Mundane Details

The Japanese game shows do it again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll2kajMH2u0

Share/Save

Oh boy. I’m so over my head in details right now. And the weekend is beckoning me to just ignore them all. Holidays can be evil like that.  I’m so glad I started using at least one of my new organization tools - the Thinking Rock thing. It at least helps me keep 95% of my to-do lists in one place on my computer and NOT online (for the inevitable power outages), or most likely, all over completely random pieces of paper strewn around my life.  And this place is a mess. I managed to tidy up the kitchen last night so I could freaking breathe, but this office needs help.  A weekend of lock-myself-in-with-junk-food-and-caffeine-only-allowed-to-leave-for-bathroom-emergencies cleaning/sorting/pitching/filing.  I mean, it’s not as bad as it could be, and it’s not even as bad as it’s been.  It’s just not right.  I’ve got this wonderful little ‘tickler’ file thing I bought to be the compliment to my computer to-do list…and I can’t use it yet becuase I haven’t filtered down what I affectionately call the ‘pile to the right’ and the ‘pile to the left’.  These have now spawned the ‘box of stuff on the floor (the lid’s closed so there’s nothing there, right) and the ‘pile on the floor to my right’, the ‘pile on the floor behind me’ and the ‘pile in the chair’.  Ugh.  Hopefully I can spend some time on at least part of it this weekend. Maybe Sunday.  Today my focus is the stack right in front of me. 3+ hours to go.

Share/Save

On this lovely virtual Friday, here’s your quote for the long holiday weekend:

“Business is like a jungle. And I am like a tiger. And Dwight is like a monkey, that stabs the tiger in the back with a stick. Does the tiger fire the monkey? Does the tiger transfer the monkey to another branch. (Smiles) Pun. There is no way of knowing what goes on inside the tiger’s head. We don’t have the technology. ”

-from The Office

Share/Save

Knight Rider GPS with Kitt’s Voice

Share/Save

They finally posted official event photos.  We only have 4 were you could see our number - so they were searchable.  There may be more, but I haven’t found them yet.  If  you go to this link: PHOTOS and then search for number “681″, then our photos will pop up.  The last pic is during the Wheelbarrow, he caught us right after J had to set me down cause basically my legs were covered in suntan lotion and not easy to hold on to. Enjoy!

Colorado pics coming soon!

Share/Save

The folks over at Urban Assault put together a nice video that captures how the race went/works, it includes most of the obstacles, including several that we didn’t get to do.

ENJOY!

Share/Save

So: Race Day.  We got up nice and super early on Sunday morning to get ready to go. Ate a decent breakfast of bread, peanut butter and honey (that we had to make with our hands - no utensils - due to the previously mentioned me-forgetting-some-things) and juice.  Jeffiner and I headed out to the starting point and Jon was going to follow on foot.  We did a little more trail exploring on our way there, had to climb a crazy steep embankment on the way there that I cannot believe I didn’t slide down.  Seriously, it was walking straight up (and dragging a 35 lb bike) on loose dirt. Anyways, got to the start and dropped off our bikes at the staging area - which you can see in the first pic.

Because we scored a 69% on our pre-race Quiz we got to start in the first wave of people.   We knew this wouldn’t matter much in the end - and it didn’t, but it felt good to beat somebody at something - even if it’s just Googling skills.  We were cracking up at all the fun outfits people had come up with.  There were the Super Grovers with fun Grover jerseys and fuzzy blue helmets, Pinky and the Brain, Chicken and Dumplings - and the ‘brush people’ which i still don’t fully get.  Anyhow, we hung around as everyone got ready to start and they ended up starting about 15 min late - so they gave everyone until 12:15pm to finish (that’s 4 hours).  Simple, right? Ha.

So, the first wave takes off, we all run down the street to our bikes (We discussed several times during the race, especially at the end how this was good triathlon training) and untangle them from each other and get going.  They stopped traffic for us, but not in a super official way.  There may have been an officer or two. All I know is that we were all dragging our bikes over the grass to get to the road quicker and taking off over the bridge with some lady going ‘go! we stopped traffic! go! go!”

Our original plan was to get back on the trail immediately and follow it north for about 29 blocks.  After some initial brake trouble on J’s bike, we made it back to the trail but then the trail spit us back out only a few blocks up.  Much of the rest of the trail is awesome and helpful, but this part just wasn’t doing what we needed it to do, so we just started heading north on the streets.  It was funny because everyone was racing but you essentially had your own course, because except for around the checkpoints and a few short jaunts, no one was going in the same direction.  It also gave you a bit of confidence that at least those other people don’t KNOW where we had been already, hehe.

Ok, first obstacle: Picking up bottle caps with soaking wet oven mits on your hands, whilst being sprayed by super soakers - and fill a bowl with them. Nice. We got there and the line was long - we spent about 30 min in that line at least.  But we used that time to figure out the fastest way to fill the bowl.  When it was our turn we each found caps and scooped them together using the mitts and our forearms and filled the bowl with one trip.  It took us less than 30 seconds to complete that obstacle - then on our way to the first Mystery Checkpoint.  We headed over to the first Mystery and found the guy giving out beads and the next clue.  Thankfully, I actually knew most of the clue - at least where to start, so we didn’t need to phone-a-friend at this point.  It was on the way to another obstacle, so we went to the area where the 2nd Mystery Checkpoint was.  The only really annoying thing at this point was that my bike chain would not stay in gear completely, it kept partially changing gears and then snapping back down.  I couldn’t get it to stop - very annoying on the hills.  The 2nd Mystery Checkpoint produced the hardest clue of all of them.  A bunch of latin with some letters in caps, highlighted.  We had no clue, so we took a pic of it and sent it to The Support Team of Rita/Marcus and Karla.  I called Rita first and read her the clue because the photo wasn’t clear enough.  They went to work on the clue and we took off for the next obstacle.  On the way there was a massive hill - Jeffiner was just killing on the hills though and passing people all the time - especially now that all that extra packaging was off the bike ;).  Me, well, my chain kept jerking and well - I made it up the hills.  But I loved to coast down them - Jeffiner, not so much.  =)

We got to the next obstacle checkpoint which was actually 2 obstacles -the Keg walk and the Wheelbarrow.  We spent 45 minutes in this line. Boo.  Thankfully we had plenty of water and gel snacks to keep us going through all this. While in line, Rita called back several times and had figured out the next Mystery Checkpoint, so that was great.  Thank you!!!  Finally we got to the obstacles.  The Keg walk was pretty easy, you just stood on empty pony kegs with ropes and walked down and around a cone.  The Wheelbarrow - not as easy.  I had to hold on to a wheel and hold myself up, while Jeffiner picked up my legs and pushed me down and around the cone.  It took us a bit and some face in the dirt before we got it right - but we did it! I was a bit dirty after that though.

Click HERE to see a Youtube video of this obstacle in another city.  It was not pleasant, cool and rainy for us.

So on to the next obstacle - the Bike Joust.  This one was where Jon was waiting for us, so we have a few pics and some video (posting later hopefully).  Basically, one of you rides the bike while the other stands on the back with a joust and picks up 3 rings as you go down the line, then you come back.  I pedaled some, but did walk the bike a bit. Hey, we completed it though! Woohoo!

Ok, so at this point, it is about 11:40am.  We have only 35 min left to complete ‘everything’ before they shut down the obstacles.  Like many other teams who stood in line with us, we cut our losses and decide to go for the funnest obstacles to finish it off.  Obvious choice: The Rowing Dock.  The water.  So we head in that direction.  By this time of day there were many more people out on the trail and it took some time navigate through the HUNDREDS of walkers out there, but we made it to near the rowing dock, which was also next to the 3rd Mystery Checkpoint.  We picked up our third mystery bead - found out what the 4th mystery checkpoint was - for fun, and then headed down to the dock.  We originally thought it was going to be some sort of paddleboat obstacle - but all you had to do was hop in the water and push and empty floating keg around a bouy. Easiest obstacle ever.  So for part 3 of our impromptu-triathlon-training, we did a little keg kickboarding, passed the other teams in the water and finished that obstacle just in time before it closed.   We were also thankful for our triathlon bike shorts that we got because they don’t hold water like regular bike shorts and they were awesome.  So we put our shoes and gear back on and started heading to the finish to pick up some free beverages and see what else was there before going back to the hotel to clean up.  On the way up the hill from the dock, Jeffiner passed a team quite easily, saying ‘on your left’ (which is what you say to warn people you are passing them).  I was behind her but not having the momentum she had, I came up next to them and said “I’m on your left, but I have no aspirations of actually passing you”.  Then my chain was being weird again and the hill got steeper, so I just got off the bike and ran it up the rest of the hill, and said “on your left” as I passed them while running.  We were all tired and it was just funny.  So we headed back to the finish, parked our bikes, went to the actual finish line - there was a line to go through the final obstacle (giant inflatable water slide and big wheels).  We were not in the mood for another line that wouldn’t matter, so we just went into the parking lot, grabbed some free tea and checked it out.  There were lines for everything else, so we headed back to the hotel. We only had till 2pm to check out and it was already almost 1pm.

Here is us back at the hotel.  We cleaned up, headed out of town, got some lunch and came home. The end. We had a great time, even though we didn’t get to complete everything.  It just got us thinking about the strategy for next time…hehe.

Share/Save

So, Saturday we set out for Austin with most everything we needed - minus the stuff I forgot, like breakfast. boo.  We made good time and got to our hotel just fine - that was pretty close to the race start.  We took our bikes up to our rooms and then set off for Packet Pick-up.  My bike got it’s own bed. ;)  Anyhow, we walked down to packet pickup and were able to get MOST of the stuff that we were promised.  We did get our cool bags, and our New Belgium bike bells - which I love! We got our instructions and our chain for the checkpoint beads, and we even got to practice one of the obstacles - the mini bike, which is extremely difficult if you have legs longer than 2 feet.  Sadly, they did not have any of the promised water bottles left (extra sad because I had forgotten mine and was counting on the free one), but we were told we could pick up our free water bottle later this week in Austin.  Not helping.  The other dissapointment was the t-shirts.  They were completely out of our sizes, even though we had selected our size on the online signup form.  We figure there were probably a lot of day-of signups that all happened to be our sizes. So, we were a bit let down from that, but we got the rest of our stuff and headed off to dinner at Stubb’s Bbq, down the road - which was AWESOME, and a perfect pre-race meal.

After Stubb’s we headed back to the hotel and then closer to sundown we walked over to the Congress St. bridge to watch the millions of bats fly out at dusk and to scope out the Start/Finish location for the race.  The bats were awsome.  There were tons of people out to watch them too.  I took a few photos of the people, but took a pretty long video of the bats.  I was told there were approximately 2.5 million bats that were under that bridge.  And boy do they smell lovely.

We went to scope out the start line so we knew exactly where to go in the morning, then we headed back to the hotel. On the way we encountered a ‘real’ road bike race going on in Downtown Austin, that I mentioned in the previous post.  Here is some short video of the race.

Share/Save

That’s how many calories Jeffiner and I each burned during yesterday’s Urban Assault Race in Austin.  I will post more tales of our adventures later today hopefullly.  We had a great time.  The night before while walking back to our hotel we came across a ‘real’ bike race going on in downtown.  It was the Austin Crit.  Just a big circle race, I don’t know all the details yet, but I took some cool pictures and some video.  I used my high speed mode and the pics turned out sweet because the riders look like ghosts.  Someone else’s flash lit them up. More to come…

Share/Save

I’m sorry I can’t be there to celebrate in person, so I made you this ‘virtual’ BACON CAKE!

Thanks to the guys over at SWOBO blog for the pic.

*Sorry for the delay in this posting - still working out a few kinks in the time-delay stuff.

Share/Save