what a weekend. i am exhausted.
i know i should be really excited about going to greece, especially considering the money i’ve already spent on a plane ticket. but i just feel blah about it. add the fact that there is apparently a massive strike going on in the country this week, and it just stresses me out.
i’m tired.
chris and debbie and i left town friday around 4 bound for marble falls, texas, about 40 miles west of austin. we stopped for dinner at the applebee’s near where leila and brian used to live, and i watched the cubs defeat the braves in game 3. we got to the hotel shortly after 10 and crashed pretty quickly, considering the alarm was set for 5 a.m.
5 a.m. came far too soon, as it always does, and we groggily headed towards muleshoe bend recreation area, the site of the adventure race. we reassembled the borrowed mountain bikes, in the dark. it was extremely frustrating, as the bikes are pieces of crap. we finally got them assembled and put our stuff in the transition area, then rode a few hundred feet farther where chris was able to park his van practically on top of the finish line. prime parking, aw yeah.
we sat around killing time, and then decided to go back over to the transition area to drop off a few final items. it was at this point that debbie asked me to grab my hex wrench and raise the handlebars on her bike. it turns out this unscrewing was one time too many, as the screw would not go back in (i suspected a stripped groove, since the screw itself was fine), and the handlebars thus were far too loose. a mere 20 minutes from race time, and we had one unrideable bike!
thinking fast, we rolled it over to the bike repair tent, where our hero-of-the-day bicycle repair man was able to force the screw through the stripped portion of the grooves and tighten the handlebars. we left the tent to the echos of his warning: “just take it easy, ok?” oooook. this should be interesting.
with the race start only five minutes away, we were told only that we would start the race on foot. part of the “thrill” of adventure racing is that you’re never quite sure what you’re going to have to do, or what order you’ll have to do it in. every team (there were maybe 150 teams) was given an envelope, and when the starter finally called “go!” we all ripped them open to find a full sheet of single-space, 12-point text. only about 4 sentences, in the middle of the page, were actually applicable. they told us to find the volunteer holding the sign with the number of dots corresponding to the last number of our team number (thus, 3, since we were team #163) and they’d tell us where to go. off we went. we were told to keep going staight, where the letter said we’d find a field full of tennis balls. we had to find the ball with our team number on it.
our team name was the hobbling wonder chicks, thanks to debbie’s bad knees, so we weren’t running. we walked briskly to the field, at which point we were in the back of the pack. this turned out to help us, because we only had to search through about 20 tennis balls instead of over a hundred, so we found our ball in about 10 seconds and kept going. we walked a mile or so and then encountered the first mystery challenge. we had to throw the tennis ball in leapfrog fashion about 200 feet–debbie throwing to me, me catching, then standing still while she moved forward, then me throwing to her, her standing still while i moved forward, her throwing to me again, etc. we did that and rounded a corner to find the second mystery challenge–kicking the tennis ball about 200 feet through the grass. after that we walked back to the transition area, where we found the third mystery challenge–trying to throw the tennis ball into a cardboard box from concentric circles. with each miss, we got to move in to the next closest circle. after that, it was time to transition to the bikes.
the park was very scenic, and we enjoyed riding the bikes through tall grass and along the shores of lake travis. soon the trail headed into the woods and turned into a single-track mountain biking trail. some sections were too rocky for our mountain biking inexperience, and so we got off and walked through the tough parts. at one point, we got back up behind a long line of racers for a good 15 minutes or so because of a large dip in the trail that only the really good bikers could successfully ride. but we were past that soon enough, and got to the next mystery challenge. here, we weren’t allowed to talk, and had to get across 30 feet of grass without touching the ground. we had one 1.5 foot square piece of plywood per person, so we had to stand close together on one board while i reached down and picked up the other board and tossed it in front of us. then we’d move to that board, and repeat. we totally rocked that challenge, and passed a few teams who were having more trouble.
we rode some more, and then encountered the next challenge. a volunteer (a cute irish volunteer with an awesome accent!) had a number between 1 and 1000, and we had to figure it out based on guessing and being told “higher” or “lower.” from there, it was more biking through the woods to the final challenge of the biking portion, a sheet of paper with three puzzles. we had to do two out of three; the first was to list 18 words that all rhymed with each other, the second was a word search, and the third was a cryptogram. i did the 18 rhyming words (at, bat, cat, flat, fat, hat, splat…) while debbie got to work on the cryptogram. when i finished the rhymes, i started from the end of the cryptogram, and we were finished in lightning fast time. then we were back on the bikes and finally back to the transition area. the biking portion was really long (we were on the bikes for more than two hours) and debbie and i were both getting pretty darn tired at the end.
the last portion involved going in the water, but first we had to leave the transition area, crawl on our stomachs underneath a cargo net, walk across a pipe like a balance beam (i fell off and had to start over!), and fill a large piece of pvc pipe with water until it came out a set of holes in the middle of the pipe. making this more difficult was the fact that both the water carrier and the water receiver pipes had holes in the bottom that we had to make sure to cover with our hands. we finished those challenges and made our way to the lake shore, where we had to wade across about a hundred feet of waist-deep water.
on the other side, we then had to follow a zig-zag route while walking on two-by-four boards like skis. with debbie playing drill sargeant (left! right! left! right!) we zigged and zagged like nobody’s business. after that came the “adventure tubing” part of the race, which involved navigating maybe 1/5 of a mile of water with a large innertube. we started sitting in the tubes and paddling with our arms, but that was pretty tiring. then we discovered that the water was shallow enough to simply walk along dragging the tube behind us. that worked almost until the end, when the water got deep and we simply side-stroked, still pulling the innertubes. the life jackets that we were required to wear made swimming more of a challenge than usual, but c’est la vie.
we climbed out of the lake and dropped off our tubes, and headed up the hill for the final two challenges. the first was the hardest of the day–two metal pipes were laid on the ground in a v-shape, close on one end and about 5 or 6 feet apart on the other end. one team member had to be blindfolded (me), and we had to each stand on one pipe and make our way to the other end. we started out holding onto each other shoulders for balance, but by the end we were grabbing each other’s forearms, and starting to get wobbly. it was close, but we made it. go team hobble!
the last challenge was simply to bounce to the back of a moonwalk and then back out the door, and then we power-walked to the finish line, finishing in four hours and 5 minutes! (the winners finished in just over 2 hours, while the last people crossed the line just under 5 hours.)
anyway. the is the speed retelling of the race. it was a lot of fun, and debbie and i are already planning to do it again next year.
we came back from austin on saturday and nick fixed us a lovely dinner. i crashed, exhausted, only to get up at 5:45 a.m. to go volunteer at the space city 10-miler, a road race put on by the local running store. i went to help and to gain some race-planning experience in preparation for directing the 5k we’re putting on next spring. i helped at the registration table, and then cut the timing chips off at least a hundred sweaty, just-run-10-miles shoes. now that was quite an icky job, but at the same time, it was fun to watch everyone finishing. the winner came in just over 52 minutes. damn. that’s at least twice as fast as i’d be able to run 10 miles. it was really impressive. the guy was all muscle and sinew; i swear he must have had like 0.5% body fat. but volunteering was a lot of fun, and i got to cheer for laurie, josh, jess, and buzz as they successfully finished the race. next year i’ll hopefully be in it as well. at the moment, i’m entertaining thoughts of registering for the half-marathon in january (it’s run simultaneously with the houston marathon). i would have just over three months to prepare, which is enough time if i start now.
yesterday afternoon i was so zonked that i took a three hour nap in front of the sox-a’s game. if you know me, you know i must have been really tired, because i almost never take naps, mainly because they only leave me feeling fuzzy-headed and confused. but yesterday i was so tired that the nap actually did help, and it revitalized me enough for sunday night soccer. we played a team from galveston that i remember from last season for their rough play. nothing has changed; they were still pushing and elbowing like no tomorrow. even i lost my temper at one point and yelled at a girl who had pushed me repeated as i turned the ball upfield, and if you’ve ever played soccer with me, you know that it takes a lot to make me lose my temper and yell. i figure soccer is a tough game, and some jostling is expected. but this team really took it to the extreme. they got two yellow cards, and probably deserved more. it was absurd.
the soccer game continued through most of the braves-cubs game, and i only got to see the last two innings. i’m sad that the braves lost. carter and i watched the last inning together via phone. it was disappointing. wood and prior both pitched very well, but i can’t help but feel like the braves sort of defeated themselves. the offense that’s been so overwhelming all season long was absent.
and another winter begins. i’ll watch the lcs and world series, but it won’t be the same.
whew. i just wrote a book.
