A little pre-race frustration took place the night before the start. We made the mistake of camping rather than getting a room and paid for it big time! We were lucky enough to have the loudest most obnoxious group of people in the entire state camping next to us. Being a private campground, there was no ranger to rescue us, so the noise continued until it was time to get up at 5:00am... with no sleep.

It took doing our first adventure race to show us how much we stink at orienteering! The race began with a short loop followed by a long loop of orienteering (about 7K total). We started on the shorter of the two loops and found the first checkpoint with little problem. We then proceeded to get lost for the next hour or so looking for the next checkpoint. We ended up finding a totally different checkpoint with the help of another team and got our bearings. We found the remaining 2 checkpoints with little problem. We then continued on to the longer of the two orienteering sections only to find 2 of the 8 checkpoints before the 3 hour cutoff. Next was the mountain biking section. First we rode downhill about a mile and a half which felt really great after all the running and hiking we had been doing. Unfortunately we had to ride back up (which we ended up mostly walking). Next was the single track. I don't know how to put into words how technical this single track was. I should have listened to Angie and ran the whole thing. The trail was about 6-7 miles long most of which we walked with the bikes due to the thunderstorm and rain making the trail un-ridable for us. About an hour into this section we realized we must have made a wrong turn somewhere and had to stop and try to figure out where we were. Fortunately there were a couple of other teams that were in the same situation, so we collectively figured out where we were and were on our way. We ended up just ditching the bikes for the last mile and a half or so and running that portion. Once we got back to the transition area, it was time for our 20 mi ride to the canoe put in. There was only one checkpoint along the way which we found rather easily. Finally after a painful 9.5 hours we arrived at the canoe put in only to find out we had missed the cutoff by a half hour. The good news was there were still 5 teams behind us, so we didn't come in last!!! I think we did great for our first race and now I'm even more excited to do our next one!