a free-wheeling hike that spurns the easiest route for the straightest, shortest one -- to Medicine Bow National Forest, 60 miles outside of Laramie. There's always the risk of getting disoriented, the dense forest turning into a fun house of mirrors, circles and dead ends, but Greaser has learned to rely on his map and to trust his compass.

"If you're out in the woods or driving down the highway and you see the thickest woods and weeds and everything possible, we go through that sometimes, just pushing and getting hung up on briars, but you just blast through that stuff and throw caution to the wind," Greaser says. "You're in poison ivy, ticks, everything.

"When we dropped down into the Medicine Bow National Forest, that transition area ... we really knew, 'Hey, this is where the race really starts.'"

It was nearly all mountain biking from that point on, and the USMES team remained busy calculating the distance and obstacles left to traverse, plotting out some sort of big-picture plan, even if nature constantly threatened to bludgeon that plan to bits.

The terrain carried the cyclists up and down, through rolling hills with miles of Wyoming landscape surrounding them -- flatness interrupted by its antithesis, a polygraph of the guilty. There were no towns. No houses. No people. Nothing except dirt, rock and Wyoming.

As Saturday's sun passed the racers off to the moon, Greaser came upon the mesa. With the air buzzing with electricity and the Wyoming winds picking up again, USMES found a ditch and lay down. The results were the same -- after an hour of sweeping winds and no sleep, the team got ready for the challenge ahead.

Greaser shoveled in some calories -- racers try to maintain a calorie intake of at least 100 per hour -- and was off toward Muddy Mountain.

The 8,287-foot mountain was, as Greaser describes it, "a bear," and it was only the first of a pair of craggy, terrestrial waves in some iceberg's ancient breadcrumb trail.

After climbing and then descending Muddy Mountain, Greaser's team almost immediately found itself climbing again, this time Casper Mountain.

But the pot of gold on the other end of the 8,130-foot-high rainbow was the finish line, the city of Casper glittering in the Sunday morning sun.

"It's exhilarating," Greaser says. "You've got a lot of emotions really. You've got, 'Holy cow,' because the views were fantastic.

"You come to the realization that you've just battled for three days, there's the finish line, it's in sight, we are going to make it."

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Cape Girardeau resident Bryan Greaser, second from right, stands with USMES teammates Ron Flick, Shannon Gaffney and Jim Weinstein. The four-person team completed the 3 -day Cowboy Tough race in Wyoming on July 14-17.Photo courtesy of Bryan Greaser

Five months earlier, Greaser was in Belize -- 8,800 square miles of Mayan haunts, Caribbean coastline, swamp, rugged rainforest and mountains -- for his first international expedition race, and anticipation was high.

"It was going to be a fantastic race," Greaser says. "Belize has a lot to offer."

Late on the first night of the four-day, 320-mile race, Greaser's team transitioned from a 25-mile stretch of whitewater canoeing into a long, ascending bike climb to a Mayan ruin. But what goes up must go down, and Greaser eagerly bombed down the other side, descending at close to 25 miles per hour.

That was when his tire hit a rut in the road left behind by a jeep, and his head and shoulder hit the ground. The impact rocked Greaser, dislocating his shoulder and leaving him in extreme pain in the middle of the rainforest, 13 miles from any sort of assistance.

Greaser knew the injury was bad, but he had no choice -- Constant Forward Motion. He rode the 13 miles with one arm, screaming out into the darkness with every bump and pothole in the jungle path.

"Like riding a washboard," Greaser says. "My teammates probably thought I was putting on, that nobody would actually be screaming out in pain like this, but it was real, and it was probably the worst pain I've ever had."

It's unclear which he felt in greater volume -- the pain or the disappointment. All the money he invested in the trip was gone. All the time away from his wife and daughters could not be recovered. All the man-hours at the office lost.

Making it all the worse, Greaser missed the final three quarters of the race. His Belizean adventure had been stolen from him.

When he returned to the United States, he learned he also had fractured his scapula, not to mention more superficial damage to the muscles and ligaments in his shoulder. But the disappointment fueled him.

The prognosis was a six-week recovery, and Greaser bombed through it the way he would a mountain-side descent. Two months after the accident, he was racing in a 24-hour event in Georgia. Five months later, he was in Wyoming.

"One of our phrases in adventure racing is 'Embrace the suck,' because there are plenty of aspects of the race that suck," Greaser says. "... That's life too. We all have points in our lives where it's, 'This really stinks. I can't believe I'm dealing with this.' Embrace it. Deal with it. Overcome it. That's really what adventure racing is all about."

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Cape Girardeau's Bryan Greaser recently completed the 3 -day Cowboy Tough expedition adventure race in Casper, Wyoming. A former three-sport athlete at Notre Dame Regional High School and a baseball player at Southeast Missouri State for one year, the race required Greaser and his four-person team to traverse more than 400 miles on foot, mountain bike and kayak.Photo courtesy of Bryan Greaser

Exhaustion, dehydration, malnutrition, hypothermia -- all regular parts of the expedition race lexicon. Those things in the trees in the middle of the night? Probably just sleep deprivation-induced hallucinations.

A look at the website for Rev3 Adventure, the company that put on Cowboy Tough, reveals warnings of rattlesnakes, mountain lions and bears.

To be able to participate in Cowboy Tough, Greaser had to sign a liability waiver wiping the host company's hands clean of any wrongdoing in case of severe injury or death. Perished in the mountains of Wyoming due to a rattlesnake bite? Sorry about your luck, but thanks for playing.

There are no surprises; Greaser is a lawyer -- he always reads the fine print.

He insists defying death is not the reason the races appeal to him. He has a pact with his wife that he will return home from every race, and if anything were to legitimately threaten that, he would pull the plug.

He doesn't want death-defying, he just wants epic, and sometimes the mundanity of everyday life doesn't offer that.

"When I say epic, the things we're doing in these races we look at each other and constantly say, 'Our family and friends back home would not believe the things we're doing right now,'" Greaser says.

"When you're talking about racing for three and four days on 20 minutes of sleep a day ... We're racing hundreds of miles all day and night while we're also dehydrated and malnourished. That's what makes the whole event epic."

He refers to the tedium of work, eat, sleep as "Groundhog Day" -- just going through the motions. Adventure races force him into a new zone of being.

"I guess I've never really considered myself to be like everybody else," Greaser says. "Michael Jordan, I think, had a quote I like -- 'I didn't come here to be ordinary.'"

That first night on the reservoir in Wyoming, 80 miles east-southeast of his team's starting point, the team pulled ashore, choosing safety over whitecap waves and wind. (The news came later that two teams capsized and were treated for mild hypothermia.)

Greaser lay on the shore, his back against the rocks and his face to the vast inkiness above him. There he found his extraordinary.

He counted shooting stars -- four of them -- slipping loose to prattle through the darkness. He gazed at a crystal clear Milky Way, mapping out a whole other sort of adventure above him, from horizon to horizon.

"It was just unimaginable," Greaser says. "It was like some of the coolest pictures you can see on the internet. Just as far as you can see.

"We just all kind of looked up and it's just, 'I can't believe I'm here in this moment,' and you feel very lucky to see something that very few people out there are seeing and doing.

"You go through these really highs and lows. You can kind of equate it to life. You know, 'Hey, I endured something that in that moment felt like I was going to die, and I got out of it.' You apply that to life -- you can really, when you put your mind to it, do anything you want to do and overcome anything you need to overcome, and that's what's really cool about it."

In the adventure of life, there is always constant forward movement.