You did it, you made it to the finish line, hopefully in one piece having had a great time and are already thinking about what your next adventure race might be. Great, time to find that next race and take what you’ve learned from this first race and make adjustments/improvements for your next race.

If this sounds about right, then let us make a few recommendations for some things you can and should be doing post-race:

Thank the volunteers!

Hopefully one thing you noticed during and after your race is that adventure races require amazing volunteers to make these events happen. Did the course have multiple stations around the area from boat-put-in to Transition Areas out in the middle of remote wilderness manned by cheerful/helpful volunteers who were likely manning that station for hours? Without amazing volunteers like these adventure races can’t happen so let them know your appreciation and also consider volunteering for a race in between participating in a few. Volunteering is actually a great way to learn about adventure racing and you may even learn some things you can apply to your next race.

Chat and hang out with other racers post-race. Replenish all those calories you burned!

Discuss your experiences with fellow racers; hopefully your race is providing some good post race food and refreshments to help you start to recover all those calories you’ve burned; you’d be surprised just how much you burn during a race if you step on a scale before/after the race. So get the process of replenishment started quickly alongside your fellow racers.

Clean up your equipment!

There’s a pretty good chance that you finished your race having dirtied up your gear, from muddy socks/shoes, sweaty clothes or even just dirt on your bike from gravel roads & trails. The last thing you want to do is wreck your gear, get those clothes in the washer, and definitely within a day or so after make sure you take the time to give your bike a proper wash.

Especially when it comes to your bike, leaving dirt and/or sand in the gearing, chains, or moving parts like the suspension fork can damage those parts if left as is. Make sure you’re cleaning off other equipment and in the case of things like lights/headlamps, if you don’t intend to use them soon you may want to remove the batteries temporarily so they don’t corrode, that last thing you want is to months later pull out any equipment before/during your next event to find things unusable.

Equipment lessons learned:

Turns out that compass you bought online wasn’t very accurate? Maybe the shoes you used gave you blisters very quickly? Oftentimes its not until you try to use some equipment in a race itself that you find its good or bad. Don’t forget to make adjustments for those sorts of things, and don’t wait until your next race, experiment with gear changes during your practicing between now and your next race.

Talk with your team about lessons learned:

If you and your teammates plan to race together again, its probably a good idea to do a debrief together if you want to get better/faster, not get lost so much. Discuss what worked well and what issues you encountered and you can brainstorm ways to prevent them. Also take stock to be constructive instead of attacking anyone: “It took us a lot of time to do X because of Y, maybe we should try out Z next time and it would be more efficient.”

A common thing for beginner teams to do is “race as a group of soloists” instead of racing “as a team.” Which means training separately on your own time and only ever really getting together as a group for the first time on race day. Many beginner teams quickly learn that 1 person is much faster at a certain discipline but you can only go as fast as your slowest person. That doesn’t mean you can’t find ways to speed up as a team, a common example is in Transition Areas while switching from one discipline to another; beginner teams tend to be “every man for themselves” where each person is converting themselves from biking to paddling, only problem is the navigator is also trying to get the next map ready, and teamate C is just slower than everyone else at doing this or spending too much time switching gear in their pack and just isn’t as quick in transition. Since the navigator has to prep the next map(s), another faster-transitioning teammate can take care of the navigators equipment for them and make the group faster as a whole. When you are on bikes you can push/tow teammates, you can rethink who is positioned where in your boat setup.

The above is just a few examples you may learn from, but debriefing as a group is the first step to finding potential improvements as a group.

Take a look at your maps and route choices:

Just about everyone has some sort of fitness tracker these days, most commonly a smart-watch. Did you “track your activity?” If so you can take your race maps (which also make a great souvenir) and compare them to your GPS track and learn some lessons about potential places where you bobbled. Some races actually have GPS trackers on all the entrants which is great for post-race because it affords you the opportunity to compare all the different route choices everyone made in the race. Was there another team that was neck-and-neck with you at CP5 but by CP6 they were ahead of you, go take a look at the GPS track and find out what they did. This sort of unintentional A/B testing is a way for you to learn about maximizing efficiency with route choices.

Recruit more friends/family to join you next time!

Let folks know how much fun you had, tell them all the things you saw, if you brought a camera or the race organization had a photographer out on the course; show off photos of this amazing accomplishment of yours, because you’re awesome!