FIT CITY COMBINES LOVE OF ADVENTURE AND RACING
Too Cool Adventure Racing serves up outdoor fun at Howl at the Moon race.
I hear it first, like a maraca, an instant before the beam of my headlamp catches a ropelike shape slithering across the trail where I’m running at Colorado Bend State Park.
I hop like someone is taking potshots at my feet; my racing partner Ron Perry stops to get a closer look.
Yep, a 3-foot rattler. But we have places to go, so we scamper on into the night.
Four hours into my firstever adventure race, I’ve already belly crawled through a cave, ridden my mountain bike down miles of cactus and limestone-studded paths, and dodged a wary armadillo. Before sun rises, I’ll have paddled a stretch of the Colorado River by starlight, scrambled over boulders and punched a race passport at nine checkpoints around this state park 90 miles northwest of Austin.
It’s bliss at its knee-scraped, lung-busting, dirt-caked finest, and it fits right in with my Year of Adventure.
In case you haven’t been following, I’ve already jumped off a 10-meter platform, raced in a naked 5K run, rappelled down a 38-story building and launched myself off a water ski jump. October seemed like a fine time to try a night adventure race. Besides, Austinbased Too Cool Adventure Racing, which has staged gritty, no-frills races at parks and camps around Central Texas for 13 years, has been nudging me to participate for a decade.
While mass-produced events like the Tough Mudder and Spartan Race lure thousands of participants who run a marked course of man-made obstacles, Too Cool races draw between 50 and 200 hearty folks who’d rather run through the woods on their own. Their races feature trail running, mountain biking and paddling, plus assorted challenges. Another difference? There is no marked course — just a set of checkpoints it’s up to the racers to find.
“As tough as the Spartan and other races are, people always seem to think what we do is much tougher,” says Art Cook, who teamed with adventure racing partner Robyn Cantor to start Too Cool Adventure Racing. “A lot of people don’t know how to read a map, especially a topographic map.”