By Jim Phillips

Since our first time out went so well, we decided to give it another try with the adventure racing …thing. This time we set our sites on a Hi-Tec Adventure racing event. Where you and your teammates can go up against 250-300 other teams in the gold standard of sprint adventure racing.

This particular race was going to take place just outside of Athens, at Ft Yargo St. Park. We arrived just in time to park and ride our bike the mile of parked cars to the pre-race meeting. The meeting was a sea of hard, athletic men and women all walking around looking like they had just stepped out off the pages of Triathlete or Men’s Fitness. Stevie B is usually not easily impressed, or stressed… He was both.

We had not gone into this blind, we knew that the top ten at both preceding races had been basically the same teams but in a different order. The first race was in LA (not lower Alabama) and the second was Miami. So these teams were traveling, and with names like Hi-Tec, Timex, Balance Bar, Fogdog, and many other corporate sponsored teams, we lowered our expectations a bit and felt that any thing short of our best but less than fun would be unacceptable.

At the pre-Race meeting they told us the distances and the order of the events. Run5.6, bike 6.6, kayak 2, and then bike 6.6 again. Seemed easy enough then they handed us the maps and compass’. The only time you could hear a pin drop with 1200 people. On each leg (event) you would be required to retrieve a card hidden in the woods and you with only the map, compass and a control point to go from. Steve and Janna looked at me and said "this is no problem Jim is an awesome navigator"… Okay, now I’m stressed!!!!

The next morning we get up and leave our temporary domicile at 4:45am and head to the race. Set up our transition, drop any extra unneeded body weight and headed for the starting line. There we were handed a sold brick which we were to carry for the entire run portion. The run was fun, fast, hilly and we got our first card.

We entered the transition hopped on our bike and rushed out to the course, just to be stopped and given our next task, remove the tubes from one of the bikes and switch them front to back… Okay? Done, headed back out on the course and enjoyed the technical, hilly, hot and oh yea WET bike course. No, it didn’t rain, we went through a small but deep creek. We found our card and headed back to home.

Upon returning to the transition area we went to the Kayaks, but not with out going over 4, 6 foot high horizontal beams, we were still having fun!!! Paddling this time was much better, only one 360 and that was because we had stopped to get a better look at where our card was, got it and got back on the water. When we crawled out of our kayaks, and had to carry them strait up hill through the woods and place them by the truck that was to take them to their next place of torture.

The next mystery event was, Trolleys, but these were made out of 200lbs rail road ties, we made it the 20’ and back with two of our teammates blind folded. On our way to the transition area we encountered another test 5 horizontal bars and we had to pass a bucket across, we missed our calling, should have been in the circus.

Out we went on the same bike course again but this time no tire changes. This time we looked forward to the water and at the finish we had to deliver our cards, map and compass and scale the 12’ wall. Well, we did it and dashed across the finish line before some sadistic event person could make us do something else.