Installment #21 in Monolisticle's Ongoing Campaign Against the "Internet of Endless Listicles."
I've always wanted to go to Fiji.
I have these idyllic images in my mind of white-sand beaches. Sun-dappled groves of palm trees. And lounging in the luxury of my own private thatched hut hovering above the clear greenish-blue waters of the South Pacific.
And then, apparently, there is the other way to experience Fiji: Exhausted. Battered. Sleep-deprived. Blistered. And near-hypothermic.
Welcome to "The World's Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji."
While it may not be my own personal idea of how best to enjoy Fiji, it would be, in its own way, the experience of a lifetime, and one that left me in profound awe of my fellow humans.
The 10-episode series documenting this endurance race, produced by reality TV guru Mark Burnett, recently launched on Amazon Prime, and Burnett pulled out all the stops with this one.
First of all, you have the single most difficult endurance race in the history of endurance races: a 415-mile ocean-canoeing, hiking, biking, paddleboarding, and cliff-climbing expedition across, between, and around the mountainous islands of Fiji.
But because it’s produced by Mark Burnett—who knows better than anyone how to tell the personal stories of contestants—you have so much more. You have drama. You have danger. You have perseverance. You have redemption. You have competitors from all over the globe. You have young, middle-aged, older. You have fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, twins, best friends, and rivals. You even have, at particularly poignant times, transcendence.
Oh, and just to make sure there’s no chance you won’t be binge-watching this the entire weekend, let’s throw in ultra-charismatic survivalist star Bear Grylls as the host, presenter, and on-the-ground interviewer/advice-giver/pep-talker doing his thing.
Some viewers have criticized the series for not telling more stories beyond the five or six key teams that it focuses on. And while I agree with that criticism from the perspective of a curious-spectator-wanting-to-know-more, I also completely understand how attempting to show every single team would dilute the story of those it does show. My vote would be to simply add more episodes. I could easily have watched ten more (no, I’m not kidding). It’s that enthralling.
In further defense of Burnett’s approach, I actually got a lump in my throat several times while watching it (I mostly blame that on two American teams, Team Endure and Team Onyx. Team Endure includes legendary endurance athlete Mark Macy, who attempts the race with his adult son, Travis, despite being 65 years old and having Alzheimer's; and Team Onyx is the first all-Black team in expedition racing and whose individual stories are so inspiring). When was the last time you got tears in your eyes watching an Ironman on TV?
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All that said, this race would have been captivating even without the emotional back-stories of the competitors. As an athlete myself, I was in constant awe of the sheer distances covered by the teams, not to even mention the difficulty of the mountainous climbs, or the drastic temperature changes—from the heat of the ocean crossings to the ice cold of the river swims, to the muddy, rocky, slippery terrain throughout.
By itself, each individual leg of the race between checkpoints would stand alone as an extraordinary feat. Extraordinary. It is the equivalent of completing several Ironman races in a row, and with only a few hours of sleep across a potential 11-day span. To put it into perspective, the winning team completed the course in 141 hours and 23 minutes. By comparison, a decent Ironman time finish is about 12 hours. To move practically nonstop with virtually no sleep for 141 hours is simply mind-boggling.
As we all attempt to endure the challenges we’re currently facing in our own lives, we need something like this to remind us how strong we truly are. It is a much-need example of the greatness that human beings are capable of, not only physically, but mentally. Through the course of ten episodes, we vicariously experience the grit and determination of the teams, and through the touching example of the Fijian people themselves (who open their humble villages and homes to help racers along the way), we even experience our own human capacity for generosity and goodness.
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