Adventure Racing Resources
Book Reading List
One of the missions of the ARC is to educate and to assist race promoters, clubs, and racers with materials on race strategies, tools and techniques, and athletes' personal stories and experiences regarding the challenges and triumphs associated with adventure racing. The ARC library collections consist of titles and good reads recommended by fellow athletes. If you have a favorite book that you recommend for members of the ARC community please forward the title of book to resources@arcooperative.org.
Adventure Racing
A complete guide to the skills, equipment, strategies, navigation, and nutrition used by the top adventure racers around the globe. Start with the right gear to perform your best—even in desert, rainforest, and subzero environments. Then learn the skills for trekking, mountain biking, canoeing and kayaking, and mountaineering.
Adventure Racing: The Ultimate Guide
Written by two endurance athletes, Adventure Racing covers the sport from its origins in New Zealand 20 years ago through today. It delves into the nuts and bolts of navigation and orientation, mountain biking, trekking, rope skills, and paddling. Information on nighttime racing and training, how to prevent injury and illness, fuel and hydration, and what to expect after a race are included.
World's Toughest Endurance Challenges
The World’s Toughest Endurance Challenges profiles 50 of the most extreme marathons, triathlons, bike rides, adventure races, climbs, open-water swims and other iconic endurance events from around the world. Breathtaking full-color photographs and insider commentary from top athletes will thrill endurance athletes, extreme sports addicts, and outdoor adventurers of all stripes.
The Thrill of Victory, the Agony of My Feet: Tales from the World of Adventure racing
Jamison, Moslow-Benway, and Stover provide a wide range of essays sharing the thoughts and experiences of a variety of adventure racing athletes. The book reflects upon their experiences, team building, leadership traits, chaos, and lively exchanges with team members.
Fixing Your Feet: Injury Prevention and Treatment for Athletes
Foot expert and ultra runner Vonhof explains how the interplay of anatomy, biomechanics, and footwear can lead to happy or hurting feet. Vonhof focuses on individual and team care covering both injury prevention and first aid necessary to keep racing.
The Essential Wilderness Navigator: How to Find Your Way in the Great Outdoors, 2nd Edition
Primer on navigating in the wilderness with exercises for developing a directional six sense, tips on mastering the art of map and compass reading, comprehensive updates on the newest orienteer technologies, and examples of topographical maps.
Bump, Bike, and Baby: Mummy's Gone Adventure racing
The author is a carefree runner with little interest in children. Unfortunately she promised her husband they'll start a family. She describes her exploits and how she maintains her sanity when faced with the demands of being a mummy and competing in adventure races
How Winning Works
Robyn Benincasa shows you how to climb to new levels of professional and personal success. She shares the eight essential elements of teamwork, learned through her extreme adventure racing, that create synergy with all the teammates in your life, from colleagues and customers to family members and friends:
Women are not small men. Stop eating and training like one.
Because most nutrition products and training plans are designed for men, it’s no wonder that so many female athletes struggle to reach their full potential. ROAR is a comprehensive, physiology-based nutrition and training guide specifically designed for active women. This book teaches you everything you need to know to adapt your nutrition, hydration, and training to your unique physiology so you can work with, rather than against your female physiology. Exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist Stacy T. Sims, PhD, shows you how to be your own biohacker to achieve optimum athletic performance.
Rusch to Glory
Rebecca Rusch describes her adventure journey as a world class adventure racer, mountain bike and gravel rider, and successful business woman. She describes her early childhood and the loss of her father, an Air Force pilot shot down over Vietnam. From these humble beginnings she chronicles her strengths and weaknesses and through grit, resilience, and perseverance, she became a world class professional athlete and adventure racer.
The Perfect Mile
There was a time when running the mile in four minutes was believed to be beyond the limits of human foot speed, and in all of sport it was the elusive holy grail. Roger Bannister was a young English medical student who epitomized the ideal of the amateur — still driven not just by winning but by the nobility of the pursuit.
Undaunted Courage
In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase.
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
A major part of adventure racing is the possibility of things going drastically and tragically wrong. The sport brings the risks of unknown and uncertain conditions, negative actors, and physical and emotional challenges that drive you to your core. Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole, presents one of the greatest adventure stories of the modern age.
Laurence Gonzales’s bestselling Deep Survival has helped save lives from the deepest wildernesses, just as it has improved readers’ everyday lives. Its mix of adventure narrative, survival science, and practical advice has inspired everyone from business leaders to military officers, educators, and psychiatric professionals on how to take control of stress, learn to assess risk, and make better decisions under pressure.
The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of te Grand Canyon
A great book for adventure seekers. Outside magazine's "Literary All-Stars" depicts the thrilling true tale of the fastest boat ride down the Colorado River and thru the Grand Canyon during the flood of 1983
Donato details the quest for adventure and the opportunities to test ourselves in a very primal way—in ways that we aren’t able to in our lives very much anymore. Describing the key moments and adventures that put him on the path to Boundless, Simon takes you on an adventure-filled journey around the globe and shows how you can apply his lessons and experience to your everyday life.