Adventure race coming to Glenwood area June 11

Orienteering, running, mountain biking, canoeing.
No, that’s not a list of summer camp activities, it’s the list of events for an adventure race Mills County will host in and around Glenwood this June.

Adventure Race Glewood will have contestants earning points by reaching check marks on the unmarked course. The multi-disciplinary team sport consists of teams of one or two participating in timed running, bicycling, canoeing and navigating events through 25 checkpoints throughout the county, starting and finishing at Glenwood Lake Park.

The Glenwood Community School District’s Educational Foundation is the sponsor for the June 11 event. All money raised by the race will go into the fund designed to enable teachers an avenue of financial support to provide students with additional educational opportunities.
The idea of Glenwood hosting the event was hatched by Glenwood Schools Superintendent Devin Embray and Justin Tallmon. Embray and Tallmon’s “Loess is More is More Racing” team competed in a similar adventure race in Panama, Neb. last summer. Embray thought Glenwood would be an ideal candidate for a race of its own.
“We had a good time at that race and we thought this could really work in Glenwood,” Embray said. “We decided to get it started. We needed a non-profit sponsor so we spoke to the Educational Foundation and (foundation board member) Craig Patzer thought it would be great. All three of us have been working on making this happen.”

The Glenwood race, like many of the adventure races, will feature a theme. Glenwood is planning a pirate theme.
“It’s Adventure Race Glenwood…A.R.G...arghhh like a pirate,” Embray joked.

Embray is hoping for at least 50 teams in the inaugural Glenwood event, some perhaps in pirate costumes he says. He sees the event as a light-hearted competition, a hybrid of “The Amazing Race” and the board game “Risk” – with contestants getting a chance to see the community, the neighborhoods, the downtown square and the Loess Hills along the way.

The race works like this: contestants are given a list of 25 checkpoints and their corresponding coordinates so they may plot their course on a provided map and decide if they will run first, or bike or do the canoeing. Teams do not have to find all the checkpoints of one discipline before moving onto the next portion of the race. And there are no set distances for any of the events – how far contestants run or bike or paddle is up to the competitors based on their own course of achieving the most checkpoints. There will be a four-hour time limit for the sports race and an eight-hour limit for the endurance race.

“There’s a lot of strategy involved,” Embray said. “The winner is determined by the most check points in the allotted time. Every five minutes you go over the time limit, you lose a checkpoint.”
The foot race will begin at Glenwood Lake Park and proceed through five checkpoints in Glenwood.

The canoeing portion will consist of four checkpoints at Pony Creek Lake and the bicycling segment, which includes 16 checkpoints, will begin at West Elementary.

Coming a little over a month before Glenwood hosts the opening night stop of RAGBRAI XLIV, Embray said he thinks the adventure race could be a nice kick-off event for the more that 10,000 bicyclists expected July 23.

“This is a different type of race,” he said. “You get a lot of hard core people then you get people who are looking for a change in their routine. I think people enjoy different events like this.”
The event is currently seeking volunteers and sponsors.
For more information or to register, visit www.raceregister.net.