Put your seat belts on folks. This was a fun one!!!
These races are kind of interesting in that you really don’t know what you’re going to be doing. You have this LONG list of items that you need in your backpack. Matches. Knife. Repelling gear. Rain gear. Warm clothes. Food for the day. Bike shoes. Hiking Shoes. Compass…You have team gear, and gear that each individual needs to have. The folks that set up the race can be creative and give you the coordinates and map early. Or at race start. Or add more later. Fun stuff. This race started out in Little Rock right along with river.
Race start was at 6:00am. In the dark.
It was sort of cold but not too bad. You layer up. At 6 we started out with a short run over a pedestrian bridge to get our map, coordinate and directions. Then a short run back to our transition area to map out the race. Mark showed me how to do the coordinates. I liked that part a lot. Though…you know me…directionally challenged. Come to find out, I’m good at navigating to landmarks and what not. Need to be careful here, could end up with a bad day if you got some coordinates wrong.
At each of the checkpoints, you punch your passport. Basically just a piece of paper with squares for each check point. And each checkpoint has a different punch. These punches hang from a foot long piece of 3″ pvc so hopefully easier to see. Most weren’t too bad to locate. There were a couple that proved to be challenging.
After we got the coordinates all mapped. And double checked. We got ready to take off. The first part of the race was biking, on our mountain bikes, through beautiful neighborhoods of Little Rock. The city is a bit hilly so there was an element of work. We traveled a bit in town, getting to checkpoints and what not. At about checkpoint four, we were lucky enough to catch the first checkpoint at the entrance of a nice park. Very beautiful. And the beginning of our single track adventures. It was pretty easy to lose your way in this park as the leaves made the paths hard to see. The below video was a bit of an example of the type of terrain found in the park.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_agklQZaMlQ%3Flist
After the first park we road on some streets again and came to the second park. This checkpoint was HARD to find. Here’s a bit of what it looked like. Notice. Just a super fabulous beautiful day!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xSt5wPQDnrk
They had a person there giving hints. Good thing too. At one checkpoint we had to climb down a pretty steep ravine to look for the check point. If you got lucky and the team in front of you wasn’t lost, you could get clues as to where the check point was. Or if they were totally lost, you could spend a lot of time looking in an area for NOTHING. So back to the ravine. And back out. Back on the roads and heading to the dam checkpoint by checkpoint. Here’s Heidi in some really cool bamboo.
By the way. The first section of the race had 26 checkpoints.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QFQOrJHVGLw
Checkpoint 12 was REALLY hard to find. (and would come to haunt us) Took us a long time. I think it took most people a lot of time. It was WAY off the bike path. We had left our bikes and started trampling around in the woods. We got split up here so…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ydUGi6x_Wew
After this checkpoint we continue our adventure into a different part of this big park area. Up a fairly big hill. And we ended up traveling up said hill a couple of times, much to my legs’ dismay, due to not finding exactly where we needed to be. We did have a super exciting event happen! A siting of…check it out…
BIG FOOT…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xecBPRUMfpE
We finally!!!!!! get ourselves to this place we are calling the “bike drop off”. The plan is to get off the bike and hike a bit to find 4 or 5 checkpoints. I’m sort of glad that I didn’t have the map because I would have been more aware of how much up and down we’d be doing. So at this point, ignorance is bliss. The a big problem!!!! Mark has lost one shoe. You bikers know that hiking in bike shoes isn’t the most fun thing to do so…some guy says he saw a red shoe at checkpoint 12. O M G! Seriously. So on the bikes we go. (at this point is when I duck tape the video on my backpack) BACK TO CHECKPOINT 12. Which is about 2 checkpoints behind us. (anyone remember that hill in the middle? my legs did!)
We looked for that darn shoe for awhile. We even recruited St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things. Heidi found a ceramic kitty and I found a key. But no shoe. So back to checkpoint 14 we went.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BF9sfgYHNIY
At this point we did A LOT of hiking around looking for the checkpoints. Mark’s navigating was generally spot on. Checkpoint 14, remember, was the bike drop, so for those of us that had hiking shoes, on they went. Thank goodness. Took about an hour or so of moderate work to find all the check points. I got to tell you, at this time…my legs were hurting. Especially going DOWN the hills. Something in my right knee was barking to me. I assume that Heidi and Mark were just peachy! Heidi was super smart girl and walking pretty close to Mark, in his foot steps. With the amount of leaves on the ground, it was hard to navigate all the rocks.
We get back to the bikes. And there are SPECIFIC instructions to follow the orange flags. Which led us along some single track that was “FUN” to Heidi and Mark. And really hard to me. At the point I’m really paying the price of having a very heavy, generic bike. I won’t bore you with the video of me falling behind, them stopping at a checkpoint, me catching up. WASH RINSE REPEAT. On one of these I fell pretty good. Right on my right hip on a big rock. About three tears came out. I lay there looking up thinking “you are all by yourself, in the middle of no where, what are you going to do” “suck it up princess” “wonder how long they will wait until they come back for me”. But I get up and make it out. Which at this time I’m VERY tired and not sure I can do much more. Then to get to the next checkpoint to find out (remember that ignorance thing, I’d have just stayed laying there if I had known how hard the next part was going to be). Or not. 🙂
https://youtube.com/watch?v=W-MEow2ZBKk
We make it to the top. It was awesome!
Going down was pretty fun. This is a long video, you can get an idea of the bits and pieces of the race. Mark took a tiny spill here on one of the turns. And Heidi went “Ass over tea kettle” doing down.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oBE6wf6LHXI
After the big down we ride a bit of straight away back to town. Heidi was a super awesome person and pulled me back a bit, let my legs recover from that craziness. We get to the bridge that we are crossing the river at, and having carry our bikes up some flights of stairs. That was awesome. NOT. We actually fit four bikes and four people into an elevator that we ride up. COOL. At this point we are back in town and heading toward repelling.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RqDOxS-uWJU
Once done with the rebelling we make our way back to the transition area. To get more check points. Where we discover that we are not done. And there is a significant amount of checkpoints left. We figure out that we won’t be able to get them all, so we strategize on what we are going to do. You get awarded on how many checkpoints you get in a certain time. With the cut off time of 6pm. 12 hours. So we plan. And off we go.
We had a great time. We even got Mark to sing. Twice.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9Ev-BdnMM
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9Ev-BdnMM
And more lovely sites on our way to done.
LIST OF INJURIES
Bonnie:
1. bruise inside of left knee – bike fall
2. Left 2nd toenail ouchie – trekking in bike shoes
3. Bruise on left arch – rock climbing in bike shoes
4. Contusion inside/outside right shin, right hip – Bike fall
Heidi:
1. Diaphragm. Breathing
2. Ass over tea kettle – left shin bruise, left quad bruise, left neck, contusion on l shoulder blade, left ring fingernail (which survived)
3. Face plant when running. Left palm heel abrasion, right knee cap
4. Rock climbing in bike shoes – jammed right big toe
Mark
1. Blister on right heel – doing entire race in bike shoes
Things we lost.
A shoe. Bike light. Portion of cliff bar. Latte.
Gained.
Ceramic kitty, golf ball, key
Over all. It was A LOT of fun. Serious fun. Can’t wait for the next one!!! Thanks Mark! Go GCAR!
