The Adventure Continues

Perhaps this blog entry should aptly be renamed, The Adventure (Racing) Begins, because I competed in my first Adventure Race at Inks Lake this past weekend!

For those of you who have never heard of an adventure race, it's kinda like competing in a triathlon in a state park. You compete in multiple events, each timed (even the transition is timed). The events I competed in (with my race partner, Jon) included a mystery event, paddling, mountain biking, and trail running (all while orienteering and navigating to hidden check points).

Our race was a "sprint" race, which meant that it would only be one day (we started at 9:00 and the course would be closed at 6:00). There are some races which will continue over multiple days (can you believe??)

So, here's our story:

Four of us drove up to Inks Lake Friday night (through some pretty fierce thunderstorms). However, praise God, the rain stopped just in time for us to set up our tents (we were to camp the whole weekend at Inks Lake). The race folks were amazed that two teams fit into one car to make the drive up to Inks Lake. Actually, we were pretty amazed it all fit into one car also! One kayak, 4 bikes, 4 people and their stuff (race stuff, camp stuff, personal stuff) all crammed into my 11 year old Toyota 4-Runner (which was dubbed "Myrtle" for the trip).

Saturday morning came early as we had been advised to put "slime" inner tubes in our tires due to the abundant cactus in the park (more about the cactus later). So, having a quick power breakfast, changing our inner tubes, then setting up our transition area became our order of events before the real "pre-race" events began.

At 8:30, the race directors gave us the "coordinate points" for leg 2 of the race. Leg 2, that's right. They gave us 30 minutes to plot the points then come back to the start to receive leg 1 coordinates (since leg 2 was the paddle event, they had to give us something to break up the masses. They didn't want everyone dashing for their boats at the same time). The first leg was a mystery event of sorts... had to figure out the clues to run to different points in the park. Once finished, we went straight for our canoe.

This is where the interesting leg began as the wind on Saturday was as strong as I've seen it! So strong, in fact, there were white caps on the water (it looked more like an ocean than a small lake). What was more challenging was the fact that the wind whipped around a couple of times while we were out on the lake! It seemed as if we were ALWAYS canoeing against the wind. We finally finished our canoe check points and headed back to dock our canoe. Once docked, we received our biking coordinates. While Jon plotted them, I changed clothes as I was soaked from being in the front of the canoe (whew!).

Off to the biking portion! Well, the half biking / half trekking with your bike portion! The trails were actually hiking trails, not biking trails, so some of the course was too rocky (way too rocky) to navigate on a bike. The trails were beautiful though!!! I don't think I've seen as vibrant of bluebonnets as are what is at Inks Lake. But don't take your eyes off the course! The cactus are right there among the bluebonnets. And I know very intimately how prickly cactus can be. I actually fell into cactus (well, right by it... where are the spines had fallen). Yes, I got a backside full of cactus spines. OUYEEEE!!! That's all I could yell as I sat smack dab on my backside. Jon turned around and came back to check on me. After I got up and got most of the ones I could see off me, I realized my backside must have looked like a pin cushion. After we got as many off as we could, we headed back to camp (we had gotten all our check points by the time). I managed to sit "just right" on my bike to avoid the sharp pain. When we got back to camp, I had hoped to find either some tweezers or some duck tape (neither of which I could find). The EMT, Mary, ended up getting an up-close and personal view of my backside and she plucked with her fingers one-by-one the cactus spines from my backside. I'm forever indebted to her!! Thank you Mary!! Well, with still quite a few spines in my backside (and yet another clothes change), and after Jon did his wonderful job with mapping the trekking check points, we were off to the trails!

The trekking portion had six checkpoints and let me tell you Jon honed in on them like a magnet! It was amazing. My favorite checkpoint was "top of the world" and we stopped to get some photos while we were up there. We made it back to the transition area around 5:15.

The bottom line is that I had a great time on this race, challenged myself, saw some beautiful country, had a great time with my race partner, Jon, and thoroughly enjoyed meeting a lot of new and interesting folks.

More adventures to come. Next week is the MS150!

All for now,
Lisa

P.S. Photos at left