Since becoming active in Latin America I often thought – like Columbus – of Latin America as the ‘new world’ of hard enduro. I had so many of “the experiences you can’t buy” and I felt incredibly fortunate to ride with locals in – among many more places – the jungles of Brazil, the deserts of Peru and the highlands of Mexico. I told friends, family and fellow enduro riders about these place and I’m sure you know the feeling of excitement when you’ve just experienced something amazing for the first time, and you can’t wait to tell everyone about it.
My access to these journeys was to be found in the rare recipe of a guy who could ride gold tracks (but didn’t have racing aspirations), had track manager experience from the biggest race in the world (RBR), spoke Spanish (or at least I was learning fast) and more importantly – was keen to travel, work and share all my knowledge. Those elements combined opened a lot of doors.
Lots of people have asked me over the years how they could come ride in Latin America, but the professional rental options were and are very limited. There are 1,000s of bikes sitting around all over the world being used much too little so I went down the P2P (Peer to Peer) rabbit hole and designed an idea where people could share their bikes. Nothing new in terms of the actual idea, but after presenting this idea to a lot of my endurobike-owning friends, I had no faith in the project. So I dropped it.
A year or so later – during the pandemic, stuck in Mexico – I had begun making more youtube videos and one guy always transmitted good vibes in the comment sections. This guy’s name was Andrew Boundy and at one point, we got in touch and started chatting. Turns out, Andrew is a brit living in Merida (Mexico) and after a lot of talks about my idea of connecting the world of Hard Enduro Riders, we decided to start somewhere else and create a platform with an offset in Hard Enduro Races.
Hardenduroraces.com lists more than 150 races all over the world and is currently averaging approximately 10,000 visitors monthly.
We named this platform www.hardenduroraces.com and in all simplicity it aims at providing a comprehensive overview of all Hard Enduro Races worldwide. We figured that this foundation of information would be a good baseline for further development and if people truly start using the platform, only the sky would be the limit. We’re not interested in investing in google ad’s to accelerate the growth. We’ve also decided to not run flashy ad’s on the website to generate a bit of revenue. We’re keeping the platform nice and clean and our mantra is “good things sell itself” so if the platform doesn’t catch on, then it probably wasn’t that good of an idea, after all.
If you’re an organiser and would like your race listed on our website, feel free to send me a message on one of my social media channels or via the form below.