This past weekend we went over to Redmond to hang out with our friends Troy and Ruth and their kids. A while back Troy invited me to run in a 5k called Heaven Can Wait. I thought that sounded cool so I registered online. A few days later Troy called back to see if I’d want to do a 5-hour adventure race the night before the 5k. I was a little apprehensive and said no at first. He explained more about it and it didn’t sound like you had to be a total superman to do the race, so I said I’d go for it. Eventually we had five guys on our team–four of whom I already knew and one guy who I’d met once before.

If you don’t want to read all of this, and just jump straight to the pictures, here you go!

So the big day came and we all (our family and Ron and Erinn’s family) drove to Redmond. Hung out with Troy and Ruth and the kids for a few hours, then Troy, Ron and I piled ourselves and our bikes in Troy’s truck with his friend Cory (one of our teammates) and headed to Bend to meet our fifth teammate for the race. We hung around the starting place (a pub) for a half an hour or so, until the race started at 7pm. Just prior to the race beginning we were given maps of the Bend area, with instructions not to open one of them until the start of the race. When told, we opened the mystery map and found that we had a few “checkpoints” in Bend that we had to find on foot. So we started running. We ran around Bend for a little over an hour, finding checkpoints and noting their codes on our maps. There were other teams to deal with along the way, so sometimes we had to be a bit stealthy when finding checkpoints.

Once we’d found all the “on foot” checkpoints we ran back to where our bikes were locked up, jumped on them and headed a few miles out of town to some local singletrack. Got there around dusk and spent another couple of hours riding around and never found a single checkpoint. That was alternately fun, frustrating and nerve racking. Fun because singletrack is fun to ride; frustrating because we backtracked a lot and never found a checkpoint; nerve racking because riding on singletrack in a forest at night by headlamp is….nerve racking. You’re always waiting to hit an unseen rock or hole or downed tree, etc. Plus, since I didn’t know the trails, I rode in back–in the dust. Did you know that dust reflects off of lights just like fog? I didn’t, but now I do! More nerve racking moments when you’re speeding downhill in the dark, faster than you can reasonably stop if you do happen to find a tree in your path, trying to see through dust-fog that has essentially blinded you!

Anyway, we got through that and decided that we should really try to hustle back to town and pick up the two mandatory checkpoints that were attended by people. After some navigational struggles we arrived at a mysterious pipeline that was about 10′ in diameter. Our instructions told us to put on our climbing harnesses (which we’d be running and riding around with all night) and climb the pipeline. We did it and eventually determined which way we were supposed to run on the top of the pipeline. Went about a quarter of a mile until we ran into a guy who was manning the high end of a zipline across a river. There were a half a dozen people in front of us, so we waited our turn then clipped in and zipped across the river in the pitch black. On the other side we started running back to our bikes so that we could hop on them and get back to the pub in time for the midnight end of race deadline.

We were already disqualified from the race, since we didn’t have time to hit the second mandatory checkpoint (which consisted of getting naked and traversing a bridge over the river. The naked part was so you didn’t drown if you went into the river with shoes/clothes/pack on. Sorry to have missed that. NOT.

Anyway, we were riding back to the pub and were only about 10 minutes away when one of our teammates rode off the sidewalk into a drainage ditch! Pat got scraped up pretty bad, but shook it off and we made it back in time. Disqualified due to missing the second mandatory, but still felt victorious!

Got home and in bed by 1am. Woke up at 6:45 when Asher came crashing in on my sleep. Ate a little breakfast then headed out to the 5k which began at 9am. Ran a really slow race since my legs weren’t exactly recovered from the previous night’s efforts–ran about a 30 minute 5k, which included walking a couple of sections. Lungs and heart felt great, but my legs were just beat.

Got back to Troy’s house, ate lunch, packed up and drove the 3 hours home. Actually, Amy drove the last half hour because I was just too tired to keep driving. I spent the rest of the day drinking fluids and not peeing–I was so dehydrated that I needed all the water I could get (and that was after drinking 2 full liters of water in my backpack during the adventure race). All in all, a fun weekend!