Questival 2017: Adventure Racing for Good?
“Would you call them the Toms or Warby Parker of outdoor gear?”
My friend asked this question when I asked him to join my Cotopaxi Questival team. Cotopaxi positions itself as a socially and environmentally conscious outdoor gear company. We joined their 24-hour adventure race: The Questival.
Questival is 24 hours of exploring your city with your closest friends, completing quirky challenges, and embarrassing yourself in public.
Questival 2017 works like this:
- Do a bunch of random challenges all over the city and earn points for your team.
- Challenges vary in points, so your team needs to strategize which ones are worth it. Hiking for a mile might only give you 3 points whereas eating a bug might give you 6.
- Unless specifically stated, you need to show off your totem in every challenge. Said totem is a cloth with the words “DO GOOD”.
- The top 10 teams with the highest points are put into a Tinder-esque swiping match where other Questivalers rate “good” or “llamazing” to determine the final rankings.
- The winners are rewarded with an all expense paid trip to an exotic destination and Cotopaxi outdoor gear.
- There are specific “Prize Challenges” such as singing your state song or casually eating a stalk of cauliflower like it is an apple. Like I said, quirky challenges.
Questival’s first race of the 2017 season took place in Austin. The biggest problem was the app, Questify, that Cotopaxi made for participants to track their rankings. You had to submit a photo or video to get points for completing the challenge. Then, teams could rate each other and climb the rankings. Unluckily for us, Questify kept crashing. Teams kept needing to repost their proof of challenge completion. Without the ability to easily submit challenges, we quit, instead lazing about in Zilker Park. After hours of exploring, we headed home and, like the app, crashed.
And here I am, one week later after surviving the Questival. The biggest question: Would I do it again? Absolutely. I became closer friends with my team, explored parts of Austin that I haven’t been to before, and made quality content that will live forever in my heart and on the Web. I visited Austin downtown farmer’s market for the first time, learning about Texas’s only native caffeine-producing plant, yaupon (which makes very good tea), and sang so much carpool karaoke that my voice started to naturally bravado.
At the end of the day, Questival is a peer-to-peer marketing campaign; every challenge asks to be shared on social media and requires you to show your totem in the picture. One challenge requires getting a celebrity with over 50K Twitter followers to retweet your Cotopaxi post. Some teams looked like they weren’t having fun at all. I’d see people smile in pictures, grins dropping as soon as the camera turned off. So here’s my tip for the Questival:
Focus on making quality content rather than cramming as many experiences in 24 hours as possible. This will let you enjoy random things that you’d normally never try out.
Thanks to Questival, I now have so many photos and videos that can be relived in the future. Our challenge submissions had a very Vine aesthetic to it, but this happens when memers are your friends. If you want an excuse to do many things that you normally wouldn’t, sign up for one of the Questivals in the US.
Leftovers:
In my leftovers section, I’ll include random things that didn’t make it into my main post. Expect grumblings, puns, and some life advice.
- Get your Questival ticket as early as possible to take advantage of the early bird discount.
- The “free” Luzon daypack that came with my ticket was smaller than I expected it to be.
- Beware of “free food” check-in challenges. A very hangry team showed up early in the morning when free breakfast tacos (an Austin staple) were promised to the first 200 people. Instead, tacos were only given to teams that could put up a hammock the quickest. Many people got very hangery…
- Yes, Questival is a peer-to-peer marketing campaign for Cotopaxi but you will have genuine fun if you don’t take it too seriously.
- Try meowing all the words to Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” for your carpool karaoke challenge.
Photo credits to Yuriy Minin (Twitter: Yuriy Minin) and Rainier Ababao (Twitter: @rainieratx).
