By Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer
Daily Press
Copyright 2008 Daily Press
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Five minutes ago, Patrick Cronyn was paddling hard in his canoe. Ten minutes from now, he’ll be sprinting through the woods. But right now, he has been struck by lightning, he has a broken arm, and his teammates, Branden Reid and Patrick Finklea have to fix it before they can move on in their race.
In less than five minutes, they’ve immobilized his arm using a portable splint made from wire and padding and some tape that amounts to glorified saran wrap. Meanwhile, a team nearby has improvised even more wildly, cobbling together a makeshift splint out of sticks and branches.
Neither team is done yet. Cronyn — whose arm wasn’t really broken — will have to help fix a dislocated shoulder and revive a person who is not breathing and has no pulse before they can get their new set of coordinates and take off. And the pressure’s on.
Welcome to the strange world of medical wilderness adventure racing, or MedWAR, for short: where competitors break up a day spent running, biking, and canoeing through the woods with challenges like fixing a gunshot wound, or helping a person who has fallen while ice climbing.
Thirty-six teams, made up mostly of doctors, medical school students and emergency medical technicians, spent more than seven hours racing through Newport News Park on Saturday, leaping over fallen logs, guiding themselves from point to point by compass, then stopping to answer questions like “Which of the following drowning scenarios has the best prognosis?”
“It’s a new challenge, trying to do this stuff without all the fancy equipment,” said Samara Lazernick, a fourth-year medical student at Eastern Virginia Medical School who helped organize this year’s race. “You get your hands dirty, literally.”
This is the second year Newport News Park has hosted the Mid-Atlantic MedWAR race.
The race was started in 2000 by emergency department physicians and students at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta who wanted to combine their love for the outdoors with their chosen profession.
Adventure racing takes competitors off the beaten path for races that can last hours, even days, and involve a combination of running, mountain biking, canoeing and even ropes courses. It can be dangerous too, for participants who don’t know what they’re doing. Wilderness medicine, meanwhile, is its own subset of emergency medicine, designed to handle situations that take place in the middle of nowhere, where help can be hours away. A match made in heaven, right?
Since 2000, Michigan, New York, Canada and Virginia have held MedWAR races.
On Saturday, racers came from Baltimore, Md., Durham, N.C., and as far away as New York to compete, wearing shirts that represented their medical schools or contained slogans such as “We do Trauma, not Drama,” for a group of EMTs. Their scenarios ranged from testing proper tick-extraction techniques to helping people trapped in an ice cave to treating a sucking chest wound from a gunshot.
Not everyone who entered had a medical background, Lazernick said; she knew of at least one accountant. Plus, she said, wilderness medicine holds some allure for anyone who likes to spend time outside.
“It’s survival skills,” she said. “You have to use what’s around you.”