2007/06/30 – Texas State Championship Sprint Adventure Race Series: Fort Worth

Location

Camp Carter YMCA

What Is It?

2 Person Teams Coed, Male, Coed Masters and Female Divisions (Both Coed Masters team members must be 40+ years old by 12/31/07)

Events:
• 2-3 mile trail run
• 7-10 mile mountain bike
• 20 – 35 minute canoe
• mystery events

Team Name: HFAR/OUCH (Houston Fit Adventure Racing / Obviously Unprepared, Confused & Hurting)

Team Mates

• Steve Mertz
• Andrea Dahlke

Category

• 2 Person Coed

Placing

• 11th out of 18 at a time of 1:43:54 (1 minute out side of top ten!)

Copied Results

Experience

This was a really fun race. Probably the funnest super sprint race I’ve ever done. And a lot of it was thanks to Andrea. She made this race fun. Thanks for racing with me!

I was a little worried today about racing. Last weekend I had a pretty serious bout of food poisoning and my digestive tract is still sorting itself out fully. So I didn’t eat as much as I would have normally, nor did I get to eat what I normally would have. I just had a bit of bagel and that was it. And it seemed to work out quite well. In fact well enough that I will be doing it again for the next sprint races.

Andrea and I decide to wait until after the pre-race meeting to do our warm up. This works best for me as, we don’t get too warmed up too soon and then cool down during the meeting. So after the meeting we go for a bit of jog and walk and then make our final preparations and head off to the start line.

We start off with a run. I hate running. I didn’t have my foot pod with me, so I have no idea how far or fast we were going on the run. I also forgot to hit my lap button when we finished each leg of the race, so I don’t have any splits. I was kind of forgetful this race. Anyways… Andrea and I started out at the back of the pack. Because I am a bad runner, I didn’t want to be too far up and get trampled. So the idea was to start at the back, and as we figured out how we (me) was feeling we could go faster and start passing people. And it worked out pretty well. I was feeling not too bad and so we picked it up a bit and we did manage to pass some people.

Run back into TA. Andrea had to get her CamelBak and I grabbed the Sevy seats as it was the paddle section next! I knew that we were going to have a good paddle. I’ve never paddled with Andrea before but I knew it was going to be short and I am a fairly decent paddler I think, so I would be able to keep the Sevy going straight which is 75% of the battle during the race.

Turns out that Andrea is quite a decent paddler herself. Before the race, I gave her some pointers of how to deal with the Sevy. And she stuck to them perfectly. We ended up passing at least 7-10 teams during this leg of the race, with quite a few of those teams wondering how we were able to do that!

After the paddle it was on to the bike leg. The stupid, stupid, stupid bike leg. We started off good, kind of finding our bike legs and working our way through the trails. Then at some point on the course, there was some downed flagging which caused a lot of teams to miss a turn or something so we lost a bunch of time as we got lost and ended up adding to the trail we were suppose to be riding. I believe this lost us a top ten placing. But not much we can do about it.

There was a mystery event during the bike leg, where we got a piece of paper and had to go through and do various little things like pushups, situps and walking the length of a telephone pole. And if you didn’t read the full instructions first, then you did other stuff and lost more time! Suckers! After we finished that we got back on the bike and did some more confusing stuff on the bike.

We came to a part of the trail where everyone was slowing down and stopping and getting off the bikes. So we got off and started walking up the little hill and realized that the reason was, the little hill was not only not rideable due to a big tree laying across the path, but it was almost not walkable, especially in bike shoes. So we get to the tree, and I get over first, then I help Andrea with her bike over and I start hauling both bikes up as quickly as possible so we can try to pass some of the teams that were around us. We get to the top and are able to ride again, with not too much trouble. Andrea did a great job getting up this nasty hill. And then when we had to go back down another hill. Awesome job keeping the tires pointed right way around!

Eventually found our way back to TA and got our stuff ready for another paddle leg.

This time around it was a real PITA. We grabbed a Sevy that was flat on the left side so the stupid boat kept turning left on me. It was all I could do to keep it going kind of straight. Even so, we still managed to pass another 5-7 or so teams out there. I wish we had a different boat though as we could have put more time into them for the final event.

The final event, another mystery event was a quick run to a check point using a map they gave us, if we had a poker chip we got on the bike, and get it punched. It was about a half mile run so it wasn’t too bad. But since my running still sucks pretty bad, I was struggling with it. But we finished!

Multimedia

I had my camera… But I forgot to take it out of the truck. Here are a couple of pictures that were sent to me. And a couple that I “borrowed.”

Maps

No Maps at this time.

Final Thoughts

This race was a lot of fun. The only problem with it was the mess up on the bike course which happens. It also reaffirmed that I need to really work on my running more. I felt slow and not overly great while running each time we had to run.

Nutritionally I felt good even though I didn’t have much to eat and still working through the healing from the food poisoning. So I think this has shown me that I probably have been eating too much before races. So I will experiment over the next several long workouts, practices, races to see what is really going on.

Days Later… (2007/07/02)

I still think it was a fun race. I really need to get more running in, and build that up as that is definitely my weakest event. I have no aches or pains which is very surprising especially since we went at it for almost 2 hours, and then 6 hours of driving back to Houston. Usually that does me in on its own.

And now it’s on to the next race in two weeks!