The Healthy Bride

The Street Scramble story is a little funny.  I didn’t realize that the December Streeet Scramble is the only one that is “foot only”.   They talk a lot about wheeled modes of transportation in general, but apparently, this is not the case for the December race. 

I discovered this minor detail when Eric Bone (race director) sent out an email to the adventure race community inviting them to join the fun.  I called Eric to clarify, and sure enough this race is foot only.  He offered (very kindly) to tear up my check if this was going to be a problem, but I told him I would figure something out.  The deal is that Scott cannot run.  He has no cartiledge in his knees, so biking was the only option for us to race together as a team.  (Yes, I know walking is an option….but it’s not an option for me, in a race, where I know people……I am just too competitive).

So, kindly, Carol Treat offered to join me in the race.  We live near each other and so took the bus down to the market on Saturday morning (today) to start.  We had to check in first, which we did after standing in a pretty long line.  We made the necessary changes to our category from co-ed to team-of-2-female.  We were assigned team #126. 

At 9:30ish (I think it was 9:40am) they handed us our maps

and we had 1/2 hour to plot our strategy.  We wrote down our route, including the streets (it’s much easier to be detailed before you get started).  We didn’t even think to add up points, and didn’t consider that we would be able to hit all 35(?) checkpoints in two hours, so we chose a good route and felt like we would do well.  The Map is accompanied by a sheet that has a clue for each check-point and then a question we had to answer to prove we were there.  All of the answers were multiple choice – which certainly helped in a few cases.

The race started at 10:10am and everyone by then was outside the Market Theather along the gum wall.  The closest checkpoint was straight up Pike, and may of us started out going the same way. 

It was cool that there were so many different teams.  Parents with kids, 20-somethings, dads with a child in a stroller, two older guys, and individuals.  It is definitely a race anyone can do.

We continued to meander through downtown, going up and down the hills (it was a terrific workout).  The weather was calling for snow, and it was raining earlier in the morning.  Somehow, the weather stayed nice the entire time we were out. 

 

We went for one of the furthest-out check points up on Capital Hill, and then swung down to Westlake, the Seattle Center.  Then we tagged a couple more points in Belltown.  Then we had to decide if we could get two more in the last 2 minutes we had left.  I thought for sure we could….and sure enough….we did! 

We handed in our score sheet that proved where we had been with 20 seconds to spare.  If you come in late, they deduct 10 points per minute.

Our total “unofficial” score was 800 (we counted 810) and it was good enough to win us a 1st Place Blue Ribbon for the Women’s-Only category. 

It was a great, great morning and we had much fun!  Thanks Carol for being a great team mate!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Events and Races. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.