The Endless Mountains Adventure Race presented by Rootstock Racing: An AR World Series event

endlessmountainsar.com

Adventure racing is continuing to grow in the US and abroad thanks to a new partnership between the Adventure Racing World Series (ARWS) and the United States Adventure Racing Association (USARA.) At the first major US race held under this partnership, the Endless Mountains Adventure Race turned out to be a fantastic re-emergence of expedition length racing on the US East Coast. You can read the full press release over on Sleepmonsters.com.

The five day race held in the PA Wilds was also an excellent test for our efforts as Adventure Racing media professionals to improve our coverage. Traditional sporting events are difficult enough to cover from a media perspective, and endurance events are even more difficult. As the distances and times between the athletes grows, showing a complete picture of the race unfolding gets to be extremely tricky. For Endless Mountains 2022, our simplified media goal was to get as much fresh content out, as quickly as possible. During the day, that meant short clips, stills and stories to social media. In the evenings it would be daily race recap videos. In addition we did a custom 3D Google Earth flyover video with the course information overlaid, custom logo animations and motion graphics, as well as shorter segment-by-segment explainer clips for the various stages, filmed on site.

Pushing content out at a high rate like that while trudging through the same terrain the athletes face is a challenge, but we wanted to add even more depth to the coverage with live video. In its alpha stage, we began broadcasting a live dot-watching recap show. Adventure racing fans who watch these races often call themselves “dot watchers” due to the fact that they watch the race through the lens of a GPS tracked map of the racers on course. Each team carries a GPS transponder that’s linked to the tracker so anyone on the internet can follow their tracks. From a fan perspective though, the tracker may be difficult to understand at first. So we brought in a few experienced racers as analysts to help break down the action. Pulling in analysis along with really tremendous video taken by our course photographers, we were able to put together the first ‘live news’ broadcast of an expedition race.

Running media for an expedition length adventure race is really an event unto itself. Scrambling sleep-deprived back and forth across remote terrain and endless country roads to find and get video of teams, generally trying to keep up with the avalanche of media and information coming from elsewhere on the course. As someone who regularly competes in adventure races, following along with the media team is just as much of a race to me. So, why not keep trying to improve?

Later this year, we’ll be launching Adventure Racing Insider, an endurance sports media production house. Our already established team includes seasoned adventure racing videographers, still photographers, drone pilots, social media experts, remote analysts and on-air talent. We’re able to work with any race organization worldwide to bring media production for expedition and endurance races under one umbrella with an easy to access central location. Working closely with international partners and GPS tracking organizations like Adventure Enablers, we can deploy our team globally to tackle coverage for even the most remote events.

October 7, 2022 UPDATE: I’m proud to say that adventureracinginsider.com is now online! After a successful beta test at the USARA National Championship in Bishop, CA, we have expanded and improved our ability to bring feature rich adventure race coverage to our audience from just about anywhere. Check out our most recent efforts at the Race Info Hub for the 2022 USARA Nationals. This is the live-updated site that we used during the race and now lives on as an archive for all the race media.