Perhaps more than any other sport, adventure racing encompasses the outdoors lifestyle of Central Oregon.

Jason and Chelsey Magness are a testament to that. The husband-and-wife duo from Bend is the core of the adventure racing squad Team Bend Racing, which rose to prominence in 2020 in Amazon Prime’s 10-episode event, “World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji.”

Two years after its brush with fame, Team Bend Racing is still going strong as one of the top adventure racing teams in the world, and the team members are more than happy to promote Bend as an outdoors mecca.

“We’ve been able to use Bend for the events we host and also to be able to train at a level that has helped us compete in national and world championships,” said Jason Magness, 47.

Adventure racing includes running, hiking, cycling, climbing and paddling on a preset course in isolated areas with the use of a map and compass, often over the course of several days. Teams are co-ed and must stay together throughout the race.

After finishing 12th out of 66 teams in the “World’s Toughest Race” and first among 35 U.S. teams, Team Bend Racing got support from Visit Bend and Columbia. But the team was dedicated to keeping its name that promotes their hometown, rather than changing to the name of a main sponsor, as many teams do.

“When we went to sponsors we told them we wanted to keep our name, and keep Bend on the map as this adventure capital,” Jason said.

This year Team Bend Racing — which also includes Bend’s Daniel Staudigel, Lebn Lovejoy, Max King and other racers from throughout the Northwest — won both of the World Series Expedition races in North America (Expedition Canada and Endless Mountains in Pennsylvania) and finished seventh at the world championships in Paraguay. That was the best finish by a full U.S. team in more than a decade, and the best-ever finish by a team with two men and two women. (Teams are required to have at least one female.)

King, the renowned distance runner from Bend, joined the team for two shorter 30-hour races, and the squad won the regional championships and placed second at the national championships.

“We’re finally at this level where we’re doing really well in all the races that we enter,” Jason Magness said.

Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Jason and Chelsey Magness have been adventure racing together for about 14 years. One of their first dates was a six-hour adventure race.

Through their website, bendracing.com, they organize several Central Oregon races each year, including Expedition Oregon, which is part of the Expedition Adventure Racing World Series. Expedition adventure races are typically between four and 10 days long.

“We are committed to continuing to grow this sport in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, too, with a calendar of six to eight races next year,” Jason Magness said. “We’re geared toward having Bend host nationals and worlds in the next few years.”

Team Bend Racing staged the La Pine Loop race in La Pine State Park this past Saturday, with a five-hour course and a nine-hour course.

The Magnesses, who moved to Bend in 2010, earn their living through teaching acro yoga — a two-person practice that blends modern acrobatics with traditional yoga poses. They have become well-known in acrobatics and slacklining, and they travel the world to teach those disciplines. Jason founded a company called Yogaslackers.

But lately adventure racing has taken more and more of their time, as has parenthood. The couple is raising two sons, Max, 5, and Revel, 3.

“When the pandemic hit, we had some excuse to cut back on our acrobatic teaching life and focus more on adventure racing,” Jason said. “It’s been super successful and really fun. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. We’ve been really enjoying traveling again and racing.”

Community and culture

While adventure racing is the main sport for the Magnesses, they each have their own individual pursuits. For Chelsey, it’s endurance mountain biking. For Jason, it’s distance paddling. They are among the best in the world in these disciplines.

“Adventure racing is our thing together, so that’s what we do mainly, but then we have these side chutes of individual loves,” said Chelsey Magness, 38. “We support each other a lot. He does the Yukon and the paddle races, and I’ve been doing mountain biking. We’re just dedicated to supporting each other.”

Chelsey took the mountain biking world by storm this summer when she won the 24-hour mountain biking national championships in Bend and then went on to win the world championships in Italy. The discipline includes mountain bikers completing as many laps as possible of a pre-set course in 24 hours.

“It was a beautiful experience for me in the end,” Chelsey said of her world title in Italy. “I found out that I was dominantly winning so it was pretty fun. Everything gets easier at that point.”

The 5-foot-1-inch Magness eventually overtook the reigning world champion along the course. “She was really fast,” Magness said. “But I’m more of a diesel engine where I can plow through for a long time.”

Chelsey Magness is planning to defend her title in the 24-hour world championships in Australia next year.

Meanwhile, Jason Magness, along with Staudigel, has found success in long-distance paddling. This past July, Magness and Staudigel won the Yukon 1,000 (the world’s longest paddle race), setting a new world record of five days, 11 hours, 48 minutes along the Yukon River in Alaska. They shattered the former 15-year-old record by 14 hours.

“We paddled through wildfires, lightning storms and unforgiving desolation,” Jason said. “That was a wild, wild race. For a whole day we wore gas masks and goggles, because wildfires were burning in the slopes around us. It was like Armageddon. Those are the forest fires they don’t fight. They just burn. It was 50 feet of visibility and dense smoke for eight hours as you paddle this massive river.”

As talented as they are at mountain biking and paddling, adventure racing will continue to be the primary focus for the Magnesses, who know they could not achieve such heights without the support of Central Oregon.

Said Jason: “We credit our success at least largely to the community, culture and surrounding wilderness.”