Maine-born racing series expands, gets new investor

Courtesy/RAID Events LLC Participants scramble across wooden beams during RAID Events' beach obstacle racing event on Sept. 22 at Gooch's Beach in Kennebunk. The event was one of three in the RAID Series.

Courtesy/RAID Events LLC Contestants takeoff from the starting line at the first Mountain RAID events held Oct. 7 at Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry

Courtesy/RAID Events LLC Athletes swing across monkey bars during the Urban RAID event held June 30 on Portland's East End

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By Matt Dodge

With a new partner and investment, Portland-based endurance event and digital media company RAID Events LLC is expanding the obstacle course racing series it launched last year in Maine.

The company's first event — the RAID Series — kicked off last summer with three events, including an urban course on Portland's East End, a beach course on Gooch's Beach in Kennebunk and a mountain course at Sunday River.

Now, with a "significant, six-figure investment" from investment banker and lifelong amateur endurance athlete David Lavallee, company founder Rufus Frost says RAID plans to introduce races born in Maine to 10 new markets down the coast, including Boston, New York City and Washington D.C.

"We're talking some pretty sizable markets that require some pretty significant capital," says Frost, whose sports marketing firm Aura360 Ventures has worked on event and media properties for NBC Sports Group, North Face and Ford.

Although Frost is eager to expand the series into new, larger markets, he says Maine has been an ideal testing ground for RAID events in 2012.

"It's a great way to launch the property because Maine offers that rare combination of beach, urban and mountain locations," says Frost.

But the company's expansion plans aren't based just on success in Maine.

The participatory sports market has been on the rise over the last decade, with events like marathons seeing the largest percent increase of finishers in more than 25 years. In 2011, there were more than 518,000 marathon finishers in the United States, up 11% from 2009, according to the nonprofit Running USA.

Frost says obstacle racing represents the fastest growing sectors within the participatory sports market, with much of the growth coming over the last two years. For the RAID Series, each iteration takes advantage of the natural elements of a venue and includes obstacles ranging from hurdles and monkey bars to narrow wooden beams and portable walls.

"The idea is to take the person who has done a 5K or 10K who is looking for the next big thing," says Frost. "Each of these races [involves] all different muscle groups and cross-training principles as opposed to linear running."

The RAID Series is one participatory sport in the state alongside Sunday River's annual Tough Mountain Challenge, New Gloucester's Dynamic Dirt Challenge and Untamed New England, a 200-mile, four-day race held in June that drew 49 teams from across the globe.

"Over the last two years, participation has exploded. It's different from spectator sports where you have 20,000 people watching 10 people playing," he says.

Frost says the arrival of Lavallee, whose investment earned a 50% share of the company, brings the infusion of capital and experience RAID was looking for. In 2001, Lavallee co-founded the boutique investment bank Revolution Partners in Boston before selling the company to Morgan Keegan in 2008.

Prior to his work with Revolution Partners, Lavallee worked as an investment banker for the Credit Suisse First Boston Technology Group in New York and Boston, helping clients to raise more than $1 billion in growth capital, according to Frost.

"He was very familiar with the growth of obstacle races and participatory sport in general and he had a similar vision on where to take this," he says.

Both Frost and Lavallee hope to make homespun events like the RAID Series a cornerstone of the company's business, signaling a shift away from the sort of contract work that the company had relied on in the past.

"The overarching goal is to go from being an agency doing these event and media programs on behalf of others to developing our own ventures and properties," says Frost.

While an independent company, RAID Events shares much of its staff with Frost's Aura360, which will serve as the event management company of record for the RAID Series.

In the past, Aura360 has run similar obstacle racing series for Men's Health and Verizon in cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It has for the last nine years produced the action-adventure sports series "The World of Adventure Sports" for the NBC Sports network.

"That was our first really successful venture property where we took on the risk and pulled partners together," Frost says. "RAID is the second property we are stepping into that owner role with."