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.