“Be everywhere at once.” The saying echoed tauntingly in my mind the week before the event. How do you capture a feeling of a live event, with no do-overs? So I began to scribble, like I always do.

In late 2014 we we’re tasked with the challenge of capturing the feeling of a 24 hour adventure race. In this case, it was the Wilderness Traverse adventure race that took place in Ontario’s backcountry. The challenge was in taking the video from a general race overview, to something that showed how intense and competitive these races are. However, in doing so, we had to be careful not to bury the immense feeling of accomplishment and success through teamwork that follows these races, and risk losing interest because people would think that they are too hard to attempt.

Adventure races are really a microcosm of life moments; they take the challenge of decision making, working with others, hardships and successes and jam them into a block of time. What I scribbled out and presented to the team was a chaotic sine graph of emotion, if you will. Those that adventure through that timeframe experience a load of feelings, that can be sequentially dropped onto this graph. However, the amplitude for each up and down is unique for each person and team.

To simplify things we decided to focus on one section, a parabolic curve that represented three raw feelings, that many can associate with: excitement of attempting a challenge, exhaustion, and a sense of accomplishment.