2006/04/08 – Silly Face Mock Race

Location

Jack Brooks Park

What Is It?

A 1-2 hour mock adventure race to prepare us for the real thing.

  1. Running
  2. Paddling
  3. Mystery Event: Carry a log up a small hill and back down.
  4. Biking
  5. Mystery Event: The reason this is the Silly Face Mock Race, make a silly face for the camera.

Team Name: X-Pats

Team Mates

Kimberly Milsap

Category

Coed

Placing

4th place Coed, 6th place overall.

Official page: Silly Face Mock Race Results

Experience

This race was pretty brutal on me. Many thanks to my team mate Kimberly for being patient with me and my bad IT Band.

We started off with a run. I was actually looking forward to this as I had a good run at the beginning of the week with not pains or anything. But as luck would have it, my IT band on my left side decided to act up about 4 minutes into the race. It got very painful very fast. I started thinking of dropping out of the race because of it. But I didn’t want to let Kimberly down.

So I thought back to bike practice with Justin, and about putting the pain out of your mind, and trying to deaden the signals of pain, since they are a mind thing. It took me about a minute to get my head wrapped around this and to kill off the pain. Once I got that dealt with I could run again. I didn’t want to go too fast, but also since I was running with Kimberly, who is a good runner, I didn’t want to go too slow. So I tried to push it as much as I could, with holding some back as I knew we had a heck of a paddle in front of us.

Next was the paddle. I was looking forward to this event as well. Until I found out, just before the race started that my Sevy had a hole in it. The irony of this was last week I thought about strategy for just this event. Putting the stronger paddler in the ‘back’ of the Sevy, and the weaker on in the ‘front’. Then swap the Sevy around so that instead of having the plugs in the back of the boat like normal, you put them up front so that the person up front can pump air into the boat while the person in the back continues to paddle.

This actually worked out great. Kimberly was up front pumping air into the boat while I continuously paddled. So even though we had a flat side, we made good time. We even caught up to and passed another team, which completely shocked me. The other problem with the paddle, was on the way back it was upstream and into the wind which was sustained and probably around 25mph. Which would not be very much fun at all normally, let alone in a flat Sevy. But we got through it and moved on to the next event.

Mystery Event number one. Carry a log up a small hill, around a flag, and back down. Because of my IT Band, I couldn’t run to this event, so we walked, quickly. Which allowed the team that we passed on the paddle to move ahead of us. So we had to wait for them to finish before we could pick up the log and have our turn. And because they ended up breaking the log when they dropped it, we had a smaller, lighter one to work with so I just picked it up myself and we ran up and down no problem, other than the pain which I more quickly put out of my mind this time around.

Time for the bike leg! Finally something fun! Or not. We started off fast, as we were in the open. Then we turned into the trails and *BLAM* my arms were tired from the paddle and I wiped out on a turn that was riddled with rocks. I got some nice scrapes from that, which I didn’t know about until afterwards as I just bounced back up and got to it again.

The bike leg was designed for small people I think. I had trouble fitting through the trails as I got my helmet tied up twice, and almost whacked my hands on trees many many times due to the tight corners. It also took me a bit to recover from the paddling enough for me to get comfortable on the bike and turning safely. I definitely need to work on my transitioning from paddle to bike so that I can eliminate this problem. We also ended up making three wrong turns as we didn’t see the coloured tape in time for turning down the right path. Which cost is a bit of time. But even with all these issues, we ended up with the third best split overall on the bike!

We finally finished the bike leg, and it was the second Mystery Event, make a silly face for the camera! So we did that quite well and that was the end of the race.

I promptly popped four Advil’s and put ice on my leg so that I could get the inflammation down on it.

Multimedia

I have no pictures. But there are some here: Silly Face Mock Race Pictures

Final Thoughts

We overcame quite a few adversities today during this race. First my IT Band going on me. And my dealing with the pain of that. Then the fact that our Sevy had a hole in it, so we had to keep that inflated while trying to paddle. Then the last issue was the biking, and how close quarters it was so that a larger person like myself struggled in there, especially after hammering the paddle section and getting a very exhausted upper body.

Days Later… (2006/04/10)

I don’t feel too bad at all. Although my IT Band is still bothering me, so I won’t be doing any running this week. And I will probably not do too much biking either as that can also cause it to flare up.

I feel better about how the race went, because of the fact we did overcome the problems that were presented to us. All things that could definitely come up in a real race. What I’m taking with me most on this is, knowing I have bad IT Bands, I will start to make sure I have Advil with me at all times, during the race, and maybe even take them before we even start. I will also work in my mental game of putting pain out of mind, so that I can do it faster.

Another thing I need to work on is upper body endurance and strength, so that when we go from paddling to biking, it doesn’t effect me as much as it did during this race.

I also need to work on developing my legs better so that I can strengthen my IT Band and the surrounding muscles so that it stops becoming an issue. This is my only limiting factor currently since running is my weakest event, and since I can’t train in running with the bad IT Band, I can’t improve here. I will be doing a little bit of research and try to find out how to fix it, and make things good.

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