BETHEL — Tracyn Thayer is feeling pretty good, despite the fact that she just spent four sleepless days and nights racing across Maine’s highest mountains, deepest lakes, and swiftest rivers.

It’s been more than a week since Thayer and her husband, Norm Greenberg, of Bethel finished the Untamed New England Adventure Race, a nonstop four-day ordeal that had participants raft, bushwhack, hike and mountain bike through the wilds that stretch from Sugarloaf to the headwaters of the Kennebec River near Moosehead Lake.

For Thayer and Greenberg, the race also marked a return to the sport of adventure racing after a decadelong hiatus. The husband and wife team have an impressive list of adventure racing finishes to their credit, including the 1997 Eco Challenge in Australia, where the duo placed 11th overall.

Re-entering the adventure racing world was challenging but fun for the couple, who were joined by Chris Hayward of Bethel and Harald Zundel of San Diego. Competing as Team AR A Decade Later, the group finished the race together on Saturday, June 23, some 80 hours after they started.

“We had a really great time, considering that we were dusting off our bodies from being off racing for 10 years,” Thayer said. “We’re really happy with how we did, and we got along really well as a team.”

The race got off to a quick start for Team AR A Decade Later, which found itself among the top 10 teams after an initial 30-mile paddle down the Kennebec River. By evening on the first day, however, reality set in. After searching for a race checkpoint that was more than a mile from where it was supposed to be, Thayer and her teammates lost nearly four hours waiting for slower teams to complete a rope traverse over Grand Falls on the Dead River.

“So you’re up toward the front being pushed by the faster teams, and all of a sudden it’s just a lot of steam taken out of your momentum,” Thayer said. “It was hard to recover from that.”

But Thayer and her team did recover. Over the next three days, the team fought off bugs, competitors and 90-degree heat as they paddled across Flagstaff Lake, hiked the Bigelow Range, and trekked through thick forests under cover of darkness. Some of the hardest parts of the course involved bushwhacking through dense mountain forests, Thayer said.

“You always sort of tend to forget how thick it can get,” Thayer said. “It was up around 2,700 feet where the trees get shorter and thicker and don’t bend or give as much. You’re crawling through them instead of between them.”

After 10 years away from the sport, the drudgery of crawling through spruce thickets reminded Thayer of just how difficult adventure racing can be.

“It’s a good reminder,” Thayer said. “I don’t know if it was a complete surprise, but some things you want to forget.”

A highlight of the race came after the team summited Sugarloaf. After descending the mountain, Thayer and her teammates devoured several large helpings of french fries at the resort’s base lodge.

“We found one bar and the guy cooked us like four orders of french fries,” Thayer said. “We must have had 10 pounds of french fries.”

Powered by french fries and stamina — no one on the team slept more than six hours in four days — Team AR A Decade Later reached the finish at Northern Outdoors Resort in The Forks  in 16th place. That was early on the evening of Saturday, June 23.

Now that she’s finally caught up on her sleep, Thayer is looking forward to her next quest. In September, she’ll likely run a 50-mile ultramarathon in Vermont’s Green Mountains.