Adventure Racing

If you take the title literally, we definitely excelled at the adventure race yesterday. Taking the rules of the competition into consideration, we were at the bottom of the pack.

9:30 am Pre-race briefing. We are given a copy of the rules, a card to punch our checkpoints (CPs), and a map. A very primitive topo map. This was when I began to think we might be in over our heads. How do we find a check point in the woods? I've never used a compass before.

10:00 The race begins: Well, we came in first at one thing--I was the first person out of anyone in a boat. Woo Hoo! In short order we learned several things. 1. Sitting in the middle of canoe results in several things--shoulder cramps and swam ass. Sorry, Beth! We also learned that I cannot steer a canoe with any sort of reliability and that we cannot travel in a straight line to save our lives. An hour and five minutes later, we were out of the water with 4 CPs punched (ahead of one team).

11:05 The mountain bike begins. A little background--the bike was the part we were least worried about. Although none of us had really done any mountain biking (minus the trip to Alum Beth and I took Tuesday and the crash course Betty had with Chet on Saturday), but we had done our fare share of road biking. We planned to knock out what we estimated to be 8 miles in an hour an a half. Hah! We might have been a little naive in thinking that the trail would be well marked and not require much map reading. Early into the ride, flew past a group of four women that were pulled off after a wreck (we did check to make sure they were ok). Then we got lost. Fast forward about three more hours, after we passed the group of four two more times and took another wrong turn, we made it back to base, leaving us with about 45 minutes to hit at least one check point to make the race count.

3:15 We go in search of the CP. We decided to tag along with the group of four ladies who we passed on the bike. We figured that while we were faster, they had managed to navigate their way through the whole race course without getting lost. And, at this point, all we wanted to do was hit one CP. We punched our card at the CP behind the cemetery and hoofed it back to base on the road (there was a path through the woods that was much closer, but we no longer had any faith in our ability to follow a trail, so we opted for the longer, but sure route). The group of four took the path and beat us back, but we probably wouldn't have found the CP without them, so we didn't care.

"mountain" biking

I rode the Level 1 Trails at Alum Creek yesterday for the first time and it was AWESOME. I know it's not really mountain biking because we are in Ohio after all, but riding over the logs and jumps they have set up is a total rush! I can't wait to do it again (like this weekend at our adventure race). I did fall once and bruised my leg, but nothing major...maybe in a few months, I'll do the level 2!