Great North American Relay | G.N.A.R.

The Great North American Relay (The G.N.A.R.) is a 7 day, 16,500-mile virtual journey from Alaska to Argentina traversing the entirety of North and South America. No matter if you’re running, walking, or hiking, every mile counts.

In honor of the Olympic Games in Tokyo this summer, we will be sharing Olympic Stories along our route: highlighting hometown heroes, medalists, and the sportsmanship that unites us all.

We will hold unique challenges each day of the week and the winners will receive gift cards we’ve purchased from local businesses in Missoula. Anyone who completes an activity for all 7 days will be entered into a raffle for a gift card to Runner’s Edge.

The Great North American Relay | 16,500 Miles | 7 Days | March 1st – 7th, 2021

The Route

The G.N.A.R. route will follow the Pan American Highway from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina, for a total distance of 16,500 miles.

We will pass through Alaska, the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alberta, before crossing into the U.S. at the Montana Border. Our route will, of course, pass through Missoula with a quick stop at The Runner’s Edge before continuing down the spine of the continent to Texas and the Mexico Border.

We will then wind our way through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama before arriving in Panama City before crossing the Darien Gap to South America.

Once we’ve entered South America, we will journey across Colombia, Venezuela, and into the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil. We will pass through the Amazon, stopping by Rio de Janeiro before heading south through Uruguay and Argentina.

Our route will reach it’s southern terminus in Ushuaia, Argentina–the southernmost city in the world, and approximately 17,500 miles from where we began.

*We will track our progress through our virtual challenge platform, Challenge Hound, and email our G.N.A.R Runners daily with progress updates!*

How Does it Work?

1) Sign up for The G.N.A.R. (Registration Opens Tuesday, February 16th)

2) We will send you a confirmation email with steps to join the exclusive G.N.A.R. Virtual Group on Challenge Hound. **Challenge Hound is the platform we’re using to view our progress on the map and track individual milesage.**

3) To upload to Challenge Hound, you can either manually enter your mileage or sync your Strava account with Challenge Hound. We will provide specific instructions upon registration.

4) Join in on our daily challenges for your chance to win gift cards to local businesses. We’re going to need as much help as we can get to make it to Argentina in 7 days!

*Every day we will send out emails to the group sharing our progress with maps, celebrating our previous day’s challenge winners, and sharing Olympic stories along our route.

Daily G.N.A.R. Challenges

To keep things exciting we will have a challenge each day of the week. These challenges are meant to keep the excitement and motivation high. Winners of the daily challenges will be announced the following morning in our daily G.N.A.R. newsletter to all participants.

We are purchasing gift cards from local businesses we love to support as our daily challenge incentives. You win, they win, we all win!

Monday | Mileage Monday: To get the week off to a strong start, the man and woman who contribute the most mileage today will win a fillet of wild Alaskan King Salmon from the Rogotzke Fishing Company.
Tuesday | Keep it consistent: Since we will likely be passing through Missoula, anyone who completes an activity today will be entered into a raffle for a Missoula Downtown Association gift card. We will randomly choose 3 winners.
Wednesday | G.N.A.R. Selfie: Take your best G.N.A.R. Selfie (GNARfie?) during your run or walk and post on Instagram or Facebook and be sure to Tag @Runnersedgemt! We will randomly choose 3 winners who will earn themselves a gift card to Tia’s Big Sky Mexican Restaurant.
Thursday | Contribute 5 Miles to Our Route: To accomplish our goal, every one of us needs to contribute 5 miles per day on average. Today we will likely be traveling through Central America, home to many different kinds of coffee. Anyone who does their job and contributes at least 5 miles will be entered into a raffle to win a gift certificate to Drum Coffee. We will randomly choose 3 winners.
Friday | Olympic Strava Art: We challenge you to draw your best Olympic-themed route–whether it’s the Olympic rings, the Olympic torch, or a gold medal, get creative and get to drawing! Track your activity using Strava, then post a screenshot of your masterpiece onto your social media account. Make sure to tag @runnersedgemt. Don’t have social media? Send a photo of your Strava art to adam@runnersedgemt.com. Our three favorites will win a gift card to Green Source Missoula.
Saturday | Marathon Contribution: In honor of the Olympic Marathon, anyone who has contributed a minimum of 26.2 miles over the course of the week will be entered to win a gift card to Missoula’s fast-casual Brazilian spot, Five on Black. To accomplish a marathon by Saturday, you need to average 4.3 miles each day. We will randomly choose 3 winners.
Sunday | Most Miles Contributed: As we (hopefully) pass through Argentina on the final day of our journey, we will be giving Missoula Wine Merchants Gift Cards to the top 3 men and women who have accumulated the most distance over the trek.

GNARliest Runners 7 Day Challenge

Anyone who has participated in an activity of at least 20 Minutes all 7 days of the week will be entered into our post-race raffle for a gift card from the Runner’s Edge for two $100 gift cards. We will also post in our final G.N.A.R. “Gnewsletter” sharing a list of all our GNARliest runners who contributed each day to our goal!

G.N.A.R. Participants Receive

A G.N.A.R. Craft Tech T-shirt (Additional $15. Note that the shirt can be purchased at the end of the registration process on RunSignUp ).
Daily emails from our team with updates on our group progress and details about where we are on our virtual journey.
Exclusive Access to our virtual platform Challenge Hound to update your runs and add to the group effort.
Fun daily challenges with each day’s winners receiving gift cards purchased from local businesses.
The ability to see what everyone else in the group is contributing to the goal and to celebrate with one another.

This year’s design for the shirt.

Join the Journey

We invite, hikers, walkers, and runners to help us complete this journey. If you cover the distance on foot, then join us! #everymilecounts

$15 – G.N.A.R. Journey with no shirt.
$30 – G.N.A.R. Journey with Craft t-shirt, picked up at Runner’s Edge.
$40 – G.N.A.R. Journey with Craft t-shirt, shipped to your home.

We will notify you when t-shirts are available; expect them no earlier than the first week of April.

The Great North American Relay | 16,500 Miles | 7 Days | March 1st – 7th, 2021

The Route

How Does it Work?

Daily G.N.A.R. Challenges

GNARliest Runners 7 Day Challenge

G.N.A.R. Participants Receive

Join the Journey

Thank you to our sponsors for their generous support of this event!

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