One Tough Bunny

She looks back on the trench foot with nostalgia. "I got it during the 2000 Eco-Challenge in Borneo," says Danelle Folta. "I remember thinking, When I was modeling, I never would have thought I'd end up with trench foot."

After her experience at the Eco in Fiji this fall, trench foot seemed like the merest nuisance. On the seventh day of the most grueling Eco-Challenge in the event's nine-year history, Folta found herself suffering from a high fever. "I sat down," she recalls, "passed out and woke up 15 hours later." A blister on her right foot had become infected. The infection had become septic, the foot black and gangrenous. At a clinic in a Fijian village, doctors removed infected flesh, operating on Folta by flashlight without anesthetics. Back in the States she needed still more surgery. "They had to take all this dead tissue off, which left a wound so large it wouldn't close by itself," she says.

That's where the skin graft came in. A plastic surgeon took some skin off her right hip to help close the wound on the top of her foot. Why the hip? "Obviously," she says with a smile, "if I ever want to do a nude photo shoot, I don't want a big scar on my butt."

Among other readily apparent assets, Folta has a robust sense of humor about herself. The 33-year-old Floridian is the founder of the Playboy X-treme Team, a group of 25 former centerfolds whose sports range from snowboarding to racing cigarette boats to driving in cross-country car rallies.

Folta was a highly successful model—she appeared on runways and in catalogs and was Playboy's Miss April in 1995—in whom resided a dormant adrenaline fiend. Her first day on a mountain bike, in 1997, she went over the handlebars while coming down Mammoth Mountain in California. "I showed up the next day for a Macy's lingerie shoot with a huge bruise on my quad," she says. "They weren't happy."

It wasn't long before she back-burnered modeling and founded the Playboy X-treme Team. Its message? "Your appearance has nothing to do with your ability to do these races. It's your heart, your soul, your level of conviction," she says.

Race directors fell all over themselves to get Folta and her curvaceous friends into their events. The X-treme Team draws TV crews, and that makes race sponsors happy. It doesn't please the people against whom Team Playboy races, however. Competition is particularly fierce for spots in the Eco-Challenge, and plenty of racers begrudge the Bunnies their seemingly open invitation to it.

Says Team Montrail's Rebecca Rusch, one of the world's top female adventure racers, "There are enough elite-level racers that you don't need the so-called human-interest teams" that comprise the back of every Eco field. "I like to cross-country ski, but I don't go to the Olympics for it. I'd wreck the track and take the spot of someone who actually belonged there."

More accepting is Team EarthLink's Robyn Benincasa, another of the sport's elite women. "If having the Playboy team means an extra hundred thousand people are going to tune in to watch my team win"—EarthLink actually finished fifth in Fiji—"so much the better."

Of the 81 teams to begin the race in Fiji, Team Smirnoff Ice Playboy X-treme was one of just 28 remaining when Folta was felled by that infection on Day 7. "I was definitely surprised by how strong, persistent and skilled they were," says veteran racer Roman Dial, who navigated for Folta, Carrie Steilen and Kalin Olson as the fourth member of the team. We know what you're thinking, and the answer is no: Dial, who is happily married, reports that there was no sexual tension on the course. Folta agrees. "After four days of racing," she says of the notion of disrobing, "you don't even want to see what's under there."