Team Ragged Glory – Adventure Racing, Multi Sport, Friends

By Robert Nagle, 2002 Team Captain Eco Internet/GoLite

No, this is not yet another thesis on how to eat during an adventure race. Nor is it a discussion on the best diet for athletic training. Instead, it is a discussion of a different kind – what goes into making a successful adventure racing experience.

How you define success is, of course, up to you. Success may mean completing the course. Or, at the other extreme, it may mean a podium finish. Regardless, there are three key elements that will determine whether or not you meet your goals.

Most people fixate on the physical challenge when they first encounter adventure racing (be it on a television show, a gripping magazine article or even just one graphic image). The immediate assumption is that adventure racing is a grueling physical test. Of course, much of the media (and some race promoters) play it this way. Is adventure racing the toughest sport of all? Is this the toughest adventure race ever staged? How can these crazies race so hard for so long on such little sustenance in such a hostile environment?

Many novice teams are built on this principle. Find great cyclists, great triathletes, great paddlers, great climbers and great runners, then blend a few national champions from various endurance sports together and you will create a powerhouse team. From all the races I’ve participated in, one thing is certain – this strategy fails. No matter how talented the individuals, no matter how stellar their background, a team of individual champions (but lacking two other key elements) will fail. Without the other ingredients, brilliant individuals will falter during an adventure race. And, of course, a collection of individuals with less impressive resumes but assembled solely on the principle of athletic ability will fare no better.

Don’t get me wrong. Athletic skills are vital for adventure racing. The demands are extreme. The skill levels needed are often very high. We race for many days, accumulating massive energy deficits each day, so by the end of the race, the endurance demands are remarkably high. The pace of racing is getting tighter and tighter, even in extremely long races. In the past, the winning team often finished twelve or even twenty hours ahead of the next finisher. Today it’s not uncommon to have differences less than half an hour over one hundred and fifty hours of racing.

Without athletic ability, a team will really struggle. If a team is racing near the front, the members need to be able to put the hammer down at almost any time during the race. For teams competing to complete, cutoff times can force an increasingly more pressured pace. So every team needs each member to have all the necessary athletic skills (possibly in 4, 5 or more different sporting disciplines) as well as tremendous endurance.

Endurance, specific sport skills and speed are pre-requisites for racing. My argument here is that, while necessary, this is far from sufficient to ensure that you’ll meet your race goals. In rough terms, athletic skills contribute about 40% to your chances of success.

To put this a different way, if you think your team is prepared physically, you’re less than half-ready to take on an adventure race.

What else is needed? The next component is to consistently make good decisions. Adventure racing is a thinking sport – a continuous decision making process. Problems abound in route selection, setting an appropriate pace, sleep decisions, equipment choices, food (or more typically, lack thereof), and your choices are many. Before the race, many of these choices are made (often without knowing much about the terrain or exact course). During the event, a team scarcely finds itself not facing a decision or tactical choice.

As is so often the case in life, it’s impossible to always make perfect decisions. But to meet its race objectives, a team needs to have a high average, to make good decisions as often as possible. In the long races, when badly sleep deprived, when you’ve lost almost all your body fat, when the environment is challenging you with heat, cold, storms, animal or plant threats, making good decisions is damn difficult.

But this is where the successful teams begin to separate themselves from the others. The very best teams make very few poor decisions. And when they do make a bad choice, it is dealt with appropriately. Put the bad decision behind you, forget recrimination, don’t assign blame and focus on the new challenge (digging yourself out of the predicament you’ve gotten yourself into).

Being able to recognize a bad decision and being able to recover from it without losing focus on the end goal is the hallmark of many of the world’s best racing teams. Making good choices, before and during the race, contributes to about 30% of a team’s likelihood of success.

The final ingredient is establishing and maintaining the team as a unit, preferably a harmonious one. Up until now, we could have been discussing extraordinary individual challenges. But adventure racing is a team sport. You don’t race alone – you begin with others. And you can’t finish the event without them. How well you do that (and, to an important extent, how enjoyable it is for all) is the final key factor in adventure racing success.

It begins with having a shared goal. Incredible though it may seem, many adventure racing teams discover, forty-eight hours into a ten-day event, that people on the team are there for very different reasons. Believe me, when this happens, the next few days are likely to be unpleasant. Successful teams, regardless of how they define success, have a clear goal and a common commitment to it.

The successful team functions as a unit, with each person reinforcing and supporting the others. Letting go of the ego is of paramount importance. Eco-Internet members repeat the maxim, “If you stop worrying about yourself and instead concentrate on what your teammates need, everyone has three people looking after him/her, rather than one.” Wise words.

This last element is truly the essence of adventure racing and it is what makes the sport distinctively different. It is the hardest part of the sport but also, as any racer who crosses the finish line will tell you, the most rewarding