Last month I tried my luck at another adventure race. This time it was the Planet Adventure Sprint Race Redux. This race was a re-schedule of the original PA Sprint race that got rained out by the 500 year floods back in June. (Mitch, Lauren, Shannon, and I were tent-camping in the 500 year flood and, somehow, the inside of our tent stayed dry.) The original team for the June race was just Mitch and myself, and we were called The Nerdy Noobs. Tom ended up joining us for the Redux, so we had to work Suckretariat back into the name — officially, we raced as “The Nerdy Noobs (a.k.a. Suckretariat).”
The name of the game for the day was “Sam falls in the mud.” Something must have gone horribly wrong with my inner ear that day because I tripped at least 15 times during the orienteering course. I consider morale boosts my strongest contribution to the team as I provided many a spectacle of flops and rolls in the swamps. I was too quickly back on my feet for the cameras to catch me lying in the muck, but you can see the results of one of my swamp splats smeared across my face in the following shot from the canoe trip back across the lake.
check the muddy warpaint
Balance issues aside we learned a lot from the last event and were in 8th place after the orienteering, only 15 minutes behind the #1 team (the top 3 or 4 teams are sponsored and have very impressive matching jerseys and gear, by the way). We remembered to find handrails and ran at high speeds, as evidenced by the blur in this photo:
too fast for the camera
In true Suckretariat style, we missed a turn and checkpoint on the biking portion and went 2.5 miles out of the way. The resulting 22nd place finish was still higher than we expected, and we had just as many laughs as we did in the Indianapolis AR. Adventure racing is definitely my new favorite sport, and I’m looking forward to doing at least a few more races next year. Word on the street is that Planet Adventure may host a mini adventure race series, racing every Sunday through the summer.
orienteering - 'the thinking sport'
Sam fiddles with the map so that he doesn't have to carry the canoe.
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