Wherever You'll Go

Cotopaxi Questival: A Questivus for the rest of us

There’s a difference between a race and an adventure race. You can’t train, you can’t really plan, your nutrition is likely to go out the window. But you still need a competitive spirit, endurance, and “llamazing” teammates and supporters. Without giving away all the surprises, here’s some of our adventures and mis-adventures on the Cotopaxi Questival.

Breakfast at a moon tower. Austin is the only city in the world known to still have moon towers.

When my hiking friend, Kimberlee, told me about this race, I was in. And yes, as a matter of fact I do have four other crazy friends, Kari, Rich, Dana and Bill, who would be up for it. This is the pitch: spend 24 hours with little sleep traveling around Austin c
ompleting unknown tasks. I feel like I should have asked more questions, but surprises make the journey. Kari, Bill and I competed in the Cap2Coast Relay together, so spending many smelly hours in a car with little sleep wasn’t new to us.

Even though you don’t know what the tasks are until 24 hours before the race start, we did know they would fall into the categories of camping, teamwork, food, service and adventure. Basically the challenge is to do things you don’t normally do – and some of those things are for good reason.

The first step was to come up with a clever team name. We chose “Llama said knock you out”, since Cotopaxi’s brand mascot is a llama. The night before the race we met up for about four hours of strategizing. We finally called it a night knowing we needed a good night’s rest. We only planned for a mere four hours of sleep during the race (we ended up getting less than three).

The race started at 7pm on Friday, and most of the team took off work to pack, plan and organize. We arrived at the race start at 5pm, and would end at 7pm the following night. Each team is given a totem that must be in every task’s picture or video, so you don’t try to complete any tasks before the official start. We downloaded the Questify app, which listed each task, every team page and rank and sent notifications. Being unprepared for technology to fail was part of the mis-adventure.

Every adventure should start with a dance party!

Two hours in, we had already completed five tasks. Each task is assigned points, so completing many tasks is as important as completing high value tasks and we could follow our ranking in the app. And then we got a flat tire. None of us had a vehicle big enough for the six of us, so we had to take two cars. After changing the flat, we switched out that car with another, so we wouldn’t waste time getting it fixed.

From beginning…

to the end. We took a lot of selfies.

We arrived at our camp site about 12:30am, and were on our way again by 6 so we could catch the sunrise. It was nice when we could take a few minutes to be still and enjoy the journey. I was worried we would be so stressed trying to complete the challenges that we would stop having fun, but for me that wasn’t the case. When I looked back at the photos we were laughing in so many of them, and we are still laughing about some of the stunts we pulled.

Our expressions speak volumes. Yes, he ate worm and yes, it was horrible.

Getting creative with our photos.

Not only were we tasked with completing as many challenges as possible, we also wanted to take creative photos. If you
make the top ten teams, then you judged by your peers based on the photos and videos you submitted. While we weren’t even close to the top ten, we finished in a respectable 69th out of 523 teams. Considering my goals were to finish top 100, and to have fun, I feel like we won.

The Questival is stopping in about 45 cities this year, and Austin was just the first stop. The organization of the event had some hiccups, but for the $35 entry fee which included a Cotopaxi Luzon backpack we didn’t have much to lose. The backpack itself is pretty cool because the seamstresses who make them pick the colors, so no two are exactly alike.

The race is chose-your-own-adventure style, and you can stop at any time. We competed until the very last minute, but there were so many tasks we wanted but didn’t have time to do. I have to say I was definitely stretched out of my comfort zone with the lack of sleep and having to talk to strangers, but for all the laughs we shared it was worth it.

Tips:

• Decide ahead of time what’s your mission; to have win or to have fun. We are super competitive but wanted both.
• Bring healthy snacks. It was a long day and we had no real meals. High brew and candy only get you so far.
• Have fun! I was worried we’d kill each other, but nope I just adore my teammates more!

Photo credits: Bill Maroon, and Kimberlee Arce