The sport of adventure racing is continuing to grow in the US and this summer I had the opportunity to serve as the Media Director for the latest demonstration event in the Adventure Racing World Series: The Endless Mountains Adventure Race. A five day expedition race held in the Wilds of PA and hosted by Rootstock Racing, Endless Mountains drew a crowd of top names in US adventure racing, including overall winners, Bend Racing. While I had shot a good number of adventure races as a photographer already, this would be new territory for me, taking control of the whole media team for the race. Luckily, I had a plan.
Adventure racing coverage is notoriously difficult to get “right.” The races take place over such great distances and times that it becomes extremely difficult to cover all the teams as they traverse the course. On top of that, we face the added challenge of relaying the play-by-play information in a timely manner, collecting and distilling video and photo from various sources on course as fast as possible. The last challenge in adventure racing media is probably the hardest: trying to explain to casual fans what is happening. This isn’t exactly an easy sport to understand for the uninitiated and as the media team we felt like it was our responsibility to break down the action so more people can get on board with dot watching.
The first part of the plan was to produce a visually engaging 3D flyover for the course. I was given the .gpx tracks for each of the stages along with the course schematic. Released at the pre-race briefing, the course flyover proved immensely helpful for racers and fans to visualize the enormity of it all. We also produced a series of segment by segment explainer videos, hosted by the race directors to help racers and fans gather more information.
Once on site, I set up our Race Headquarters media production suite at Clarion University. From that production desk, we were able to run a live broadcast twice a day on Facebook Live. The broadcast turned out to be a big hit too: I pulled together race maps, live trackers, weather reports, videos, and most importantly, live remote analysts to provide commentary on each day’s race action. Directing the show from race headquarters, I also found myself on camera doing some presenting and hosting. This was certainly a step up in intensity from anything I had done before, but as we ironed out the wrinkles, our production started to hum.
Media production suite at Clarion University Race HQ
A critical part of our coverage package revolves around paying attention to the teams who are not necessarily on the podium. Following a race like this it becomes easy to focus just on the lead teams as they fly through the course. Racers who are out there just to finish the course are often left by the wayside in media coverage. Recognizing our personnel and time/distance limitations, we opted for a mission-driven media acquisition strategy. Our fans would help guide our coverage. We made every effort to get our photographers out onto the course with as many teams as possible, not just the leaders. As fans interacted with us on Facebook, we went out and found their teams or talked about them on stream. Hopefully this type of coverage resonated with those watching. For the fans, know that we are always working to improve coverage and to get out there and find your teams on course.
The week I spent covering this race wasn’t easy. In fact I slept less than many of the teams on the course. During the first few days, our team was hit with a few challenges that included internet outages at our secondary locations. We do have the best media folks and volunteers though, solving our issues and getting us back on track.
At the end of the week, we ended up with a healthy showcase of videos, starting with the highlights video that the racers all saw at the awards ceremony:
The Endless Mountains media coverage package was just the next iteration in what I hope will be continually evolving and improving media coverage for adventure racing. A big thanks must go to race directors Abby and Brent for putting their trust in me. Additional thanks to my stellar media crew: 2nd Unit Director Paul Miller, Photographers Chris Radcliffe, Vlad Bukalo and Nic Wynia.
See you out there at the next one!
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