Leading Team Bend Racing on the World’s Toughest Challenge in Fiji, Jason Magness has done over 50 expedition races under his belt.

Here are some lessons about adventure racing that you can glean from:

1. Adventure racing is ultimately about two things – and one of them is relationships.

Once the race starts, it's not going to get better. And the big thing that people miss in this sport is that it's set up against newbies or people that haven't done it because they have so many excuses. You could always point to somebody else on your team that made a mistake or blame a situation, but the sooner you get away from any of those, the better.  

Even if somebody doesn't do their job, it doesn't do any good to bring that up during the race. It will not make you any faster and it will not make you achieve your goals or get closer to them. If you don't have a good relationship, you're more likely to accentuate those mistakes and make more mistakes because you're afraid of making mistakes.  

2. If we are so full of doing good, there is no room to do bad.

Regardless of the result, the most important thing in adventure racing is communication and connection. This opens the way for you to learn more about each other so that when you race together again, you already have that understanding and compassion. If you're a pessimist in the sport of adventure racing, that's not going to happen. You've got to be an optimist and you've got to be a team player and invest in relationship skills. 

3. As soon as you realize you aren't the only one, the sooner you can get on with it. 

When you're in a team, it's really easy to look at all your struggles and think you're failing. 

But seeing how other teams are also failing to do things somehow changes your psyche to do things well. 

4. Disappointments create a script for how you behave in the future so point positive. 

Failures happen. You have to acknowledge them and learn from them. But you also need to spend more time looking at what you did well so that you’re going to do more of that. It’s important to have post-race debrief within the team for everyone to express their feelings. But be able to turn any negative into a positive. 

If you want to learn more about more adventure racing strategies, check out the Tales of Toughness Podcast on https://gosonja.com/podcast​.