The AR Kids Are Alright

Members of the Full Steam Ahead adventure race club pose at the Spring Bloom Adventure Race.

Left to right front: Henry Caulton, Samuel Joseph, Jared Monge, Ella McMongale, Josephine Johnson, Lexi Partyka, Jeremy Johnson.

Back row: Luke Williams, Jeremy Bel, Eli Miller

By Bill Donohue

How can the sport of adventure racing attract younger racers? Seems like we just need to tell them stories about the races.

“I heard Mr. Johnson’s stories, and I thought ‘why not?’” says Ella McMonagle, a 17-year-old junior who describes the stories as chaotic and fun. “You just want to be a part of the stories… [The adventure race] was just honestly one of the best things I have ever done.”

“I heard the stories when Mr. Johnson would come back from a race—all the mayhem,” says Jeremy Bel, a junior, “and I thought, I want to do this.”

“Mr. Johnson made running sound fun,” says Jared Monge, a 17-year-old junior with a soccer background.

Mr. Johnson is Jeremy Johnson, an adventure racer, high school social studies teacher, and sponsor of “Full Steam Ahead,” an adventure race student organization at Brunswick High School in Brunswick, MD.

The club started when the academic oriented model UN club started exploring the outdoors together to get to know each other. A combination of Mr. Johnson’s inspiring stories and some adventure-minded teenagers set the club in motion.

“I run cross country in the fall, and the thing about cross country is you are running without a purpose really,” says Lexi Partyka, a 17-year-old junior. “I like that an adventure race is like a treasure hunt. Me and Ella always say it feels like the Hunger Games. And its more than just running—there is paddling and climbing…”

“It is motivating to go from checkpoint to checkpoint,” adds McMonagle.

“I wanted to win something,” says Sammy Joseph, a recently turned 18-year-old who has a cross country running background, on why he started adventure racing. “I can’t win my races so I thought I could win this.”

His track and cross-country background gave him a good foundation for foot sections, but he had no navigation skills. Enter Luke Williams, an 18-year-old senior with a navigation background thanks to the boy scouts and his backpacking experience.

“I have gone to a camp with week-long backpacking trips,” says Williams, who was also a counselor at the camp and started leading the trips last summer. “From that and from Boy Scouts I have learned a lot about navigation.”

They recruited another friend, Henry Caulton, a 17-year-old junior with no navigation nor running background to form their team.

“I just went in kind of blind,” he says in true adventure racer fashion. “But it was really fun--trying to train with these guys and the friends I have met along the way.”

Caulton had done sports as a child but hadn’t been participating in anything organized for a while.

“I just wanted to get out and do something,” he says.

His team was complimentary of his training.

“Henry has been running every single day leading up to the adventure race to get in shape,” says Joseph. “I think it really paid off.”

The students recently participated in the Spring Bloom Adventure Race in Virginia by Broad Run Off Road and have amassed chaotic stories of their own—starting with the timing of the race in the high school social calendar.

“Most of us did this after prom,” says Caulton.

“We had 4 or 5 hours of sleep, but we woke up and did the race,” says Joseph. “Prom was a nice precursor to the adventure race.”

Whether it was fatigue due to racing or lack of sleep, one team found themselves needing to adapt after a nav bobble.

“We slid down a hill that was like a mountain,” says Jeremy Bel. “It was steep. We sat on our butts and slide down this hill and couldn’t stop until we got to the bottom.”

“For context, we found a checkpoint that we thought was a certain checkpoint,” says his teammate Jared Monge. “It ended up being a different one. So, we ended up wasting a lot of time. We decided to just wing it, and slide down the hill instead [of the original plan to go around].”

One could only image what their third teammate, 17-year-old junior Eli Miller, must have been thinking since he was roped into the event by a friend.

“I pretty much joined because I was persuaded by Jeremy,” he says to laughs from his teammates.

Then again, many a racer has questioned what they were doing out on the course at some point. Those experiences have led to some of the best stories—just like the ones Mr. Johnson told to inspire his students to start adventure racing.

The students plan to continue in the sport. One big obstacle is gear. The Spring Bloom was an attractive race because there was a “no-bike” category. The club is seeking donations and options to acquire bikes and the skills to go with the staple AR discipline.

And they are spreading the word about the sport. The club recently put on a race at their school that saw participation from 10% of the student population—some who wanted to experience the sport and traditional high school athletic teams who used the event for team building.

The students see mentoring as vital to attracting young people to the sport.

“The key is someone showing younger kids how to do it. If Mr. Johnson never told us about this, I would have never done it,” says Bel. “Mr. Johnson telling us about it, giving us advice, walking us through the steps, allowed us to be introduced to the sport at a nice pace.”

The club has plans to mentor younger high school and middle school aspiring adventure racers to learn the sport.

“We are going to pair up with upcoming high schoolers and run a course with them and get them into the adventure race program,” explains Bel. “We are going to show them how to navigate, where the checkpoints are. Just run with them and help them.”

Together, they will create many more stories.