Free delivery on orders over £80Adventure Is The New Normal
Yvon Chouinard, the 82-year-old founder of Patagonia and all-round outdoor sage, once said that real adventure is something that only happens “when everything goes wrong”.
He was, of course, referring to that feeling you get from overcoming adversity with your mates, but in a year when things have gone catastrophically wrong on a global scale, it feels like his words have taken on a whole new meaning.
Studies suggest that over the course of the past 12 months, people have been taking up outdoor pursuits in record numbers. Apparently, adventure isn’t just something we experience when everything goes wrong, it’s something we actively seek out.
In June, a survey conducted by Active Traveller magazine found that 30% of respondents had taken up a new outdoor activity during the first lockdown, and 48% had invested in new gear. Here at Ellis Brigham sales of hiking boots continued to rise this winter, as more and more people headed outdoors for their government-sanctioned daily exercise. Trail running shoes have also been flying off the shelves, confirming the truth behind all those stories of lockdown Strava converts. According to the Open Water Swimming Society, participation in water based activities was up three-fold in 2020 vs. 2019, and for much of past year, you couldn’t buy a bike anywhere in the UK for love or money.
A large part of the reason outdoor sports have become so popular recently is practical, of course. Gyms have only been open sporadically at best, football has been banned for much of the last 12 months, and no-one wants to be getting stuck into something like rugby when there’s a highly contagious virus about.
But anecdotal evidence suggests it’s not just Covid precautions that have persuaded record numbers of people into the outdoors. Getting outside, as countless studies have attested down the years, is good for the mind as well as the body. Exploring wild places, and taking the time to truly appreciate the natural world, has always been a great way to de-stress: a fact that’s only become more obvious in a year when we’ve spent so much time cooped up.
For those of us who’ve been evangelising about the benefits of the outdoors for years, the surge in popularity and the influx of new participants can only be a good thing. The development of the lightweight gear that fills the pages of this guide is ultimately funded by sales of more mass-market kit. Newcomers might not be challenging for individual FKTs anytime soon, but their presence will undoubtedly drive the industry as a whole forward.
We might be trying too hard to see the silver lining on this enormous, Covid-shaped cluster of cumulonimbus, but if the pandemic has encouraged more people than ever to embark on new adventures, then that’s a positive. Not a net positive. Not even close. But it’s something. And as we begin to look beyond this year, the idea that the adventurous outdoor sports we love are now “the new normal” for many is something we should take, and run with.
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