This year's Father's Day SCAR Adventure Race took place in the Kings Landing/Kelly Park area around Rock Springs. It was a great venue which provided some great trekking, paddling and biking...
The Trek
The race started at 0745. There were four legs to complete (bike, run, paddle, tubing) and teams had the choice to do them in any order they wanted. This was really nice. So Jason and I decided to trek first and get that out of the way.
The CPs were plotted on the orienteering map, but there were no clues as to their location. Also, the punch card did not have the usual CP numbers printed on it so that one could cross reference and make sure they were at the correct control. Plus there were several control flags for the other races placed close to some of the Elite controls. You had to know exactly where you were, and be confident about it. Otherwise, you could end up punching the wrong control. In other words, this was true orienteering, and Jason and I loved it!
We found all controls without too much trouble, except for CP6. CP6 was plotted on one side of the trail, but was actually placed (as we found out much later) on the other side of the trail. When we arrived at the plotted location for CP6, which was a very deep depression, Jason went down into the depression while I ran around the depression looking for the control. We could not find it. We then started looking around the area at some of the other depressions. But after consulting the map several times, we knew without a doubt that we were at the correct place and that the control was simply not there. So after about 15 minutes of looking, we made a decision to go on without punching this control.
This map show my GPS track while looking for CP6 (coming in and exiting from below):
We finished the trekking section in about 49 minutes and quickly left the Main TA ready to paddle.
Here's our entire trek:
The Paddle
We decided to do the paddle leg as our second leg. So picked up our paddles and headed to the Boat TA.
The paddling leg was great. There were no other boats in the water (except for a couple of park visitors), so Jason and I had the river to ourselves. The CPs were all right along the river and very easy to find. It only took us about 40 minutes to get all the CPs and get back to the Boat TA.
The Tubing Section
After returning to the oat TA we decided to head off on the tubing section of the race. So we grabbed a couple of inner tubes and ran down to the put in spot (CP24).
This was a great section. The water felt awesome and it was pretty relaxing. The CPs in this section were once again right along the river, so very easy to find.
Every race should have a section like this. :)
We finished the tubing section in about 48 minutes and headed off on our last leg of the race.
The Bike (01)
The bike section was basically along the same trails we had already trekked. And thanks to all the rain we've been getting lately, the usually nasty soft sand was nice and packed, which made for some great and fast riding.
Once again Jason's navigation was 100% spot on, and we were able to quickly find every CP without any issues.
The Finish?
We came into the Main TA at 1030, having just finished the 6-hour race in 2 hours and 45 minutes. We talked to Greg and told him to maybe add another section in. We suggested he make us go back out on the bike, but this time pick up the points we had picked up on the first trekking section. Since it was just a few minutes to the start of the Sports race, he asked us to wait and he'd get back to us.
The Bike 02
At 1055 he gave us the go ahead to go pick up the trekking points on our bike. At the same time the second place team (Doc-n-Neers) finished the race and Greg told them the same thing. So off we went, both teams leaving only a few minutes apart to do one more bike section.
Since we had been to the points before, navigation was very easy. So it was just a matter of riding well. This time we did find CP6 (as we had been told by the volunteers where it was actually located).
Throughout this section we kept running into team Doc-n-Neers who were right on our tail. But we managed to hold them off and finish the race ahead of them.
The Finish?
This time the race was actually over. We had officially won with a time of 3:25:37. But since it was still fairly early and still over two hours until the awards ceremony, Jason and I decided to go back out on foot. This time we went to find all the bike points, but on foot. When we finished that, we crossed over to Kelly Park and went down to watch the rest of the racers start the tubing section.
All in all we had a great and fun race.
Race video:
See you guys at the Luminescent and Nocturnal!
