On June 27th, I competed in the ARG Challenge for the third year in a row. (I know it was a long time ago, but better late than never, right?) This time I did it with Brenna. It had been crazy hot the week of the race and so they cut out some of the trekking part and had us spend a little more time on the water.
We started off with trekking about a mile and a half to find the first four cp’s. Along the way, we picked up our third teammate, an egg named, Richard. Here’s a quick story about Richard: I totally forgot to reserve a kayak for us in advance, so by the time I called, they were all gone. So, I emailed out the Adventure Racing group and asked if anyone had a kayak I could rent. A guy named Richard replied back and let us use his. So, when we got to the point where we were supposed to get our eggs and the one on top had the name “Richard” written on it, I viewed it as a good omen and took it.
We got back and did the kayak/trek portion where we got all the cp’s, but got a little turned around with directions. We then headed out for the biking portion. We had gone out the week before and checked out the trail so this one was pretty straight forward for us.
When we got back, we saw Jamie and her girls there cheering us on. (Our families had decided to stay home, since it was just too hot for our little babies.) Jamie said that the top three teams were already back and the people who got first place took about an hour on the last kayaking portion.
We only had 1 1/2 hours until the cut off, so we knew it would be close. We trudged through some very nasty grass in the water that was way taller than us to get to a cp on land. And one cp we looked for forever, before we had a moment of luck and scrambled up a ledge to find the cp just at the top of it. In the end we got back about 10 minutes before the cut off and we got all of the check points. We were pretty happy with that.
