The Adventure-The Race!

Sunday was our race. Our team consisted of Dave and I, our friends Todd and Lori Larsen, and our friend from high school, Mike Paustian. He has his own team that he races with but he was at this camp alone so he raced with us. I was excited to see how it would go to be in a real race. We started out on a cyclocross course. My cousin, Bruce Grell from the Healthy Habits Bike Shop, was at the camp with a presentation on cyclocross, which is a bike race off road with different hurdles and natural barriers that you have to carry your bike over. I was very bad at this and found I have no interest in the sport-sorry Bruce. His presentation with his friend was very interesting though. The next part of the race was a 12 mile road biking portion. It took us 2 hours and was so hilly some of us had to push our bikes up the hill. If I do any races, I will have to work at biking. It wasn't fun and was made even worse by the weather which was in the 30's that day and sleeting. When we finally finished that, we got to do the trekking portion in the woods to find different checkpoints. That part I thought was fun. We had to cross the river about 8 times and one of those times the water was up to my waist. Which brings me to our friend Mike. You can see he's slightly taller than the rest of us. When we crossed the river that last time, the rest of us were soaked and he only had a water line on his thigh! It was hilarious how much faster he was than the rest of us. He bounded ahead and hardly even breathed hard. Dave could keep up with him but the two of them definitely had to hold back. One awesome thing that day was the cave we had to walk through. It was about 200 yards long and not much wider than a person. I could touch both sides almost the whole way. We got to use our headlamps and got to see some bats. They were just little guys and didn't bother us. If we hadn't already been filthy I probably wouldn't have liked it very much because the cave of the floor was covered with water. But since we had to cross the river to get into the cave it was no big deal. We ended up finding all the checkpoints but it took us 5 hours instead of the allotted four. Since it was practice, the important thing was that we had fun and now I kind of know what to expect. One of the things that impressed me the most overall was the friendliness of the adventure racing world. The people are alot of fun and for the most part like to work together since we're all there for the same purpose. A very nice group of people. I had a really good experience.