right now

as i write this, they've been on the move for 2 days, 7 hours, and 47 minutes. daytime temperatures have been over 100^oF, there hasn't been enough water, and most of them haven't slept yet.

they're not even half-way to the end.

primal quest 2006, the biggest adventure race of them all, is happening right now.

87 coed teams, most of whom just want to finish, but the winning team takes home $100,000.00, major sponsorship deals, and serious bragging rights. these people are serious.

adventure race!

i participated in my first adventure race this weekend, and it was hard, but i finished which is what i was hoping for.

you can read all the details here

all kinds of stuff

busy busy.

sunday i competed in an orienteering event (only the second one i've done). i did the brown course (in ascending order of difficulty, courses are white, yellow, orange, brown, green, red, and blue, where white is literally a walk in the park, and blue puts you at risk of being eaten by wild animals), and did ok.

my main problem was not knowing what the symbols on the control list were, so i spent a lot of time running in circles in the general area of the control before finding it.

but i finished in (just barely) under 2 hours, and i was pleased about that.

on monday, baarbd.org, the adventure racing site j. and i have been working on, finally went live.

it was a shitload of work, and i'm still kind of amazed that we went from concept to live site in a month.

there's still lots to do, but at least now it's out there, and hopefully people will use it.

pupating

so i had a little 'aha' moment tonight, nothing earth-shaking, but it made a lot of sense.

i feel a little like i'm pupating; indeterminate, not here and not there, waiting for the waveform to collapse.

it's interesting and exciting, but also a little lonely.

rinse, lather. repeat.

event: urban rogaine
setup: 60 checkpoints in san francisco and daly city, marked on a map, each worth a certain number of points.
object: hit as many of the checkpoints as you can, in any order you want.
format: choose one; foot, bike, or half foot, half bike (must do first 8 hours on foot if doing duathlon).
teams: male, female, mixed, veteran (average age of team members must be at least 50 on race day). minimum team size is 2, max is 5
rules: you have 16 hours, starting at 4:00 pm

the team i was on was a coed (mixed) duathlon team with 3 members. o., is an experienced adventure racer and was our navigator. s. is a triathlete and coach, and was our female member, and me, i was along for the ride.

i'm not going to go into a lot of detail because it's boring if you weren't there ('first we found THIS checkpoint, and then we were going to go over to this other one, but on the way we realized that we could take this back alley and get THAT checkpoint, so we did that, and on the way we drank gatorade'. gripping huh?), but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

i've never done an event that long, and i was a little worried about how i'd deal with fatigue, given how cranky i get when i'm tired, but i didn't have any problems with that, and didn't even need resort to caffeine.

we made a decision to skip a couple of low-value time-constrained-checkpoints (they basically expired after a certain time) early on, which ended up costing us first place, but other than that we did well. o.'s navigation was really good, and s. and i were able to provide a bunch of shortcuts and local knowledge (my runs on san bruno mountain paid off here) that saved us a fair amount of work.


the purple roughly covers the area the checkpoints were in.
the team aspect was really cool; the way we all were able to contribute in different ways to achieve our common goal was really rewarding, in way that trail-runnning or cycling (at least not on a team) isn't.

ok i'm done babbling. i've had a 4 hour nap, and as near as i can figure, covered something like 80 miles before that. i'm off to bed.