The team name is an acronym referring to the accidental ingestion of debris. They wear funny yellow rainsuits. But Team WEDALI, a Minnesota-based squad who often parenthesizes its full moniker — “We Eat Dust And Like It!” — boasts one of the strongest adventure racing rosters in the land. That prowess was demonstrated last weekend in Kentucky at the Adventure Racing Championship, the season finale event in the Checkpoint Tracker race series that attracts many of the nation’s top teams. At the 24-hour race, WEDALI literally smoked the course and crushed the competition. They won by a wide margin, finishing more than an hour ahead of second-place Team SOG/Tecnu Extreme. (Team GearJunkie/YogaSlackers, a squad sponsored by this site, took 6th place in the event.) WEDALI won $5,000 and immense street cred in the sport for the victory. Here’s a Q&A with team captain Justin Bakken, the 31-year-old Minnesotan who co-founded WEDALI in 2003.

Gear Junkie: What is WEDALI’s secret? You continue to kick butt at almost every race you attend.
Justin Bakken: We’re out there to have fun at every race, no exceptions — we love to play in the woods and really enjoy the camaraderie that comes with overcoming challenges during adventure racing. We’ve got a great crew of family and friends that support us in our endeavors and the AR scene is an awesome community. Also, racing with the same teammates for a long time is like playing in a rock band — you get better and better with each show. I’ve been racing with Scott Erlandson for nine years now! Jason and Andrea Nielsen, the other half of the team for this race, are married so they obviously have that connection, too.
At the Adventure Racing Championship, what was the most unexpected part of the course?
Definitely the “noodle rafting” challenge. We had to tie pool noodles together and float across a bay at night. Unfortunately, the noodles worked their way apart 100 meters from shore and our raft broke in half. Scott went swimming, and it was cold out! Frost on the ground. We ended up carrying the raft parts on a run around the bay and back. We laugh about it a lot now, but it wasn’t funny at the time!

How did the big orienteering section go? Smooth or any errors?
Really well overall. It was about 20 miles long and it took us 6.5 hours. Our crew kept a decent pace throughout and we didn’t have any major navigation errors. A couple of times we missed a reentrant or a spur, but we were able to correct fairly quickly and probably only lost a total of 20 to 25 minutes over the course.

