The Great Urban Race--Dallas

We arrived early to the race, the Great Urban Race Dallas headquartered at Dick's Last Resort, but not nearly as early as we thought we'd be. Here we are posing at the finish line before the race, sporting our matching gear(T's and socks) purchased days ago from Mellow Johnnys, Lance Armstrong's bike shop in Austin.



You know it's going to be a crazy day when you can take a picture of a tennis ball and racket taking pictures of a bunch of gnomes in a bar before noon, you can quote me on this.



Gnomes on a day off.



Apparently the beers in their bonnets were just props, either that or they're quadropble fisting, either way, pretty impressive pre-race hydration techniques.



Yeah, it looked to be a pretty interesting event, remember this is before the race.



Is that Skye at the bar???



She got 86'd after her second round.

Totally kidding, she is outside waiting for the race to begin as I made my way to grab the race clues. We were ready to run.



This is our second pic with this guy. Our first didn't show the Segway he was on. This should have been an early warning.



We had no idea which clue we were posing for but obviously it was one on the course.

As far as these races go, this one was very much of a sprint, it was over before we knew it. This left very little room for error and made every second count. We had some technical problems early on.



At this point, well into the race we still didn't have a real game plan. This was very atypical for me. The race was short, not geographically or physically challenging, because Cindy was working, we were reliant on one of her co-workers who was great at the clues but because he had never done anything like this he could not help formulate an over all game plan. For me it was frustrating, we never had a race imposed public transportation "break" where we could check the clue sheet and organize.

It was different from other races in that most of the questions could be answered without support. In 20/20 hindsight we would have been better served trying to map the course ourselves but like I said that is 20/20 hindsight.



Skye is an amazing teammate. She keeps her attitude as high as she can. I am always so proud of her.




We finally found a "U" on a license plate. As far as we were concerned this was our the missing piece in our race puzzle. We sprinted for the finish line. I ended up carrying Skye on my back in the final blocks, passing racers in their twenties.

Yeah I am all that.

My legs were burning. Sprinting with 100 lbs on one's back, has its consequence. I ground my teeth and pushed. I did pass teams with Skye on my back. For me it is less about beating others and more about how far I can push myself. But it does feel nice to win.

When we checked our pics and clues with the officials, we found we were missing a picture that another team took for us or didn't as the case may be. I was pretty pissed and didn't do a great job concealing this to Skye(We would end up going to the Texas State Fair as due penance). My legs were full of lactic acid and I watched as team after team checked in, knowing we would be placed behind them because of our time deduction even though we "should" have been in front of them. Well we needed to double check our photos. Tough lesson to learn.

Ironic.

When Kip and I raced, I insisted on covering ourselves in case of such an error. That cost us first place, we ended up out of contention with a four spot. We would have easily taken first had I not made us hit every obstacle and here we were in Dallas taking a 30 minute hit because I didn't check our photos and we skipped an obstacle because of time constraints.

Yes, Ironic.