Well, Scott somehow convinced me to write a blog entry, so here it goes: I officially completed my first adventure race yesterday and I am HOOKED! My friend, Jamie and I (aka: Team AOKE – the first initials of all of our daughters) signed up for the Adventure Race Girl Challenge expecting to canoe, bike, run and navigate through this 3-6 hour race. Well, the week before the race, a ton of rain fell and the day before the race the rowing portion got cancelled.
So, we started off the race with a team challenge where they tied our shoes together and we had to run up a hill to pick up our “3rd teammate.” When we got to the top, we were given an egg that they called the “Fragile Male.” We were instructed to carry him (ours was named Homer) with us on the entire race and we would get a 10 minute penalty if he broke.
So, we ran back down the hill, got the string that connected our shoes cut, and one of us had to ride Jamie’s bike while the other one ran. I had a lot of adrenaline to start, so I ran while Jamie rode. We had 3 checkpoints that we had to make our way to in order to get our other bike. So we switched off running and biking until we got my bike and then we had to make our way to 6 more checkpoints using a map and going in whatever order we wanted.
We missed the first CP we were heading to (#7), got CP6 and headed to CP4. The hill leading to CP 4 was a killer. We didn’t read the clue very good for that one, so we spent plenty of time on the top of this huge hill wasting time until some other teams came along and led us to the checkpoint. Oh well.
After spending an hour making poor decisions to get to CP 5, we finally got it and finished up 7, 8 and 9 before heading back into the transition area to trade in our bikes for new maps. When we got there, we said a quick hello to our families, got our new maps and headed out on foot for our trekking portion.
A short ways into our trekking portion, Jamie noticed that some fluid was coming from Homer. There was a tiny hole in him but that white membrane was still intact, so he wasn’t gushing fluid – just had a slow leak. Luckily when we got back they didn’t consider him broken, so we didn’t get the 10 minute penalty.
Since we could hit the CP’s in any order, we didn’t see people very often, so we had no idea what our standing was. Because of how long it was taking us, we figured we must be in the back of the pack. So, after hitting CP’s 10 and 11 easily, we totally screwed up on our way to 12 and had to backtrack a mile. We got it, got 13 and headed back in. When, we got in, Scott said, I think you came in 9th so we went and checked it out and sure enough… WE CAME IN 9TH!!! Not bad for not having a clue what we were doing. It took us just over 4 hours.
It was so fun to have our families there to see us come in. Audrey actually looks a lot happier than she really was in this picture. A: she was freaking out about the flies around her and B: she had no desire to touch me since I was so dirty.
Check out our muddy legs. It rained for about 10 or so minutes so the mud was just flying up all over us while we were mountain biking.
