THE FORKS — It was Wednesday morning and his race hadn’t started yet, but Norm Greenberg already knew his feet could be in rough shape by the end of the day.

By Wednesday evening, Greenberg, of Bethel, was to have rafted nearly 30 miles down the Kennebec River, biked another 30 miles through the forest and pulled himself across the raging torrent of the Dead River’s Grand Falls on a rope.

By nightfall, his feet could be like raisins — not the best way to start the Untamed New England Adventure Race, an epic that requires participants to paddle, hike, bike and bushwhack for four days nonstop.

“We’ll be taking good care of our feet,” said Greenberg, competing on Team AR A Decade Later with his wife and two others. “It’s going to be a wet race, so there’s a lot of potential for foot problems in a race like that. When the skin on your feet get soft, they’re more prone to blistering and chafing.”

At 10 a.m. Wednesday, Greenberg’s team had begun the soggy journey at the headwaters of the Kennebec River north of Greenville. They were accompanied by nearly 200 other adventure athletes, some hailing from as far away as Sweden. The race, one of the largest adventure races in America, serves as a qualifier for the Adventure Racing World Championships this September in France.

While the top finishers will get tickets to France, many of the 49 teams are competing simply to finish. Only 18 teams have finished the three previous editions of the Untamed New England Adventure Race, organizer Grant Killian said.

“We’ve front-loaded the course with a lot of juicy bits, so even if you don’t complete the full course, you’re still going to compete a significant race,” Killian said. “Even making it to checkpoint 19 is a great achievement. We’ve considered giving people finisher’s medals just to get to 19.”

Racers must pass through more than 40 checkpoints to complete the course.

The long odds of finishing didn’t phase Team AR A Decade Later, most of whose members have completed scores of adventure races. As Mainers, they’re also confident that they know the course well.

“Mentally it feels like we have a little edge, but we still have to go do it,” said Tracyn Thayer, Greenberg’s wife. Thayer has an impressive resume of podium finishes in adventure races stretching back more than a decade.

“It’s not like there’s a path laid out that we’ve all walked before,” she said. “But it’s fun to know that we’ve done the Bigelows before, we’ve paddled Flagstaff Lake before, we’ve rafted down the river.”

Familiarity with Maine’s rivers and mountains may give Team AR A Decade Later a boost, but they’ll be competing against some of the top adventure racers in the world.

That inside knowledge might help them compete against formidable teams such as the Thule Adventure Team, a group of two French and two Swedish athletes who make a living adventure racing. In 2011, they won the Adventure Racing World Championship.

By 2:30 p.m., online race tracking showed Team AR A Decade Later in sixth place, just behind the Thule Adventure Team. Rankings are likely to change often over the next several days, as the teams make their way to the finish at the Northern Outdoors Resort in The Forks.

Over the next 48 hours, the racers will find themselves paddling across Flagstaff Lake in the dark, climbing Sugarloaf Mountain, biking through the forest and getting their feet wet once again during a final paddle and trek through the Dead River Basin.

It will be a long few days, but Team AR A Decade Later plans to make it to the finish on Sunday.

“We want to strike that balance between going as hard and fast as possible and not wearing ourselves out,” Greenberg said.

You can follow the Untamed New England Adventure Race in real time at www.untamedne.com.