fitness adventure travel

Up For An Extreme Adventure? Fit For Trips Can Get You Off And Running

Recently, I wrote piece for Luxist about Abercrombie & Kent's new extreme adventures, five new ones that test the endurance many travelers: including trekking and/or snowmobiling across glaciers, going on road rallies in Morocco, sleeping in tents on glaciers and in deserts, hiking in Bhutan, climbing to the Base Camp of Mount Everest or Mount Kilimanjaro, and the like. It was suggested by Abercrombie & Kent that those who would like to do adventures like these might also like to partake of services provided by Fit For Trips, a company that provides fitness training for these extreme adventures and other, softer adventures as well.

The popularity of adventure travel has grown exponentially in recent years, due to many socio-economic factors: the Gen X/Y population and Boomers who want to experience places they have only seen in movies or read about, those who want to combine sports with adventure, those who want to include sports, risk, and adventure, and those who want a far out and far away, once-in-a-lifetime-experience.

"The consensus is there would be double or triple the number of people who would be up for these adventures if they felt fit enough to go, and this is where we come in," Marcus Shapiro, Founder of Fit For Trips, told Luxist recently.

In a perfect world, or even in a semi-perfect one, the many who wanted to do adventure travel would indeed be fit enough -- to cycle, climb mountains, hike all day, swim lakes, and ford rivers, ride horses, and camp -- but that seems not to be true. Many do not feel fit, many have had sports, accident, and just simply, life injuries. This is why Fit For Trips was created -- to partner with travel operators, like Abercrombie & Kent, so that people who wanted to take extreme adventures actually could.

Marcus Shapiro, founder of Fit For Trips, is by nature and education, a fitness trainer, world traveler and adventure enthusiast. After receiving his degree in Exercise And Sports Science, he traveled the world, and began conceptualizing two (then) diverse ideas -- fitness and adventure travel. He realized that in order to fully enjoy adventure travel, the traveler had to be fit, or fairly fit -- else he or she would be suffering from rolled ankles, torn meniscuses, rotator cuff injuries, and that once-in-a-lifetime adventure would REALLY become one, mainly because the traveler would never want to go on another adventure again.

Tags: Abercrombie Kent Extreme Adventures, AbercrombieKentExtremeAdventures, Adventure Travel, Adventure Travels, extreme adventure travel, Fit For Trips, fitness adventure travel, Marcus Shapiro, popularity adventure travel