How to hitchhike: what is sport hitchhiking

Where did sport hitchhiking come from and how does it help to improve athletic performance?

The participants of the Sport Hitchhiking Club in St. Petersburg answer.

Sport is the engine of progress. Runners’ shoes are becoming an everyday item, and baseball caps and T-shirts even hint at their origin by their name. There are plenty of examples in motorsports: disk brakes, paddles, dual clutch, regeneration, direct injection. Even our familiar rearview mirrors first appeared in 1911 at the Indianapolis 500-mile race. Hitchhiking was no exception, which evolved from an attempt to get from point A to point B into actual racing.

hitchhiker

You want development, make it a sport. You want to develop hitchhiking, do sport hitchhiking.

Table of Contents

What is sport hitchhiking?

Let’s start with the fact that hitchhiking is one of the most interesting ways to see the world. A hitchhiker notes that through communication with local drivers one can get a full range of impressions of a country or region.

Dmitry: To understand the simple human desires of Afghans to visit a village open-air movie screening in a small Czech village; to see a waterfall that the kids from the neighboring village know about but the big guidebooks don’t know about yet; to get a blessing from a real lama or to visit an Iranian owner of seven cotton factories in Tajikistan. All of this is hard to imagine without hitchhiking.

Sport hitchhiking began more than 40 years ago. It is a race in which the participants have to pass the route in a certain sequence. Imagine that you have a task to get from Moscow to St. Petersburg – the distance between the cities is 709 km on the highway, which is about 11 hours by car. Is it possible to get to the end point faster? Yes, if you have good voting skills.

Hitchhikers are just that, they compete to see who can hitchhike and get to a certain point faster. There are real sports competitions in hitchhiking – whoever can hitchhike faster wins. Such events are organized by special clubs of sport hitchhiking – movements of like-minded people, aimed at development and popularization of hitchhiking, which exist both in Russia and in Europe.

hitchhiker

The purpose of the races themselves is to increase the speed with which hitchhikers usually drive. And the goal of the crew in the race is to drive the race as fast as possible. Sport hitchhikers on main highways can drive at a speed of 1.5 thousand kilometers per day. This depends on the quality of the roads and the hitchhiker’s mastery of voting techniques. It takes an average of 11 minutes to catch a car.

How are the races held?

In sport hitchhiking there is a set of checkpoints, which must be visited in a certain sequence and arrive at the finish line as soon as possible. Whoever arrives first wins.

Dmitry: We have a saying: the race is won the evening before the start over the map. That’s partly true. You have to be able to think out the route well, understand how and on which roads more cars drive, where people go in the evening and where they go in the morning. And a thousand other little things to make voting and travel time minimal. Most races have a two-day course, but there are some long races. For example, recently a week-long race across Russia with a start in Nizhny Novgorod and finish in Yekaterinburg was completed. Between these cities it was necessary to drive not in a straight line, but to roll loops for 3.5 thousand kilometers with visiting dozens of different sights. In previous years there were long races in Georgia and Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany).

According to Dmitry, the task of the races and Sport Hitchhiking Club is to create conditions for finding new solutions in hitchhiking, revealing statistical regularities and applying them in practice. Hitchhiking can be compared to another sport. Physical endurance is also important here: for running between voting places, and for stages of sports orienteering with a compass and map, as in the good old days. All this with a backpack: the movement is autonomous, and overnight stays, as a rule, in tents.

In general, sport hitchhiking is more than just racing. In fact, it is also a community of people participating in them, and ethics. Future sport hitchhikers should realize that speed should not be at the expense of the drivers’ experience of traveling with fellow travelers.