Just what I needed...

I had, er, forgotten that I had promised Lulu I would race the Women's Race with her today. I was almost off the hook, since she thought the race had passed when I was in Dallas. But for some reason, I reminded her it was this weekend, and we signed up.

First let me say, I love Lulu. I really really do. And yet, she had it in her mind that we needed to win this thing. 300 teams, racing through trails, doing crazy obstacles, paddling through a lake, all while carrying a rubber chicken. Sound fun? Hell yeah. Sound like something that we will beat out at least 500 other people at? Well...
We got to the site pretty early, since neither of us bothered to look up the start time. We set up our toobs (thanks Ostrich) in transition and wandered around until near race-start. With 30 minutes to go, we did a little run warmup - which about 7 other teams then copied us at. We had scoped out the other teams, and it seemed like we had some serious competition. Lulu's nerves started up; I, on the other hand, just wanted to go to sleep.

The race starts with a mystery event - after doing a walk for the cancer survivors, we stood around waiting to hear music that would tell us where to go. Our strategy was to position ourselves near the direction we expected the music to come from. Suddenly, we heard "The Eyes of Texas" and we raced through the park to grab our rubber chicken. We had to get ahead of everyone else, otherwise we'd be caught in the bottleneck of completing events and getting through the trail. By the time we'd finished events in one side of the park (2 math questions & passing a burrito from partner to partner with no arms) - we were in 2nd place. We hustled up the trail and then passed the lead team while doing a three legged race. After more running (and far too many hills for my liking), we finally made it back to transition.

We were the first team in the water, lifejackets on and toobs in tow. The goal was to paddle backwards while sitting in our toobs. Unfortunately, I have much shorter (and weaker, apparently) arms than Lulu and did not fair well at this. I managed to lose our lead to a mother/daughter team in an inflatable kayak. Luckily Lulu finished and came back to push me. I admittedly was exhausted at this point, and the fact that we had lost our lead (thanks to me) and still had the third part of the race left was not that motivating.

But I knew Lulu wanted to win. Hell, I didn't want a kid to beat me either, even if she was a badass kid. So I regrouped, and we ran back through transition on to the next few obstacles. First we had to blow up a balloon, carry it between our chests over these inflatable tubes, then pop it. This was easy, and the balloon popped as soon as we let go. Next we had to play croquet with a ball and our rubber chickens. We did great at this and took the lead again. Then we played frolf, but with the chicken versus a disc. By now, we were gaining time but I was getting tired. I honestly haven't been running (much less sprinting) in weeks. Lulu, thank god, took the lead and conquered the next obstacle by successfully throwing our chicken through a hole. After more (uphill) running, we had to handcuff ourselves together and run more. Then we had to carry a ball a short distance in between 2 spoons, not using our fingers.

At this point, we realized that there was a "lead vehicle" (i.e. a guy on a dirt bike) who was OUR lead. Never been in that situation before! We kept running on the trail, and had to run past the group who hadn't completed the first part of the race yet. Two girls were right on my heels, which really pissed me off, until I realized that they hadn't even done the water segment yet. Lulu was ever encouraging, telling me to suck it up, not leave anything out there, and that the second place team was right on our toes. (They weren't, by the way.)

We made it back towards the finish area, and everyone yelled, "here come the leaders." (Again, never had that before!) Unfortunately, one of the volunteers sent Lulu in the wrong direction so she ran to the end of transition before realizing I wasn't behind her. We met up at the final obstacle course and crawled, shimmied, climbed, ducked and crawled again towards the finish. We grabbed hand, ran through the finish, and low & behold - we won!

HELL YEAH!!!! We cheered for the next few teams for a bit, got some water, and headed back to the car to assess the damage. You can see from our clothes below - this was not exactly a clean race!
We ended up with a cool award (below), and each of us got a Nike watch. (And, for some really strange reason, we each got tubes of antiseptic. Not sure what that was about.)
I have obviously been really burned out lately, but this was just what I needed. A short, but extremely fun race that couldn't have gone better. I must say that Lulu & I make a fabulous adventure racing team. We will definitely be back to defend next year. Perhaps I will even train this time!