Adventure Race

Pete has arrived from NZ so our team was complete and no excuses could keep us from undertaking our first adventure race. Despite several mis-adventures, we are done....and I am shagged. We got off to a late start when we realized that 2 life jackets were back in Mill Valley and the race was starting in thirty minutes from SF (with the kayaking section). So Brent zoomed home, grabbed the gear, and then we were off -- about 20 minutes behind the rest of the crowd. Because we had a single (which I was rowing -- albeit slowly), we made little headway on catching up. Didn't help that we had to paddle to the far side of Alcatraz. A container ship cut us and a couple of other laggards off, which was cool. By the time we finished the first leg, we were in 2nd to last place (yeah -- we passed one team). Fortunately the biking followed, and there was a lot of it, on our home court (all the way out to the familiar zen center). Navigating wasn't too hard and by the time we came back across the bridge, we'd moved up to 15th place. There's a minimum time to cross the bridge and get back to the start (25 minutes -- so folks don't rush)....but we took those extra moments to grab a coke and a hot dog at the golden gate bridge. On the run, we settled for 3 of the 4 checkpoints -- so will get docked for omitting the furtherst point....but I/we would have been pretty beaten up if we went for it. As it was, we were lucky to avoid a big boo-boo over the fact that there are two Mason streets (and we were going to the far away one).

Pete and Brent did great -- both in zooming along and in navigating. A good team effort. We were out there about 8 or 9 hours. I'm zonked. Dunno if I'll repeat as right now all I know is that the hot tub sounds good.