by Jess Evans
May 15, 2018

While I LOVE adventure racing, that is not my only love.  For those who know me well, they know that I am also an avid conservationist.  I volunteer for several water conservation groups because I just love water and the life it provides.  Moving to the Mid-West when I was 18 years old opened my eyes to a beautiful natural world that is quite different from the one I grew up in.  More importantly, I learned first-hand how the Clean Water Act of 1972 improved the water of the Mid-West significantly.

Throughout my time in the Mid-West, I often heard how the rivers and lakes were dirty – “you’ll grow a third eye swimming in that river.” But actually, these rivers are not so terrible, and compared to what they were, they are phenomenally better.  Of course, monitoring and improving are always necessary, but at least the rivers are not burning on a regular basis like they did in the 1960s.

For several years now I have been involved in the Stream Quality Monitoring program lead by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) and completed by dedicated volunteers.  It is a fairly simple test that is done three times a summer, where you paddle to a particular riffle on the river and set your net down in the water.  Someone else disturbs the river floor up-stream from your net so that anything they loosen up from the bottom flows right into your net.  Then you pick up the net and take it to shore.

Next comes the really fun part, you pick through the net looking for all living things – larvae, worms, fish, crawdads, water bugs, beetles, and so on.  Once you have collected your living creatures, you review your water quality indicator list and record the number of each type of critter you found.  For example, water pennies are these flat macro-invertebrates that typically cling to the bottom of rocks.  They are sensitive to pollutants and are good indicators of healthy, clean water.  You would record on your sheet the number of water pennies you found.  Once you are done, you put all the animals back into the river.  The form is sent to ODNR for them to compile from volunteers around the state.  This allows ODNR to see which rivers are increasing in health, which are decreasing, and which are staying the same.  Then they can begin to investigate the “why”.

Because rivers and lakes are essential for our adventure races, I think it is good to be aware of how we impact the quality of the water we play in and learn what else relies on clean water to survive.

by Jess Evans
May 11, 2018

While I worked at Kentucky State Parks in the early 2010s, the book “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv was all the rage.  It motivated a lot of park districts to think about how to get children to “play” outdoors again.  I found it interesting how the author described the modern childhood experience as moving away from nature. I grew up in the 1980s on a small farm in Colorado, where I encountered nature on a daily basis.  During our summers, my siblings and I built forts with sticks, waded in the creek pretending to be on an adventure down the Amazon River, battled aliens that resembled our cows (of course, they just eyed us lazily and continued to chew), and turned our Colorado home into thousands of different places imaginary and real. The natural world around us was the source of our play and our imagination. The idea of not experiencing nature is foreign to me.

Richard Louv gives a good description of what “experiencing nature” is.  A young boy who rarely spent time outdoors explained to him that when he visited a canyon in the Southwest with his family, they were caught in a rain storm and had to take shelter under a rock overhang.  The boy realized what nature was at that point.

Thinking back on that story, I realize that experiencing nature is one more reason why I really like adventure racing.  If it is raining, snowing, sunny and hot, or windy and cold, you are out in nature.  You are pushing your body forward through the elements.  Two examples come to mind from my recent  Cowboy Tough race experience in Wyoming. We were riding along the road on our bikes and could see a storm approaching quickly from our right.  As the wind picked up to scary speeds, we crossed the road, laid down our bikes and huddled behind a large sagebrush.  The rainstorm was quick but large rain drops splashed around us.  We sat in our sagebrush shelter listening to the storm.  As soon as it passed, the wind died down and the sun peeked out from the clouds.  We were back on our bikes.  The second incident occurred early the next morning before the sun came up.  Another rainstorm set in on us.  The wind picked up again.  This time we remained on our bikes.  The sandy path we were traveling on soon turned to mud that stuck to everything.  We could no longer ride our bikes.  We got off the bikes and began pushing them through the sagebrush next the trail to clean off the sticky mud.  Pushing the bikes on the trail was more trouble than it was worth. The rain whipped around us as we trudged through the sagebrush, stopping periodically to make sure we were on the right track.  Lightening struck in the distance, lighting up the clouds around it for a brief moment. As the sun came up, the rain clouds drifted on, and the arid Wyoming air swooped in to dry us and the mucky road.  I said to Shawn, “I hope Doug took a picture of that sunrise.”

Those are only two examples of the many times I have experienced nature. For me, I like feeling the natural elements. I will even tolerate briars, with some grumbling, knowing that I am experiencing nature.  The energy of nature flows through my veins and keeps me excited about it.  I am experiencing the world as it is with all its hardships and beauty – that is nature and that is adventure racing.

by Jess Evans
May 8, 2018

Your mind is a very powerful tool.  It formulates your world for you, making sense of what you see from your experiences, or at least tries to make sense of it.  It helps you creatively solve problems.  But sometimes your mind is so sure it “knows” what is going on, that you are not really seeing reality but a manifestation of what the Mind is telling you.

When I was young, I was sure I knew what I knew.  It was a hard lesson to learn when I realized what I thought I knew, I actually did not know.  Navigating in an adventure race helps bring that concept to light very well.  In the 2013 USARA National Championship race in Brown County, Indiana, I was the team navigator.  I did not have the confidence to be the navigator, but our primary navigator had to drop out of the race at the last minute, so the task fell to me.  I was passable through the day, picking up checkpoints and not getting too confused.  But once night came, that was a very different story.  I had navigated very little at night, and this was a true test.  As we left the trail in search of a checkpoint that was on a spur, I was sure I knew what direction we were going.  As we continued, no checkpoint appeared, and we had travelled well past where it should have been.  We circled back and tried again.  I tried to follow my compass more closely and found that I did not believe my compass.  I was sure I was travelling west when it said I was travelling north.  How could that be?  I got so turned around from the terrain we saw compared to the terrain on the map and from my brain convinced I was going in one direction when the compass said another.  I could not reconcile anything.  My mind was fighting against reality, and the Mind will never win that fight.  We had to abandon that checkpoint.

Since that time, I have witnessed situations where the navigator is sure we are at X location on the map, but nothing matches up.  Often you later find that you were not at X but at Y location.  When this happens, you are lost, but you can find yourself again, if your mind lets you.  If you continue to believe what you “think” is correct and do not rely on the map and compass to find where you are, you may be lost a while.

The problem is, when you know you are right, but reality (the compass and map) proves you wrong, it can be very hard to convince yourself of that fact.  Your mind is so confident that you may disregard your compass or say the map must be reflecting what it looked like during the Jurassic period.  The most productive option is to erase all your prejudice and preconceived notions, and take a fresh look around you, at your compass, and at your map.  Beware of your over confident mind, and remember, your map and compass never lie!

by Jess Evans
May 4, 2018

I am sure many of us who participate in adventure racing get this question quite often.  I try to answer it but my answer always feel inadequate.  On the surface, an adventure race is a team endurance activity that requires using a map and compass to navigate your way around a course to pick up checkpoints.  Each leg of the course may have different athletic disciplines, such as biking, trekking, and paddling, that the team must use while collecting the checkpoints.

Another key aspect of adventure racing is the effort of planning for the race to execute it successfully.  Because there are so many possible modes of transportation, the gear list can be quite large.  When I am preparing for a multi-day race, there is the food planning, the gear staging planning, and the physical comfort planning.  You must do a lot of thinking before the race even begins.

Ok… that seems simple enough, but adventure racing is much more than the disciplines and the planning!  I think the team is one of the key elements of the adventure race.  It is the team dynamics which helps the team move through the course.  If you have a dysfunctional team, your not getting very far very fast.  It is the team camaraderie that helps with the success of the team.  There is a special bond between the teammates.  As a team you are relying on your wit and will to get through the course together as much as your gear and your physical fitness.  There is truth in the saying “your team is only as strong as the weakest link.”  Your team is like a series of links chained together.  The team can only take as much as the weakest link.  As a team, you must support each other to get the entire team through the race.

When I race with a team, sometimes one of our goals is to be in the top five or qualify for the National Championship, but most often our goal is to successfully complete the race with smiles on our faces and hopes for the next race.  What is adventure racing?  Maybe the best way to answer that is to get out and try one.

by Jess Evans
May 1, 2018

Wow!  Twenty-five adventure races in May (listed on the trusty Adventure Race Hub).  You can do two races per weekend and still miss a bunch of great races.  I love seeing all these adventure races cropping up around the country.  If only I had a plan to participate in more of them…

When I first started adventure racing 10 years ago, I thought I had stumbled onto this obscure sport that 100 people in the entire world participated in.  Then I learned there was not one, but TWO national adventure race championships, AND an AR World Series that led to an AR World Championship.  What?!  My mind was blown.

Slowly the AR world began to open up to me.  I found more races and more teams.  I discovered that people of all ages were enjoying these races not for a few years, but years upon years.  I look forward to opening this sport up to many others and share the love I have for it.

There are plenty of races lurking in your neck of the woods for any level of racer.  Not racing “because you can’t find a race near you” is no longer an excuse.  Enjoy this beautiful spring and get out there!