On assignment - press coverage of Wilderness Challenge, endurance competition - Brief Article

All Hands, Feb, 2001 by Joseph Gunder

"Covering the Wilderness Challenge in Fayetteville, W.V. gave me a new appreciation for those to participate in these kind of sports. It's one thing to run a PRT, its quite another to walk a six mile forced hike along a hilly wooded path, in the cold.

Just getting into position to shoot pictures required a little extra effort. If I wasn't climbing up hills or down rocks, I was hiking a mile and a half just to get to the big puddles where the bicyclists would take their spills (during the bike relay). In some places, the surface the bikers rode was so soft that it was barely mud at all. I remember taking one step onto what I though was just mud. Instead, my foot sank shin-deep in black gunk! Yet those riders went over that stuff twice, once up and back again.

This was sure a change of pace from editing the Navy News Service."

Gunder is a photojournalist assigned to All Hands and the Navy News Service.