Guest blogger Geoff Langford is the head adventure dude at Frontier Adventure Sports and Training (http://www.far.on.ca/). Aside from putting on some of Canada's premier adventure races, FAST organizes training camps in Mexico designed to offer adventure racers an edge over their competitors. Here Geoff tells us his top three ways you can have success in adventure racing.
If you're new to adventure racing, you probably think you need to be a super-athlete with no need for sleep and an insane tolerance for suffering in order to succeed.
You wouldn't be wrong, but luckily you can also find success by racing smart and focusing on a few key factors that will get your team to the finish line healthy, fast and smiling.
Pace. So many things affect your pace, and a solid team will constantly be focused on maintaining their maximum sustainable pace. Not their full-out maximum pace, but a sustainable maximum. Push too hard and someone will bonk or get injured. Too slow and you'll miss the banquet. The biggest secret here is teamwork - communicate and watch each other, work together and find ways to improve the team's pace - not just your own. And here is where many teams miss an amazing opportunity - tow each other, push each other, take some weight or an entire pack. There are so many ways to create balance and improve your team's overall page.
Time in motion. Isn't that what I just said? No, this is about wasting time. Streamline your team's stops, train and develop ways to avoid stopping, avoid chatting and lingering in transitions. It's amazing how time stopped adds up and keeps the podium just out of reach.
Distance traveled. This involves two skills - navigation and route finding. Surprisingly, it's not all about finding the shortest route, but the fastest. Often the 6K trail run is faster than a 2K bushwhack. Try it when you're training. And use your entire team for managing your route - someone counting pace, someone watching for landmarks, etc. Navigation is technical, but it's not difficult to learn and improve at, and your team's performance will soar.
Of course, there is much more to each of these and I'll dig into them more in the coming weeks. When your team is training, you should focus as much on these factors as anything else.
Don't miss the key point here. Underlying all three of these factors is the core of adventure racing - teamwork!
Photo: Participants in Camp Frontier's Pico2Playa training camp in Mexico work on their towing techniques to improve pace.
No comments:
Post a Comment