ESSENTIAL EVENT INFORMATION 2026

With 3 different disciplines, how we support each day varies according to what we’re doing.

The 2 run/trek days are mostly self sufficient due to being inaccessible by vehicle. We have medical and support staff on the trails and provide small pit stop support but it’s not a full on service as we have to carry everything in. You should expect and plan to carry 2+ Litres of water on each of these days.

The cycling days have full support. Lead and sweep vehicles plus 2 or 3 pit stops depending on distance. Each pit stop will have water and snacks, with something more substantial at the designated lunch stop.

The kayak stage will have a midway rest stop for you to stretch your legs and grab a snack and a drink that you’ve taken with you.

You go at your own pace each day, be with others, be on your own, you choose. We will not stop you unless you look unlikely to finish in daylight. This means there aren’t formal cut offs.  However, if it is likely that you’re going to run out of daylight before finishing the stage, we will work with you to ensure to complete as much as you can and stay safe.

Accommodation throughout the trip varies from a hotels to a wild camp. Here is an overview of what to expect.

Nights 1,2,3,4 - Pioneros Del Valle - Simple but comfortable accommodation in El Chalten. 

Night 5 - La Leona -  Accommodation is camping in the grounds.

Night 6 - Wild camping night -  Camping by the riverside in pre-erected tents 

Night 7 - Estancia Rio Mitre - Rustic but comfortable accommodation in the most beautiful estancia in Argentina  - Accommodation is in shared rooms or optional tents if preferred.

Night 8 - Hotel Konke - Return to El Calafate - comfortable accommodation in a nice hotel in town - Twin or double rooms

All meals will be provided whilst you are on our itinerary. Typically, this means breakfast, lunch (at pitstops) and dinner. There will sometimes be a pay bar and from time to time, some beers and other beverages will come your way from us, too! 

Pit stops are different on trek days and riding days.

You need to be self sufficient on the trekking days due to the lack of vehicle access to the trails meaning we can’t deliver a regular pit stop. There will be a sandwich station in the morning so you can prepare your own lunch and take snacks for the day. We carry in water for top ups and some snacks but need to share the load with everyone being self sufficient.

Cycling days have regular pit stops with 1 being dedicated a lunch stop with more substantial items. Expect water, fruit, sweet and salty snacks. Plus the odd Empanada!

You should look to augment these Pit Stops with your own snack supplies and you should very definitely provide your own hydration, electrolyte and sports nutrition supplies. This will be important throughout your adventure. At the end of the trip, we will provide dinner and some celebration drinks.

Due to catering constraints at the location we are going to be using dehydrated meals for the full expedition experience while at the river side camp. We will provide hot water but we are asking individuals to bring their own dehydrated meal choice for dinner and breakfast the following morning. This will allow you to have personal choice for both meals and ensure that everyone is well fed for that evening. We will ensure that refreshments and snacks are covered for that memorable evening on the river bank. 

Alcoholic drinks & extras

Where we provide meals as part of the general event service, we will not include alcoholic or soft drinks as standard and these must be provided by yourselves. See more on local payments, below. 

At some of the accommodation, there is a pay-bar where you can buy drinks and small snacks.
 
We will provide you with some beers at certain locations, to celebrate a job well-done. That is a Rat Race tradition! These will be at the discretion of the organisers, however, in general, you should expect to pay for alcoholic and soft drinks.  

This is the ‘hottest’ time of year in Patagonia (it is the height of the austral summer) but it never gets ‘hot, hot.’ Highs of 15 – 22 C are the norm but it can be much cooler, especially in the mountains. What is also inevitable at this time of year are the notoriously strong Patagonian winds. Whilst it is arguably a bit more sheltered in amongst the mountains, the bike stages on the Steppe are very exposed and it can be windy on the river, too. Which means it could be dusty, windy, rainy, cloudy, sunny. Basically it’s a bit like Scotland. On steroids. Changeable is the word and you should study this kit list carefully. It has been prepared with this destination and with this event specifically in mind.

There is a mixture of accommodation within the itinerary. It is therefore not guaranteed each evening will have a shower facility. e.g. camping nights. Therefore, you should keep to a high level of personal hygiene by using wet wipes, washing with minimal water and always keeping hands clean. Check wounds, rashes, and blisters regularly for infection.  

Pit stops will not contain toilets, so if you need to go out on the course, be prepared.   

The firm advice is always to ensure you are ‘self-contained’ with toilet roll and with anti-bacterial handwash gel for the trail.  

Card payments are widely taken across Argentina. In remote areas having some cash is always useful. US Dollars are preferred by most places. We would recommend a couple of hundred dollars in cash is likely sufficient.

When we are staying in hotels, you may charge incidentals to your room if the hotel has that facility. All room accounts should be settled prior to leaving the accommodation in each location. If hotel room bills remain unsettled Rat Race will reserve the right to charge your nominated card, plus a £20 admin charge per unpaid bill. 

Stay connected throughout your adventure with Holafly eSIM! It's a quick and hassle-free way to get reliable mobile data as soon as you land so you can navigate, keep up to date with the event WhatsApp group (link shared in 1 week to go email) and share your photos during the trip!

You can bag 5% off your Holafly eSIM by using the discount code RATRACE at checkout. Purchase your e-sim HERE.

The event will not be providing satellite data or phone services as standard unless for EMERGENCY USE via satellite phone.

Our team is there for you in case you have an incident with which you require assistance. The team will shadow the progress of the adventure each day in vehicles or on foot (whichever is most appropriate given the days activity) before establishing a medical clinic each afternoon/evening at our overnight accommodation. Whilst the medics are there for ‘what ifs,’ they are also a great source of preventative advice; so please do use them to ask questions and check best practice, particularly in suspected foot injury or issues such as blisters.  

Please complete the medical screening form HERE by 21st September 2026. If you do have any conditions that you feel we should know about, however small you feel it may be, please do share this with our Medics. Experience has shown that early pre-screening can assist both us and you greatly in enabling the care you need pre and during the trip. If you do not share information on conditions which are likely to affect your participation or decide to share them very late in the process, we are all under pressure and we will always reserve the right to cancel your participation if we feel there is a medical issue that may affect yours, or others’ safety. So please, do share anything and everything you feel our team should know about, at the earliest opportunity. 

 IMPORTANT NOTE ON SUBMISSION OF DOCUMENTS AND MEDICAL INFORMATION: 

​ We are very fortunate to have an excellent Medical Director providing oversight, planning and screening on all of our international trips, who in turn engages seriously professional and qualified staff to join you on the trip. Rat Race also conforms and has been audited to the rigorous BS8848 standard of expedition management. This means our approach to all things safety and medical is extremely thorough and it is designed throughout with your best interest at heart. 

Your medical screening details will be sent direct to our medical team and under medical confidentiality rules, this will only be shared with our medics and no-one else. If they decide this is information that is in the best interests of everyone for us as organisers to be privy to, they will seek and gain your consent before doing so. It is therefore important you complete the medical survey only via the link which can be found HERE; do not send Rat Race medical information direct. If you have any queries at all on the medical side of things in relation to this event, you can email our Medical Director, Dr Patrick Musto confidentially on office@trailmed.com and he and his team will assist.

As well as being a practising NHS Emergency Care Doctor and Expedition Medicine Specialist, Dr Musto is also a qualified travel medicine practitioner.  Please view the Travel Medicine Advice PDF HERE. 

Please carefully review our Sun & Heat Safety Guidance issued by our medical partner Trail Med.

In the event of a true emergency or serious incident you will be notified of protocols at the pre-event briefing in El Chalten. If you are with an injured party whilst on the route, stay with the casualty and await assistance. In the event of a non-emergency incident but for which action is requested from the organisers, then you should place a call (we will give you numbers) or if no phone reception, you should send a message forward to the next Pit Stop with another participant if possible and/or await an event crew member approaching via vehicle/or on foot from behind. This might be medical, logistical or kit/ equipment breakdown as examples. We politely ask that you stop and help someone that is in difficulty – you will be the first person to find them – remember to take note of time, place (number of km, or minutes/ hours from last Pit Stop) and participant number/ name at the incident site. Remember we are all in it together and we are in effect one big team. 

We will give more information on these procedures when we are all together in El Chalten. It is relevant to note that phone reception is patchy in several places and our systems do reflect this. We use satellite communication devices as part of our safety system, but no communication system is absolute in this area, so we rely on you to become part of our safety communication system where appropriate, particularly in the mountains. This will all be explained when we get together and will be very clear.

Patagonia is known for its varied weather conditions. All four seasons can be felt in one day. Please be prepared for the multiple weather conditions and temperatures ranging from hot to cold. The terrain and altitudes along the route will also have an effect on the temperature. The event will proceed in many conditions, but if it is deemed unsafe to continue due to weather conditions or any other factors, the event will be halted at the current accommodation location. If required or possible, we will await more favourable conditions to re-commence. This may result in some stages being cut short or cancelled in their entirety in order to achieve forward progress within the time available.

In all cases, the decision of the Event team is final in these matters. We will monitor weather and general course conditions throughout and rest assured that any decision we do make in this regard is only ever made with the safety of event participants at its core.

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But please do understand that the very nature of such an undertaking in such an environment requires us to plan (and deploy) contingencies and we cannot therefore guarantee that the exact itinerary as laid out on the website and in this document will be achieved. Such is the essence of adventure!

We have asked that you have in place Travel Insurance cover and specified Evacuation cover to last for a minimum period of the event duration for the days you are with us on the published itinerary. Evacuation and medical expenses cover should total no less than $500 000. A copy of this cover/covers (if separate policies) is required to be received by us by 21st September.

​We recommend that participants have insurance to cover damage, loss, theft, injury and non-attendance. Rat Race cannot accept any responsibility for the loss of, theft, or damage to any Participant property or the circumstances of Participant non-attendance. Within the 12-week departure window, we cannot provide any transfers and, in all cases, we cannot entertain requests for refunds. We respectfully remind all participants that unforeseen circumstances preventing attendance is what travel insurance is designed for and is the reason for this as a strong recommendation on such undertakings.   

Some suggested providers are as follows:   
  
For UK and Channel Island residents Rat Race’s own insurer brokers have a brand-new product: https://www.mannbroadbent.co.uk/sports-travel-insurance/.  

  
Note: This is Rat Race’s UK-based insurance broker, specialising in the leisure insurance market. This is a specialist sports travel cover product; however, Rat Race is neither an insurance broker or underwriter. We can recommend Mann Broadbent wholeheartedly as good people to deal with, but please remember that this is not a ‘Rat Race product’ and we have no say whatsoever on claims decisions made by the insurers, in the event that you raise such a claim via one of these policies.   

Other providers:  

• www.battleface.com  

• www.bigcattravelinsurance.com  

• www.internationalsos.com  

Note: We have no relationship with any of these providers, but previous customers have found them reasonable to deal with regarding some of our similar Bucket List challenges.   
  
Note: For all insurance, please remember that cover is offered based on several factors, (the nature of the event disciplines being one of them), but your own insurance profile, age, health and other details form a big part of this. As such, we are always happy to provide details to insurers in support of cover requests from customers, but we cannot influence their decisions as to whether to offer cover to individuals.   

You have already been made aware that this is a serious undertaking in remote terrain. For the bike stage, we have vehicles in support. On the trek and on the kayak stages, there are some locations to which we can get a vehicle but in general, these are far less accessible. You need to be fully aware therefore that an evacuation from the event where vehicle access is not possible is an extremely serious undertaking. In the event that such an undertaking is deemed to be required, it may be that YOU become part of the safety system. We will reserve the right at all times to call upon members of the Event, alongside crew, to assist in any evacuation activity whatsoever required in order to remedy the situation as quickly and decisively as possible. This may involve diverting off the route, assisting with casualty-bearing and load-carrying, or other duties.

You should also know that the evacuation time at certain parts of the course could be considerable. It is important that we state unequivocally that we cannot remove all risk from such an undertaking nor would we state such. You are entering an area where the remoteness of the undertaking and the slowness of possible evacuation could result in Death.

Mitigation of such scenarios is our number one priority. Your ability to reduce the risk posed by trauma is key: Taking your time, particularly on bikes and on foot, plus steps such as descending rough ground in a carefully controlled manner are all part of this mitigation against injury. Recommended use of trekking poles for example will also help on the trekking section. You must take your time, undertake each event phase very much with a clear understanding of the environment you are in and come to the table with a team mentality on this one. That way, we will stay safe and we will mitigate and reduce the risks outlined above.

This event takes place on a mix of trails, paths and roads. There are vehicles, this is not a closed road event. Vigilance must be always taken.