When Melinda Owens finishes an adventure race, which is basically the grittier, more collaborative cousin of the triathlon, she’ll have blisters, bruises and bug bites, and her skin will be chafed and sometimes covered in poison ivy. She’s typically famished. Meanwhile, Owens’ friends shake their heads at her sport of choice, and, recently, when her mother saw the toll her daughter’s latest battle with the outdoors had taken on her, she wondered, “What happened to my baby girl?”
Owens is a member of the Nashville Adventure Racers (Nashvar), a fledgling group launched in June to promote adventure racing and possibly even to organize one of those bewildering events here. The group also leads seminars dealing with some of the odder topics of the relatively young sport, including foot care and navigational skills. Clearly, this is the sport for multi-taskers. “I figured I already run, kayak, mountain bike and road bike,” says Owens, an accountant. “This was a good way to incorporate all those sports. Plus I like the team aspects.”
Unlike endurance events from the marathon to the triathlon, there is no set definition for what an adventure race is. But nearly all include hours of running, hiking, mountain biking and paddling on intentionally poorly marked courses, often in the dead of night in state parks lonelier than Carrot Top’s bedroom. It’s sort of a starter version of the wildly popular Eco-Challenge. In that televised expedition race, teams traverse some God-forsaken corner of the globe by canoe, bike, foot or whatever, all the while avoiding Fear Factor staples, including snakes and leaches. (Nashville even has a team competing—Team Mitochondria.)
Like the Eco-Challenge, most adventure races feature teams in which all members more or less have to stay together throughout the event. Every now and then, a couple make the mistake of competing in an adventure race together. They’d be better off trying to paint the garage.
“I knew a couple who did an adventure race, and at the end of the race they were no longer a couple,” says Patrick Bair, a co-founder of Nashvar (www.nashvar.org). “Sometimes when you’re tired you say things that are not exactly nice.”
A South Carolina native, Bair first become interested in adventure racing when he was peddling away on a stationary bike early one morning at his gym. Looking to spice up his aerobic monotony, he picked up a magazine that happened to feature an article about the multi-sport event, which become popular in the mid-’90s, along with other extreme sports like snowboarding. Bair was hooked and now regularly competes in adventure races.
Recently, Bair endured the Big South Fork Challenge, a Herculean test along the Cumberland Plateau that included 36 miles of mountain biking. For 10 of those miles, Bair and his teammates had to push their bikes through uncompromising terrain. They also got to enjoy a 10-mile paddle and another 10 miles of what’s known as “orienteering,” which requires the team members to use a detailed map and compass to find specific points in the landscape. The race took around 25 hours.
“I get tired and sore, but I never ask myself why I’m doing this,” he says.
Probably because there’s no sane answer. Adventure racers, like most endurance athletes, struggle to explain why they do what they do. There’s just something about their genetic wiring that seems to compel them to take on challenges that would seem insane even to most marathoners. “I’ve done marathons and triathlons,” says Susan Love, a member of the Nashville Adventure Racers. “I was ready for a new kind of challenge. Plus, I have an adventurous spirit.”
Most adventure races happen in state parks and other wilderness areas. But a few are hosted in cities, including what is considered sort of the Super Bowl of the sport, Chicago’s Wild Onion. The Wild Onion, so named because “it will make you cry,” features a dizzying litany of events, including kayaking eight miles on Lake Michigan and climbing up and down 103 flights of stairs of the Sears Tower. There’s also biking, in-line skating, scootering, more paddling and traversing and rappelling an office building. The total distance covers 128 miles. Good times.
The members of Nashvar would love to stage that kind of event in Nashville. Over lunch, they eagerly chat about how the race might feature climbing up and rappelling down the BellSouth Tower, mountain biking through downtown Nashville, roller-blading in Shelby Bottoms and maybe kayaking on the Cumberland. Asked from how high they’d like to rappel, Owens and Bair say, “as high as they would let us.”
For now, members say they’re trying to figure out how to corral sponsors. They’re also going to need the city’s permission, along with, well, BellSouth. Given that Nashville is to adventure racing what Cool Springs is to pedestrian activity, it might take a scaled down version of that vision to pass muster. But that would be a start. In the meantime, they’ll have plenty to keep them busy.
Oddly to some, members of Nashvar find what they do fun. “I’ve done triathlons,” says Jennifer Sicard, whose husband plans to run a marathon in all 50 states. “They’re very intense. With adventure racing, everybody has more fun.” Love adds, “It just has a more fun-loving spirit.”
