The Controversial Evolution of Adventure Racing

Options this week in high-end adventure racing include a 350-mile Alaskan ass kicking and a 300-mile opportunity to get lost in a dugout canoe off the coast of Tanzania. Both races are dangerous, expensive, and demanding, and both represent very different evolutions of a sport that became popular with a Mark Burnett-hosted reality T.V. show in 1995.

Adventure racing didn't begin in earnest with Eco Challenge, but millions of Americans had never heard of the sport before. The sport of adventure racing, or at least the traditional format of a wilderness-based, multi-sport competition, plateaued when the final season of Eco Challenge aired in 2002. From there, the phrase adventure race began to take on a broader meaning. Events and competitions sprang up around the country that were adaptations and morphs of the original sport.

"For a long time, adventure racing people were offended that the Tough Mudder people were calling their thing adventure racing," says Stephen Regenold, editor of GearJunkie.com and a member of Team GearJunkie/WEDALI, a team that has won multiple national championships in the sport. "Pretend you play baseball, and a cricket player starts calling his sport baseball."

Regenold has been involved in the sport since 2002 and waxes pessimistic about its future. To him, the race in Alaska this week is a dying breed. The race, called Expedition Alaska, pits teams of four people against the rigors of the Kenai Peninsula. Twenty teams will climb, bike, run, kayak, and paddle packrafts for a week, consuming about 5,000 calories per day. Pre-race training included two days' worth of crevasse-rescue instruction and a session on grizzly bear safety.

Expedition Alaska represents traditional adventure racing in that it requires an elite skill set and level of physical fitness. The race is not accessible to most people. For those who are not high-level endurance athletes, the other race this week along the Tanzanian coast is open to pretty much anyone who can swim.

The race, called Adventure 9, launches July 1. Ten teams will island hop their way north for ten days, stopping at two checkpoints and riding the southerly trade winds toward a finish point that will include, without a doubt, one hell of a party. I know because I've been there. Not in Zanzibar with a sail-rigged dugout, but in Mongolia aboard an ornery horse. Both races are staged by the Adventurists, a gang of wrinkled-shirt, could-give-a-damn Brits that hosts races all over the world.

In 2012 I rode 25 different horses in a Pony Express-type relay for 700 miles across the Mongolian steppe. The Mongol Derby turned out to be a full-on adventure. I swam a river blown out by recent rains, clinging to the saddle as the slight horse struggled across 100 yards of frothy, brown water. I did a somersault with my horse at a full gallop after it tripped in a marmot hole. I was relieving myself on the steppe when the toilet paper spooked the horse and he jerked away from me, leaving me afoot under the biggest sky I'd ever seen. That was all on the fifth day of racing. The finish ceremony was a 48-hour deluge of vodka.

Those are the types of colorful experiences that can be had by signing up for one of the six races hosted by the Adventurists. Another race involves driving a sub-SUV car (think Toyota RAV4) from London to Ulaanbaatar Mongolia. Roughly 600 people compete in that race each year. One person has died doing it. A new race this October, called the Icarus Trophy, has competitors flying paragliders—a large fan bolted to a go-cart and attached to a parachute wing—from Washington state to Southern California—about 1,000 miles covered in two weeks.

"A paraglider is really perfect for the Adventurists," says Tom Morgan, founder of the Adventurists. "They're extremely dangerous, you don't need a license to fly one, you can land anywhere, and you can fill them up with regular petrol."

Competitors for the inaugural Icarus Trophy were vetted for their training and flying experience. About 1,500 people applied for the 40 available places in this year's race. Like the Icarus Trophy, the Adventure 9 race is also in its first year. Though far different from traditional adventure racing, what the Adventurists is doing may represent a template for the future of the sport.

"In 12 years running we've never posted a profit, across the board," Morgan says. "Money has never been the goal for us… We try to find a balance between adventure and a race. We want something fun, then we take away the support, we make sure someone's going to get hurt, and that's about the sweet spot for us."

Most of the people who feel that traditional adventure racing is dying, like Regenold of Team GearJunkie/WEDALI, cite a lack of big money as one of the reasons for its decline. There's been no Red Bull or Mountain Dew to put up $25,000 purses. Not since the Eco Challenge, which ended in 2002, and the highly sponsored Primal Quest nearly a decade ago has the sport been in the mainstream. The lack of exposure has meant little product development and investment from the manufacturing industry.

"It's like what the U.S. Postal Service did for cycling," says Mike Kloser, who won the Eco Challenge in 1998 and went on to win just about every adventure race worth winning. "They're looking to capture impressions, and they're not sure they can do that with adventure racing if it's not in front of a lot of people."

The problem with evaluating the state of adventure racing is defining what qualifies as a race. Obstacle races, like Tough Mudder or the Warrior Dash, have seen growth to where more than 10,000 people will compete in a single race. Among Tough Mudder's sponsors are Wheaties, Under Armour, and Ziploc. Compare those to the sponsors of Expedition Alaska, which include the U.S. Forest Service and Alaska State Parks, neither of which have much money to give, but also a whitewater guide service, a few wilderness lodges, and a local bakery.

Kloser, who is currently volunteering on staff at Expedition Alaska, sees the sport on the verge of expansion after a half a decade or so of level trajectory. Craig Bycroft, director of the Queensland, Australia-based Adventure Racing World Series, of which Expedition Alaska is a qualifying race, agrees with him.

"The AR World Series is in the strongest position it has been since its inception in 2001 with the most number of qualifier races and the greatest demand to be part of the series," Bycroft said in an email. "The annual AR World Championship is now attracting teams from more diverse countries and sees over 30 nations represented at the championship."

The U.S. Adventure Racing Association falls in the same camp as the AR World Series, saying that the sport hasn't declined and is ready to grow. Both organizations point to shorter races—called sprint races, which usually last less than 8 hours—as the area of main growth. Regenold vehemently disagrees, asking for data to support both organizations' claims of a growing sport. In response, the USARA says, "We don't have year to year data but there has been an increase in shorter AR's and a decrease in the multi-day events over the past few years."

Regenold doesn't buy it. He points to a lack of big-name sponsors, a near-total lack of events in the Western U.S., and the demise of the organization Checkpoint Tracker in 2013, which oversaw a domestic race series and hosted an annual national championship race. He's passionate about the sport and wants to see it grow but doesn't want to see bad or misleading data on its current state.

"Every year the USARA says participation is up, but my hunch is that that's not true," he says. "I think traditional adventure racing is dying, and what's blossomed are all these other disciplines—urban stuff, obstacle stuff, and even weirder stuff like so-called adventure running, an offshoot of orienteering."

Adventure 9 and the Icarus Trophy fall into the category of other disciplines. They're races, but a traditionalist would probably be less likely to sign up for either. The traditionalist, as a part of the old-school core of adventure racing, will be the reason the sport stays faithful to its roots with events like Expedition Alaska. But as organizations like the Adventurists continue to expand and offer exotic, accessible races, the industry will continue to attract participants from other sports.