Adventure Racing Activities for Fun and Fitness

Begin with a physical challenge. Add a heavy dose of fun. Divide into teams. What do you have? Adventure racing events and units that are easily planned for a field day or a regular class period using equipment you already have.

Adventure Racing Activities for Fun and Fitness: A CORE Experience is the brainchild of Dan DeJager, a physical education teacher and adventure racing enthusiast, and Cathrine Himberg, an instructor of future physical educators and advocate for effective physical education who want to pass the fun along to kids. Adventure racing is a sport that combines two or more disciplines and emphasizes teamwork—in fact, the CORE in the book's title stands for cooperative obstacle racing experience. In adventure races, teammates work together to finish an obstacle course as quickly as possible.

DeJager and Himberg provide everything you need to know to prepare for and teach an adventure racing unit at your school or lead an adventure racing event in any environment with any group of people. With Adventure Racing Activities for Fun and Fitness, you get

-complete instructions for setting up an adventure racing unit or event,

-forms and checklists to help you organize and conduct an adventure race, and

-suggestions and options for customizing the activities to suit your needs.

Unlike conventional adventure races that call for mountain bikes, kayaks, and other specialized equipment, Adventure Racing Activities for Fun and Fitness guides you in setting up races for teams of two, three, or four students that require no equipment or readily available equipment.

The authors show you how to set up a race, lay out the course (locations include tracks, fields, courts, schools, and gymnasiums), use obstacles to present challenges, and assess race results. You discover how to vary the course and the obstacles to bring fresh excitement and challenges to each race. And you find out about various scoring systems (some in which the winners are not necessarily the ones who finish first!), adding spice and motivation to the competitions.

Adventure Racing Activities for Fun and Fitness provides teachers and youth leaders with a new way to get kids excited about physical activity, instill healthy habits, and meet NASPE National Physical Education Standards. More than that, it meets kids' standards of having fun while being physically active.

Dan DeJager, MS, is a physical education teacher and new teacher mentor in the San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento, California. Mr. DeJager has coached several sports and has served as a school intramural director. He also has worked on several committees, including the Physical Education Curriculum Framework and Criteria Committee for the California State Department of Education. Mr. DeJager has published an article on adventure racing in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance and has made numerous presentations at the state and national levels on adventure racing.

Cathrine Himberg, PhD, has been teaching physical education teacher education at California State University at Chico since 1996. She has taught K-12 physical education and children's fitness classes and has coached youth sports. Every week she spends hours in the public schools with her university students so that they can get the hands-on experience they need to become effective and reflective teachers. She is the founder and director of CASPER (Center for Advancement of Standards-based Physical Education Reform—www.supportREALteachers.org), an international advocacy organization for developmentally appropriate physical education.

Dr. Himberg is the coauthor of Teaching Secondary Physical Education: Preparing Adolescents to be Active for Life (HK 2003). She has a master's degree in exercise physiology from California State University at Chico and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction (physical education pedagogy) from Virginia Tech.