Be an Adventure Racer—or Just Train Like One!

If your workouts feel as flat as a bike tire after a long, cold winter, put an adventurous twist on training. Adventure racing, a team competition combining trail running with mountain biking, kayaking, and more. is a great way to let girls who want to have fun get out and play, while learning new skills and making more friends.

When the Eco-Challenge Adventure Race splashed across television screens on the Discovery Channel in the mid-1990s, viewers got a unique perspective on the exotic lands of Borneo, Fiji, and Morocco, through the bloodshot eyes of exhausted, muddy racers. After inspiring armchair athletes across the nation, the sport grew faster than manicured toenails in the summer.

For the past few years, Primal Quest Adventure Race has been the premier nonstop epic expedition of this fledging sport. Last July’s Primal Quest, held in southern Utah, drew nearly one hundred international four-person teams vying for the extraordinary $250,000 prize purse. Traveling on foot, bike, ropes, horseback, and kayak through 455 sun-baked miles of Moab’s red-rock canyons, it took some teams up to ten days to complete—while sleeping only two to three hours each night.

While these big-money, arduous adventures are fascinating feats of perseverance, most of us have full-time jobs, families, and demanding lives that limit training and travel. So, if traipsing through the searing desert for a week is not feasible—or desirable—no worries. A grab-bag of adventure races exists, featuring races of varying lengths and formats, for all abilities and levels of experience, spanning multi-days or bite-sized sprint distances.

New runners often start racing with a 5K. In the same manner, sprint-distance adventure races are perfect for newbies to get into the sport without too much training or financial investment. These three- to five-hour competitions require three-person teams that travel together at all times, along marked (or sometimes unmarked, when navigation skills are part of the game) routes using trail running, trekking, mountain biking, and paddling. Teams clock in at checkpoints along the way, documenting their successful completion of each portion of the route. Just as in triathlons, athletes change gear in transition areas. Since the courses are not terribly demanding, and race organizers typically provide boats and paddles, new racers mainly need to arrive with basic skills and gear—oh, and teammates.

My first adventure race was the 1997 Triple By-Pass, held on the outskirts of Santa Monica, California. I first heard of the sport from an adventure racer from Los Angeles. At the time, I was doing local running races and regional triathlons. Jim’s stories of whitewater-rafting down gushing rivers, rappelling rugged mountainsides, and hiking through remote hillside villages in Lesotho, South Africa were captivating. By the end of our conversation, I had agreed to join his team for a sprint-distance race in the California desert.

Typical of most endurance athletes, I had good lungs and legs—but despite years of road bicycle racing, I was a white-knuckled mountain bike weenie, and I had never sat in a kayak. For the race, I wore my running sneakers, borrowed a mountain bike, and ungracefully got through the paddle. But I was hooked. I loved the team camaraderie, the mix of activities, and powering myself through remote areas. Most of all, it was fun—and I got a great workout to boot. 

That summer, I bought trail shoes, a used mountain bike, and learned to paddle at Manhattan Kayak Company, a local kayaking outfitter on the flanks of the Hudson River, close to where I live in NYC.