Expeditions

Tom Shankapotomous
Jan 1
2 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Why I Moved to an Expedition Approach in My Race Reviews

For a long time, my race coverage followed a familiar pattern: course layout, conditions, logistics, splits, maybe a note about how the hills felt. What stayed with me afterward, though, wasn’t just the effort or the placement—it was the place itself. The terrain underfoot. The dust and traction. The way different ground behaved under load. The sky overhead at the end of a long day. These events were happening inside much larger systems, and that became impossible to ignore.

That realization led to a shift.

I stopped treating races as isolated events and started treating them as expeditions—field opportunities to observe, document, and understand the environments these races pass through. Running became just one mode of engagement among several. Observation, collection, and context became equally important.

Race Reviews are the Foundation

Standard race reviews remain the foundation—distance, obstacles, terrain, and execution—but each event now also supports three parallel project threads. The Dirt Project examines local geology and surface materials, the Sky Archive documents astronomical observations tied to place, and the Deep Time inquiry situates the venue within its longer natural and human history. Together, they expand the race review without changing its core purpose.

The Dirt Project

A ground-level inquiry into race terrain and regional geology. Samples collected from courses and adjacent sites, examined later to understand material composition, weathering, and surface behavior. This project asks a simple question: what are we really running on, and why does it behave the way it does?

The Night Sky Archive

A place-based observational record of the night sky above expedition and training regions. Travel for races often means unfamiliar skies and darker horizons. Capturing those skies—sometimes raw, sometimes processed later—adds vertical context to the experience. The same locations, seen on a cosmic scale.

The Deep Time Project

A curiosity-driven exploration of what these places were before they were race venues. Regional geology, paleontology, archaeology, and history gathered through reading, museums, and field observation. Not academic research—context. A way of understanding how much time is embedded in the ground we move across for a few hours.

Together, these threads form the Expedition approach: racing as exploration, not just performance.

Video Field Reports & Web Ring

This page also serves as a one-stop hub for video content connected to the Expedition framework You’ll findl inks to my own developing YouTube field reports — rough, evolving, and intentionally documentation-first

Direct links to creators I trust and learn from—including OCR Kings, who are part of my broader web ring and community orbit. In a commercial internet increasingly shaped by incentives rather than substance, real content creators have to band together—not to chase clicks, but to counter the Dead Internet effect. The goal isn’t growth for its own sake; it’s to keep meaning, craft, and genuine curiosity visible in a system that actively devalues them.