Kim and Andy Holak are hard people to pin down. They had just led two separate trail running tours through Italy in April, one in Cinque Terre and another near the Amalfi Coast. On their way home to Duluth, they took a detour to California to run in the Canyons 100-mile trail ultramarathon. Just days after this conversation about their Adventure Running Company (adventurerunningco.com), Andy took off to lead another trail running tour along the Appalachian Trail. They are definitely two people on the move.
This is the sixteenth season that the Holaks have operated their Adventure Running Company. This year, they will guide eight different tours to places as varied as Mont Blanc in the Alps, Yosemite National Park, and to the nearby Voyageurs National Park where a houseboat is part of the trail running experience. Kim quoted one of their company taglines: “You run! We take care of the rest!” Each trip is a little different, but the main ingredient is trail running while the Holaks move your gear from one lodging spot to the next and square away the meals.
They started Adventure Running Company in 2009 while raising three kids and holding down day jobs. Kim taught Spanish for the school district and Andy worked as the Forest Recreation Specialist for St. Louis County. “We were a very small company and we were really part-time. It’s just Kim and I. We would only do one or two trips a year and use the vacation time for that. My goal was to someday be able to leave my job and do that full time because that’s what I really wanted to do,” Andy said. Now, Kim works for the school district in a paraprofessional role, but Andy has transitioned to full-time with their Adventure Running Company.
Adventure Running Company was the first in the U.S. to guide trips for trail runners. “Nobody in the United States was doing that. Nobody was doing trail running tours. We kind of pioneered the idea. It’s not unique anymore. There’s a couple companies that grew bigger than we are that are doing it now. So I’m like, okay, that sounds like a cool idea. Let’s try to do it.” They initially modeled their operation on guided mountain bike tours. Andy said, “We did two tours our first year. We did the Maah Daah Hey Trail and the Colorado Trail, and they were both camping. We started out mostly with camping tours.”
This year, their Yosemite trip is their only trip with camping for lodging. The rest of their U.S. trips stay in vacation homes near each night’s stop. Andy said, “On the Appalachian Trail, we’re staying in vacation homes and then a lot of times we have to shuttle to the trail head each day.” Kim added, “The great thing about Mont Blanc is that you run into your lodging every day, boom. You’re going to come running every day right into your lodging. It’s awesome. And those are the best tours where you can run right into your campsite or your lodging or a refugio right up on the mountain somewhere.” Andy said, “In a vacation home, we’ve got a dishwasher, we’ve got a kitchen, we’ve got showers. Kim and I are getting a little soft.” Soft is hardly the word that comes to mind for these two ultramarathoners.
“I think one thing that is important to point out is that these trips are accessible to anybody. We get people who walk quite a bit of it. We want them to run a little bit because you don’t want your group to get too spread out. But we always have a lead runner and a sweep that comes. We always have the last runner accounted for,” said Andy.
They are also accessible in price compared to some of the other companies that offer trail running tours. “Our vacation home tours are more expensive than our camping tours, but our prices are outrageously cheaper than most companies,” Andy said.
Sharon Yung is a trail runner who lives in Duluth and shared her experience with the Holaks on a recent trip. “I was able to be a part of the Fall 2021 Zion-Bryce running trip with Adventure Running Company with a group of friends in Duluth. We were able to see parts of Zion and Bryce that were off the beaten path and enjoyed great chow, spent many miles and hours out in the beautiful parks,” she said. “There is nothing like being able to share the sound of nature and sound of your footsteps with friends and those you love.”
Are you interested in something competitive instead of a guided tour? The Holaks have you covered there, too. They put on two days of races each fall called the Wild Duluth Races (wildduluthraces.com). Four trail running events each October in Duluth including the Terribly Tough 10k, Harder ‘n Heck Half Marathon, and the 100k/50k ultramarathons. They started with the Wild Duluth ultras in 2009, the same year they started the Adventure Running Company.
“When we started building the Superior Hiking Trail through Duluth, I was involved with that through my job with the county so I helped lay out some of the trail. I said, ‘Hey, when this trail’s done through Duluth, let’s put on a race here.’ So I followed through and we had our first race in 2009,” Andy said. “We had a hundred people, the 50k and a 100k. And then we had some friends who were like, ‘Hey, it’d be kind of fun to have a shorter race. We want to get involved but we don’t want to run ultramarathons.’ So then we added a half marathon in 2010. Last year we had over 900 runners. Four races, two days.”
Andy said that their 50k has historically been one of the top 12 biggest 50k races in the country. “Our race is pretty old school,” he said. “We don’t do a bunch of fancy stuff. It’s like a race that we remember when we started in the early 2000s. The important things to me as a race director are to have a good quality course, have a well-marked course, have a pretty course. I think having a scenic course is important. And then providing aid stations with the basic things you need. Nothing fancy.”
The energy to power all this clearly comes from their deeply held love for the sport of trail running. Kim was a standout runner in high school and college, holding a 2-mile record in St. Paul for many years, but Andy came to the sport of running later. Initially a road cyclist, he got into running around the time they got married 32 years ago. Oddly enough, he was the first to get the ultramarathon bug with his first 50k in 1994.
Andy said, “The main reason I started ultra-running back in the mid-nineties was because there weren’t trail races back then. I wanted to run trails. The only trail races were ultramarathons, like the Voyageur and Western States. Literally you couldn’t find a 10k trail race. Now they’re everywhere. But back in the nineties that wasn’t a thing. It was all road. I think she [Kim] followed shortly after me in ultras.”
Kim ran her first ultra at the Ice Age 50k and then the Half Voyageur. Kim said, “I thought ultrarunning was kind of weird though. It took me a while to get into it because I thought it was really weird that you would walk during a race. That didn’t make sense. I was like, you can’t walk like that. I was a runner.” Her attitude changed. “Once I did it, I was pretty hooked.” She won her first 50-miler in the Superior races up the shore from Duluth. According to Andy, there was a stretch where Kim won seven ultras in a row.
In the early 2000s, Kim and Andy did well enough to be sponsored by Vasque as part of the footwear company’s trail running team. At one point Kim had an all-expenses paid trip to race in Japan where she came in as the 2nd woman in a race with 2000 people. She was signing autographs there and appearing in Japanese magazines. Maybe even more impressively, in the early 2000s, they were also raising their daughter and two sons. How did they manage to both have jobs while raising three kids and still run ultra-marathons as high-level athletes? Andy said, “It worked really well because we both understood that we needed to run. And that was part of our sanity to get out for a run. We didn’t run for sponsorships and stuff. We ran because we enjoyed it. And that was our way to just decompress and relax.”
When asked about their favorite memories from their guided tours, both Kim and Andy immediately mentioned their Mont Blanc trips. Kim said, “Mont Blanc is just unbelievable. But for me, my favorite tour is actually the East Coast Trail in Newfoundland. That’s amazing, too. It’s very much like the Superior Hiking Trail. Rugged, but gorgeous. It’s rugged and the people of Newfoundland are so cool.”
Andy echoed Kim about Mont Blanc, but struggled to sift through so many other memories. He managed to find one that nicely summed up his sentiment about the Adventure Running Company: “We did the Wonderland Trail for about eight years where we ran around Mount Rainier in four days. Our boys, James and Bryce, came on that trip three years in a row. And I have pictures of them jumping into this lake two years in a row and they look like almost the exact same picture. It’s really cool. So they came and helped a few times and my parents have helped with that one. My parents have actually helped on a lot of our tours driving our support vehicle. I just remember one year towards the last year of running the Wonderland trail. So every year we jump in this beautiful crystal clear, really cold river. And so I was walking from the campsite to meet the runners where we jump into the river and I’m walking through this campground and I’m looking at these giant ponderosa pines, the beautiful campground. And I’m walking through there and I’m looking up at these pines and I just said to myself, this is one of my favorite places in the world. Just all the memories I had there from all the tours, all the people we met and all the friends we made and having our kids with us and having family there and just making new family with all these runners we’ve had.”