Adventure Racing Activities for Fun and Fitness
ISBN: 0736069240
ISBN13: 9780736069243
Edition Description: Paperback, 136pp, 2008
Authors: Daniel D. DeJager, Cathrine Himberg

Reviewer: Andy McCorquodale

Adventure Racing Activities for Fun and Fitness is an invaluable resource for any physical educator wishing to properly conduct an adventure racing unit within the physical education curriculum. This text is focused more towards the middle and high school physical education student, although many of the activities are suitable for elementary students.

This book was written for the purpose of providing a guide to physical educators who want to implement an adventure racing unit within their physical education curriculum, or those who only wish to put together an engaging, developmentally appropriate obstacle course on any given day. This text is 125 pages long, and anything that can be helpful to an interested reader can be extracted quite readily. It is a very easy read, and the layout of this text is conducive for easy navigation. The authors have done a great job of achieving their purpose for this textbook, and they have done it in a manner that requires very little time.

This resource is a wonderful help for physical educators, and there are several specific reasons why this is true. First of all, the organization of this text seems to be put together with the idea that physical educators don’t have unlimited amounts of time to search through a textbook for activity and unit ideas. The activity finder is a wonderful tool for mixing and matching the activities found within this book to create obstacle courses that are uniquely yours. With the high amount of activities found in the activity finder, creating a variety of obstacle courses shouldn’t be difficult, leaving a higher probability of desirable student interest.

Another great feature of this textbook is that it covers more than just a variety of activities that can be used to create a quality adventure racing unit. There are sections on point systems, assessments, and sample ideas for creating cross-curricular learning opportunities for students within an adventure racing unit. A final element that is helpful for physical educators is that most of these activities and units can be implemented within the physical education curriculum with very little squeeze on your budget. A majority of these activities use little to no equipment, and much of the equipment that is used is often times already a part of a traditional physical education program.

This text can be a wonderful addition to any physical educator’s library, and it is fully recommended for anyone wishing to execute a quality adventure racing unit. The activities in this text contain the proper fitness elements for a physical education unit, and the developmental appropriateness of the activities fits very well within the scope of the new physical education.

I give this book a 5 star rating.