Navigating the Longest Off-Road Rally in America Taught Me How to Be Better at Relationships

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Let me set the scene: It’s 4 a.m. and it’s time to wake up. The stars look like holes punched in a piece of paper held up to a spotlight. You have bags under your eyes because it took two hours to turn off your brain—all you see behind your eyelids are the contour lines from your maps. After sacrificing brushing teeth time for skincare time, you head to the main tent to begin another day of competition.

This was a typical morning during the Rebelle Rally, the longest off-road rally in the United States that happens to be just for women. The Rebelle Rally is a competition in which two-person teams drive through brutal Nevada and California desert while hunting for checkpoints using only a compass and maps—GPS strictly prohibited. It is not a race for speed; it’s a chess match that demands precision and strategy. You earn points by navigating to checkpoints of different values, and you win by earning the most points. Your phone is even locked away for all eight days of the rally. Some might call that a dealbreaker.

I had never been off-roading and I hate camping, so the odds were stacked against my coworker Mara Balagtas McIlwrath when she asked if I'd join her in this year's rally. Mara, who works at Hearst Autos, told me about the Rebelle Rally the first time we met at a Toyota track event back in 2021. Luckily for her, I love doing ridiculous things for the story, so I said yes, in no small part because I knew I had a great partner in Mara, who is the human embodiment of the girl you hope to meet at a party when you don’t know anyone else there. (It helps that she's a car genius and an incredible technical driver on the track and off-road, too.)

Once I signed on, Mara and I chose strict roles: I would navigate and she would drive. Our “third partner” in the Rebelle was the 2023 Lexus LX 600 F Sport, provided by Lexus. She’s beautiful, capable, and ready for anything. Lexus SUVs are very popular in the off-roading/overlanding space for good reason—the LX, in particular, comes loaded with features that saved our asses throughout the rally. From the Multi-Terrain Select, which allowed us to switch between six terrain modes (sand, dirt, etc.) that supported specific trails, to the Multi-Terrain Monitor, which helped Mara pick smart lines under the car, we were in good hands.

Together, we spent eight 10+ hours days in the car, driving 1,320 miles between California and Nevada with temperatures ranging from 14 degrees to 110 degrees. We traversed remote locations that don't exist on Google Maps. We ate beef jerky until it became our natural musk and skipped showers for days on end. “It’s going to feel like you two are in a marriage,” Emily Miller, the founder of the Rebelle Rally, told me and Mara over a Zoom call in July when we started training. “At some point during the rally, even the way that you eat chips is going to annoy your partner. You’re going to have to find a way to push past those feelings and learn how to support each other as a team no matter what.”

Even though we didn’t bring chips to the rally, we quickly realized Emily was right: Mara and I were great together on paper (we’re the personality hires!), but the Rebelle pressure-tests your relationship. I heard many competitors saying things like, “I could never do this with my husband, I’d kill him,” and I get it. Our closest relationships, whether romantic or platonic, require maintenance and occasionally, space. But in a competition like the Rebelle, you can’t distance or play games with your partner—the game is working together to survive.

Ultimately, Mara and I finished the race, an undoubtedly huge achievement, but I've taken away much more than a medal from this experience. Frequently during my time with our incredible competitors (Drag racers! Environmental scientists! Grandmas!) and Emily Miller’s impressive Rebelle Rally staff, talking about things that would've previously bored me to tears (like gear selection) made me emotional. Life lessons I had been trying to force-feed myself in the “real world” were so obvious while learning them in the context of navigating and driving. I had breakthroughs about being a better teammate to myself and to others while circling the Obsidian Dome, driving in between slot canyons, and setting up our tent in a literal ghost town among dozens of tarantulas. Here are five of those revelations in the hopes they resonate, whether or not you've off-roaded across 2,500 kilometers yourself.

Make a plan, but always be ready to pivot.

One of our key accessories in the car was our rally odometer, which is a little computer that helps you accurately track your car’s distance, time, and speed. A rally odometer is crucial in figuring out how to get from one point to another without a GPS. The problem is the sensor for the odometer is traditionally installed somewhere on your wheel, so it’s prone to getting pulled off while you’re driving over loose rocks, rendering it useless. By the end of our commute from Los Angeles to Mammoth Lake, our odometer basically stopped working.

We had to quickly pivot since fixing it wasn’t an option. Luckily our built-in vehicle odometer was pretty accurate. After testing it before heading to tech inspection, we fully had to submit to this plan B. There were downsides, of course; I needed to see the odometer during the rally to navigate us, but it was small and on Mara’s side of the dashboard. It was under glass that was not glare-proof, and Mara had to reset it on her side every few kilometers as we hunted for checkpoints.

To get through this hiccup, we had to trust the process and in each other. Good teams plan, but great teams remake the plan as they go.

Remember to tell your partner when they’re doing a good job.

On the second day of the competition, we had a choice: We could take a regular route to collect checkpoints, or we could take a harder “X route” up Queen Canyon, which would be the steepest climb in Rebelle history. Without hesitation, Mara said, “Let’s take the X route,” and I agreed.

One thing about me is that I am terribly afraid of heights. (Even typing a sentence about hating heights is making my hands all sweaty.) I knew that we would encounter some elevation on this route, but I did not realize that all of it would be visible from my side of the car. About halfway up, I looked out to see an 8,000-foot drop just outside of my door. The trail was incredibly rocky, so one false move and Mara could have sent our car down the canyon. I white-knuckled our maps and tried not to look down, but I still had the mental capacity to marvel at how incredible Mara’s driving was. She and our Lexus LX got us to the top of the trail without a hitch and safely down the other side using the LX’s Crawl Control. As we approached sea level, I shook out of panic mode to tell Mara how amazing of a job she did. I still hype her up every time I remember it.

We move so quickly in our daily lives that it’s easy to put our brains on autopilot. We navigate through projects and seasons and moments without acknowledging our people for their strengths and bravery. We should send more texts to tell them why they matter. When Mara complimented me during the Rally, it kept me going for another three days. Good vibes go a long way.

Instead of casting blame on other people in high-stress situations, take the high road.

Before a marathon stage night (a night where we didn't return to base camp and instead camped on our own), course officials said we needed to stop by 6:30 p.m. because it would be too dark to drive safely. We found the self-camp area early and set out into Johnson Valley for one more checkpoint. Since we “knew where we needed to go,” we got cocky, grabbed a snack, rolled down the window, and blasted the radio. We took our eye off the ball and ended up in a very rocky area that was not our destination.

The sun was setting quickly, but we found two Jeeps that were headed in the same direction. They told us that we couldn’t drive any farther—it was too dangerous—and we all needed to turn around. Mara and I had taken a clunky step down into the area, and we knew we needed to make it back up in order to get out. Although we made a plan, the step was too big and the center of our car got stuck (“turtled”) on top of a big rock. We couldn’t move forward or backward without damaging the vehicle.

One of the Jeep teams was familiar with this kind of terrain and scavenged for “perfect stacking rocks” to put in front of all of our tires to help us get out. I held my breath and watched all four tires make it up and out of this stupid valley.

It was hard to recenter after that moment. We didn’t find our way back to the self-camp area in time, and we had to sleep on a little bit of a slope that night, but we were safe with other competitors and our car was not damaged.

Not every day can end in laughter, but in tough moments, you can choose not to sit at a pity party for one. Being a partner sometimes means giving space, silence, or an open ear. Sometimes it means offering support. And sometimes it means brushing off a rough night in the desert.

Trust that you know where your true north is.

As a kid, I was shy and found that it was easier to keep my thoughts to myself instead of trying to speak over the person who spoke the loudest. This emotional safety mechanism haunts me to this day. I tell myself every New Year’s Eve that my resolution will be to use my Big Girl Voice and speak up more, even when it’s hard. One of the first lessons Emily taught us in the Rebelle U training sessions was that a good navigator always knows where north is.

The same goes for your moral compass and your intuition. As women and femmes, we are sometimes gaslit by men, people in power, and even medical professionals, which makes it difficult to trust that we know where our “north” is at any given time. The Rebelle finally allowed me to trust that I know my true north and showed me I shouldn’t be afraid to say it with my chest.

Give yourself grace. You’re trying your best.

I only cried one time during the rally outside happy tears at the finish line. On Day 1 of the competition, we were up in the beautiful Inyo National Forest area heading to a checkpoint when a car that was not in the rally cut in ahead of us. They were driving incredibly slow, which was stressful since our checkpoint was closing in less than 10 minutes. The moment they turned onto a different trail, we picked up speed…but came to a fork in the road that we did not account for. I had to make a rash decision based on what I saw on the map. The thing about driving in the forest is that everything looks the same. It was the wrong path, and we missed our checkpoint.

It was a maze of trees, and we found out later that we were basically going in circles. Just as we stopped to take a point penalty to click our tracker to get our exact coordinates, a search and rescue truck pulled up behind us and a Rally official walked up to our car.

“Hi guys!” the woman said with the kindness of a preschool teacher. “Are you a little lost?”

We confirmed that we definitely were.

“Okay,” she said. “You’re doing a great job. We’re just going to follow you for a little bit to make sure you find your way out.”

She walked back, and my tears immediately started to flow.

Emily told us there would likely be a moment in the rally where we'd feel Actually Lost™. “When you feel lost, your body goes into fight or flight mode,” she said. “Your blood pressure rises, your muscles tense, and it’s hard to make decisions.” At that moment in the forest, I felt Actually Lost™ and I was angry at myself for making the wrong turn. I felt stupid for not being able to figure out where we were, and I was stressed that I was wasting our time by taking so long to problem-solve.

When I started to get upset, Mara told me I was allowed to cry, but I could figure it out and we were doing a great job. She also told me that when she eventually did something stupid and felt like she needed to be angry, she was allowed to cry, too. One of Emily’s lessons heading into the rally was that we needed to give ourselves and our partners grace when things went awry. There’s only so much we can control, and we can't always be right.

On the last day of the competition in the Imperial Sand Dunes, Mara and I got stuck four times. It took anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to dig ourselves out, and the final time we dug out, it was 104 degrees outside. Speaking plainly, it sucked. It was mentally and physically challenging on a level I had never experienced before, but I am here typing this story of our ridiculous journey because Mara and I powered through every obstacle that we encountered together.

We eventually did find our way out of Inyo National Forest without any help from the safety team, by the way. After all, the Rebelle Rally wasn’t about how many times we got stuck or lost—it’s how we worked together despite it.

Overall, these lessons are but a small snapshot of what I'm taking away from my wild, dynamic time navigating the deserts of the American West. You can take them or leave them, but if you take one thing away from this account, I hope it's this: Don't be afraid to embark on the adventure that feels far from who “you are.” I promise that it will teach you more about yourself than you bargained for.

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