Desert High

He lives with Chelsea and their 150-pound Great Dane, Winston, in a suburban Arlington townhouse, where the new-home smell lingers, around the corner from his mom, who still lives in Frank's childhood home. (Frank's father died in 2005.) They live quietly: 10 p.m. bedtime, Mass every Sunday. Despite a few gray flecks in his dark-brown hair, Frank looks younger than his 40 years. He is 5-foot-10, with a square face sitting atop strong shoulders, and strong-man muscles that push his arms out slightly from his sides, a consequence of many hours at the gym. Frank isn't a born athlete. His mom, Marie Fumich, proudly recalls the only touchdown he ever scored, in his last high school football game.

Frank says he started running because it hurt. In 1997, his aunt was battling cancer. To suffer in solidarity with her, and though he had never run a long race, he signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington. He trained for a mere two months, yet still finished in 3 hours 50 minutes -- not too shabby, considering his lack of preparation, he says. Now he enters marathons as training for races like the Atacama. He usually finishes in the top 30 percent.

As for the folks back home, he says, "I don't really give them all the details about what it's like out here," at such races. "I don't think they'd really understand."

The people who do understand are the ones running with him. Which is why Frank, a relative lone wolf in races before this one, decided to try a new twist on the 4 Deserts: binding his fate to a three-man team. Frank met Mike and Pete in June 2007 at the Gobi March through northwest China, another 4 Deserts race. Each day, the Aussies would jolt out too fast; Frank would start out slow and inevitably pass them (a pattern he calls "reeling in the next fish"). So they've named him team captain. "I'm actually in charge of being slow," Frank laughs, "rein us in a bit."

The Aussies each have an array of Ironman medals hanging on their walls back home (Mike has nine; Pete, 10), and both have been taking on marathons and other ultra-athlete events for 19 years. Mike, 41, is built heavier than his teammates and claims to be the slowest runner. He's thrilled to have escaped his corporate sales job outside Sydney for a week, but he carries a letter from his three young daughters and stands in line each evening for his turn at a generator-powered laptop, where he can read e-mails from his family Down Under.

Pete, 34, is the single guy and the tallest of the three, with long arms, a lean build, a strong jaw and a signature squint. He's impulsive but watchful, and when he chimes in, it's usually with the punch line. In his 9-to-5 life, he's a systems engineer for a racetrack-betting organization in Sydney.

RacingThePlanet is a for-profit company that organizes these types of races in deserts around the world. Ultra-racer Mary Gadams founded the organization in 2002, signing up 42 competitors, and participation has grown to 500 registrants for this year. Gadams attributes part of its success to its relative accessibility: Anyone can enter by paying the course fee and passing a medical checkup on arrival. But don't equate accessible with easy, as evidenced by a 10 to 15 percent average dropout rate, which doesn't include the 15 percent who end up walking most of the course because of exhaustion or injury.

Competitors qualify for Antarctica, the most prestigious of the 4 Deserts races, by completing two of the other three: the Gobi in China, the Atacama in Chile and the Sahara in Egypt. They need only finish; there's no cutoff time. For each leg of the race, teams are assigned their slowest member's time, and teammates may never be more than 50 yards apart. If members don't finish as a team, they don't qualify as a team. The test will be whether these three can endure one another's foibles and triumph in the desert over their one competitor, the only other team in the race: a trio of Chilean runners, two of whom boast intimidating reputations.

The odds are against Frank and his teammates. "To finish one of these races as a team and still be friends is incredible," Gadams says. "Very few can do that. It's just too much an individual mentality. And very few teams ever come back together a second time."

THE MEN, WHO'VE DUBBED THEMSELVES TEAM TRIFECTA, put Frank's meticulous plan into action as they pack in their hotel room in the dusty town of San Pedro de Atacama the day before the race. Every ounce they can leave behind is one less to haul more than 160 miles on their backs. They spend the next three hours agonizing over long or short sleeves, dehydrated meal flavors and the most critical decision: wet wipes or toilet paper? To keep weight down, a fellow competitor has sawed the handle off his toothbrush.

"The only non-mandatory thing I'm bringing is a sleeping pad," Mike brags. Later, he'll sheepishly admit to one extra pair of socks. When pressed on his luxuries, Pete holds up a package of strawberry gummy snakes, "for when things really get rough out there."

Then Mike glances over at Frank's piles and lets out a loud guffaw. "Shampoo, Frank?" he asks incredulously. He points to a one-ounce bottle of yellow gel that is decidedly not on the mandatory equipment list and is quite uncharacteristic of their no-nonsense leader. Frank has pulled out a calculator and is furiously trying to measure the number of scoops of electrolyte powder to dump into a Ziploc bag so he'll have enough for exactly 161.5 miles and no more. He looks up and shrugs. "I like to keep clean, boys," he says with a smirk.