(note burrs all over pants)My friend and I just did the Peak-2-Peak Enduro 10K in preparation for the 25 - 27 K Raid the Hammer orienteering race in two weeks.
We did it because we're runners, not navigators.
And the funny thing is that we didn't have trouble with the running, only the actual orienteering. Strange, eh?
We like to challenge ourselves.
And you know, it really puts things into perspective.
After the race today, after spending three and a half hours (yes, that's correct) running in the mud and a constant cold rain, it felt unimaginably good just to lie on my bed. I hadn't quite appreciated before the level of softness and coziness that is my bed.
And just to be in a warm robe drinking hot chocolate after a hot shower; it was absolutely wonderful. See? It makes you appreciate things.
We naively thought it wouldn't take us that long to run 10K because we've done it in pretty short times running. But, of course we weren't running. We were trying to find the checkpoints!
You get a map with numbered checkpoints and you have to do them in order. If you don't, you get disqualified. Did I mention that we got disqualified?
There were 16 checkpoints. We did great for the first 7. Especially because neither of us is known for a good sense of direction. Okay, speaking for myself, ANY sense of direction. (Yes, I can hear you saying that and yet, we signed up for an orienteering race. I know. I like to think 'hard-core' versus 'stupid'. Look, it's good to learn new things, okay?)
Checkpoint 8 really threw us for a loop. All the other checkpoints had an orange streamer on a branch overhead with the checkpoint below. We found a hilltop where we thought 8 was, and we found a streamer. So far, so good. But no checkpoint! We kept looking around and around, thinking it must be near.
The race organizer told us later that he had put the streamer there, thinking that was the right hilltop, and then when he realized it was the next hilltop, he just kept going and didn't retrieve the streamer.
Anyway, eventually we ran into another team and they said the course was closed at 1:00 p.m. and it was almost 1:00 p.m.
We decided we were done anyway, since we couldn't find 8, so we thought we'd just do a few more and then call it a day.
Did I mention we were completely soaked through and freezing at this point?
We laughed quite a lot on the course despite the bad weather. At one point we knew we had to cross a creek. I crossed a little stream and then yelled, "Okay, we just crossed the creek! It wasn't as big as I thought, I - (major soaker)...."Correction: we are now IN the creek! We are IN the creek!"
The other funny part was that we had to go through an electrified fence on a farmer's property (I'm sure that was completely kosher). A man we met up with assured us that if we went through the two green wires we would be fine. This was a 'I can't believe I am doing this and yet here I go' moment. Then we joked about how we were like Catherine Zeta-Jones in that movie where she evades the red laser beams. We definitely looked the part, I can tell you, with us covered in mud, burrs and thorns, completely soaking wet. Pretty sexy.
We did do lots of bushwhacking. And I mean, tangled up with thorns, unable to move bushwhacking. I mean having to crouch down just to get through places. And hanging on to trees to climb up places. I'm talking having to take pieces of branches out of my hair, and having my legs covered in thorn scratches (through my running pants!).
Well, there are three things I know now. 1) we are in major trouble for the Raid the Hammer. 2) It was fun! 3) I need to learn to read a map better, but hey - I'd do it again!
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