Sports
How Adventure Racing Was Born in Brazil in the 1990s
Shubi Guimarães and Sidney Togumi recall the era of paper maps, compasses, and newsstand discoveries.
Before GPS and social media, exploring outdoor endurance sports in Brazil took patience and pure adventurous spirit. In a candid conversation, Shubi Guimarães and Sidney Togumi look back at the early days of adventure racing during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
In the late 1990s, anyone wanting to check the results of the Ironman World Championship in Kona or follow international endurance events had to subscribe to imported magazines like Outside Magazine or Triathlete and wait up to three months for the physical issue to arrive in Brazil. Long before GPS watches, live feeds, and app-mapped routes, the birth of adventure racing in the country was built on flyers in specialty outdoor shops, cable TV broadcasts, and sheer intuition.
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The arrival of the sport and the impact of Eco Challenge
The spark for outdoor endurance sports in Brazil ignited when the legendary Eco Challenge aired on the Discovery Channel. For Shubi Guimarães, a pioneer of the sport and founder of Team Atenah, her first contact came while flipping through an American magazine in 1997, where she saw images of athletes alternating between rafting, mountain biking, trekking, and rappelling in Australia. The following year, in 1998, Alexandre Freitas brought the format to Brazilian soil by creating the EMA (Expedição Mata Atlântica), inspired by his experience competing in New Zealand's traditional Southern Traverse.
Shubi's debut took place at that very first edition of the EMA in Ilhabela. Without a mountain bike of her own, she tackled the challenge on her brother's borrowed bike, took a quick navigation crash course with the Army, and learned to paddle Canadian canoes virtually on the eve of the race.
From asphalt and baseball to the mud of Salesópolis
For Sidney Togumi, now a prominent coach and leading figure in Brazilian trail running, the path to the trails also began without any prior background in the outdoor world. Coming from traditional sports—he played baseball from age 8 to 21, alongside judo and swimming—Togumi discovered the discipline after spotting an EMA promotional poster at the classic Pé Na Trilha gear shop in São Paulo's Paraíso neighborhood.
His official debut came in the early 2000s at an event organized by Mário Lopes and sponsored by Half Dome in the municipality of Salesópolis. Back then, three-person teams competed without any technology beyond simple stopwatches like the Timex 50 Laps and paper topographic maps. Inexperience in plotting azimuths led to memorable moments: while the entire pack started by turning left, Togumi's team headed confidently to the right under a torrential downpour.
The early seeds of Brazilian trail running
This rustic, collaborative atmosphere—documented at the time through video coverage by Renata Falzoni—served as a proving ground not only for major expedition races, but also for the emergence of the country's first dedicated mountain running events. Grassroots initiatives such as Fábio Galvão's Copa Paulista, the arrival of the XTERRA circuit, and handcrafted flyers for races in Rio de Janeiro and Poços de Caldas paved the transition from raw adventure expeditions into what would become Brazil's thriving trail running scene in the decades that followed.
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