Wellness Wonders: Meet the founder of Rat Race Adventure Sports
Wellness Wonders delves into the stories and innovations driving the UK’s thriving landscape of health, wellbeing, fitness, and nutrition. Join CityAM as we meet the visionary minds and passionate entrepreneurs behind leading brands and the impact they’re making on the pursuit of wellness.
For this feature, CityAM sits down with Jim Mee the founder of Rat Race Adventure Sports. The UK’s largest provider of global adventure challenges, offering everyday people the chance to explore once-in-a-lifetime, bucket list locations.
How was the business founded?
I have been finding adventure anywhere and everywhere for as long as I can remember. I started as an event professional with Red Bull and developed a love for the outdoors living in Scotland and taking part in a series of expeditions around the world.
It was back in 2003 though when I was 23 years old on the side of a mountain in Peru that the idea of Rat Race was born.
I was climbing in Peru, and I was coming to the end of a long period of expeditions and was getting a bit tired of all the snow and ice! So, decided I wanted to set up a business, initially so that I could fund more trips but ultimately, I wanted a fresh challenge.
I took a notebook with me (which I still have!) and in a tent on the mountain Alpamayo, in the Cordillera mountains of Peru, I drafted out a concept for an event called the ‘Rat Race Urban Adventure.’
What was the goal?
The idea was to present a bit of an ironic and quirky take on adventure, hence the name Rat Race, showing that you could have an adventure on your doorstep and that it’s possible for this to be accessible to anyone.
The format involved taking adventure sports such as running, mountain biking, kayaking and abseiling out of the wild places and putting them on the streets of the city. It was well received, albeit the numbers involved in that inaugural Edinburgh event were much smaller than they are today as these types of mass participation events didn’t exist in the same way, then.
How did you fund it?
I sold everything I owned to set up the business including the house that I lived in at the time. Then I secured sponsorship for some of the early events from big corporate companies like Volvo.
What separates you apart from your competitors?
Put simply, every single one of our events has been crafted by myself or Danni, it’s unique and bespoke and nobody else offers the journey or the trip that we do. So we don’t have classic climbs like Kilimanjaro or Everest Base camp. Every single one of our trips is ours. We have built our reputation on delivering innovative and exhilarating events that cater to participants of all ages and abilities. We offer some of the most authentic and challenging adventures in the business. Visiting destinations people may never have heard of but will be fascinated to go to once they have.
Rat Race’s mantra is to be achievable and cater for everyone’s needs, whether you’re a first-time adventurer or an experienced explorer. One of the hallmarks of all of our events though is the commitment to fostering a sense of community among our participants. Whether you’re tackling a gruelling obstacle course or navigating a treacherous mountain trail, participants form bonds that last a lifetime. United by the shared experience of overcoming challenges and pushing their limits.
What are the highlights of the events?
Over the years, we have continued to expand our portfolio of events, introducing new and exciting challenges that capture the imagination of adventure seekers everywhere. Some of our bucket list locations we have include a 100-mile journey across a frozen lake in Outer Mongolia. A chance to journey across the Namib Desert in Namibia to reach the most famous shipwreck on Earth. a
A Trans Andean Coast to Coast cycling adventure from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The toe-to-tip traverse of Dominica’s entire nature island, and the ultimate Panama Coast to Coast challenge that is claimed to be tougher than the Marathon Des Sables, to name a few.
What size did you manage to grow the firm?
Turnover for the last financial year was £4m but our turnover year on year is consistent. Since COVID we switched our entire business model internally, from mass participation events with lots of people to bucket list adventure travel trips without dropping any turnover.
We have accelerated our international events despite effectively closing a section of the business of how we used to operate but have maintained the turnover we’ve historically had, something we’re proud of.
What would you say has been your biggest challenge?
It will not be a surprise to anyone to hear that Covid was one of the most testing times for the business. For a mass-participation events company which had just also expanded our offering into travel-based events, we found ourselves in perhaps the two hardest-hit sectors in the early days of Covid.
I remember lying there together on a mattress with my wife Danni on the floor of our son’s room just wondering how we were going to get through this and thinking of a business that had been going for 15 years and that was pretty much doomed.
Most of the time we were simply answering emails from customers asking what was happening with their event. We had no idea, of course!
We engaged with all our customers via social media and never went ‘dark’ like many other companies, we did virtual events and sold medals for those events that were sitting in our warehouse, and we had a bit of a fire sale on merchandise that was sitting on our shelves, and we started to use the downtime to launch future events.
What have some of the highlights been?
There are so many highlights but if I had to name a few it would be traversing the Namibian desert with Dannii on foot as part of a Test Pilot trip, then launching the event and making it a success and taking a group of celebs there for Sport Relief 2020.
Namibia also holds a special place for us both and we love the country and the event. Launching our recent Sea to Summit trilogy series together in the back of a van in Sweden, in the cold, eating a freeze-dried meal while running another event. It had been a long, long time since we launched any major UK event and it was an amazing reaction to it from our customers. Installing a Glastonbury-style ticketing wait-list system for our much-loved last-ever Dirty Weekend obstacle course event in 2022.
The reaction to the event was extreme – we sold several thousand tickets within minutes of the system going online. This would have been amazing. But it was made more poignant that we were in the middle of the Covid pandemic, we had not worked for over a year and frankly, we needed that launch to work to save the business from ruin. And it did. It did.
What’s next for the business?
As we celebrate our 20th anniversary, we have lots of exciting new events on the horizon and a growing community of adventurers around the world. The future has never looked brighter for us.
In general, we are trying where possible to deliver events with a sense of journey. That could be ‘A to B’ like a coast-to-coast journey, or have a tangible objective, such as the Race to the Wreck in Namibia. Latterly, we want to focus on that element of the journey as this resonates with people as a reason for undertaking them.
The big goal?
To make the world-first adventures a reality, the aim is to test and prove never-been-done, incredible journeys to extreme places.
Exclusive locations such as a circumnavigation via kayak, pack raft and foot of Bikini Atoll in the Marshal Islands, infamous for the world’s first nuclear tests and the furthest ‘off-grid’ you can go on Earth, are just one of the locations that are the calling card of Rat Race’s Test Pilot programme, where we hope to have fully fledged trips in the next few years.