Defiant, epic and enduring growing pains America’s fastest-growing outdoor sport won’t sell out.
By Chelsea H. Bryan
Gone are the unregulated days of its adolescence when adventure racing outfits commanded teams to swim in Class 4 and 5 rapids as part of the “adventure.” The sport is mature—but never tame. In the wilderness in the cold of night, armed with little more than maps and compasses, sleep-deprived teams struggle on—enduring over terrain by climbing, paddling, biking, running and orienteering for days on end at breakneck pace in the name of adventure and competition. It’s like “The Hunger Games” sans the killing, but way harder.
“This is probably reason number one why the AR ‘industry’ will never be industrial: you cannot mass-produce it. It takes months to plan and coordinate a great adventure race course; we’re working on our 2014 expedition course right now. All the effort is good for only one event production a good adventure race would never retrace it’s steps in subsequent editions, because competitors would lose that sense of exploring the unknown.”
—Grant Killian, Untamed Adventure
Though “not an industry,” claims Grant Killian, adventure racing is growing on a national and global scale. Killian is organizer of many a successful adventure race with Untamed Adventure, the outfit that puts on the much-adored AR event, Untamed New England.
Adventure racing ranked as the fastest-growing segment of the outdoor industry in a 2010 participation report produced by the Outdoor Foundation, says Troy Farrar. Farrar is founder of the United States Adventure Racing Association, which puts on a national 24-hour champion- ship event annually. “We have also seen an increase in the teams that are qualifying and competing at the USARA Adventure Race National Championships.”
“We have a seen a shift to shorter ‘sprint’ events and many of the new events fall into the 2- to 8-hour range, which are great for new participants and offer a gateway into adventure racing. After getting their feet wet in the shorter events, we often see new participants challenging themselves with a 12- or 24-hour-long race.”
—Troy Farrar, founder of the United States Adventure Racing Association
The Adventure Racing World Series (www.ARWorldSeries.com), which Killian describes as a global circuit of 10 to 12 races per year, now has a television show. “Wild Racers,” the series covering the AR World Series on networks worldwide is, according to Killian, “the sort of thing the sport needs to catch fire in the U.S.” Killian believes airtime will attract the sponsors needed to get the sport mainstream popularity. Which connects back to the reason the sport is not an industry: “Don’t you need money to be an industry?” asks Killian. Money may happen, though. “Last thing I knew, ESPN was reviewing their Wild Racers pilot, so you never know.”
As is, AR is an underground wilderness obsession in which teams must pay around $3,000 for 50 course choreographers and logisticians who are running a 200-racer show with few roads and fewer cell phone towers just to break even.
As described by top sport performers Robyn Benincasa, Sessel Elmstrøm and Killian, the raw heart and draw of AR is the journey.
Teammates cry, panic, laugh and break down—they go through serious trials together and approach Frodo and Sam of Lord of the Rings level bonding because of it. Or the bonding featured in any epic, for that matter. In short, it’s the stuff of legends that hooks adventure racers—and all the incredible highs and lows make the sport both TV-ready and so authentic that it by nature rejects reality TV’s often fake reality.
Though the AR draw to commercialization may butt heads with its defiant streak, no one believes even for a second that the heart of adventure racing, with all its grit and gruel, will ever stop beating.
