This was going to be a night race with Team Florida Xtreme 2 (Bruce, Jim, and Wanda). Team FLX 1 (Mark, Jeff, Marghi, and Erik) are 3 of the 4 I will be racing with in Idaho. I was a bit tired starting the race, I had been packing all day (we are moving to Deland) and also had my wife in the hospital because she had been bitten by one of our cats breaking up a fight (Cat bites require IV administered antibiotics to prevent infection). I was even running late and the team called me to make sure I was still on my way (and had not gotten lost).
The race started with a 6 mile out and back bike ride to a CP with one water crossing. We blew through it in 37 minutes (5 minutes behind the leader) and headed out into the water for the paddle. Even though we never had any issues on the water - we still never got into our paddle rhythm and the choppy water was tough on Bruce and Jim steering the boats. The choppy water meant no luminescence (no big deal to me I paddle in these waters at night a lot) - but I did see the biggest mullet run I've ever seen - thousands of fish jumping out of the water at the same time. The paddle took us 2 hrs 22 minutes a bit slower than what I had wanted.
Once we got off the water it was back to the TA for and then to the Parrish TA where we chose to trek first. This was uneventful except for one strategic error. At CP12 - located on a fenceline along I-95 I decided to bushwhack short of the control point as we approached. I had figured there would be at least a trail along the fence - there wasn't. This was a pretty nasty bushwhack and forced us back out to the main trail. The second attack we used the faint trail and went right to it. We new we had lost 20+ minutes on the bad attempt (oh well). We ran the rest of the course at an easy pace and had no navigation issues with the other controls - though we did take an "odd" route to CP16.
On the bike we decided to go reverse order which was working well for us. We had no issues with CP25 and CP24. We had a little trouble finding the trail to CP23 and worked with Zombie Cranks to find it. We got to the attack point north of the CP where the trails intersected and spent a large amount of time searching. I decided to ride the north trail from there to ensure we were in the correct location. We were and rode back passing Zombie Cranks who had found it and told us our attack point was good. We went back to the open field attack point where 5-6 teams were searching. This time Bruce found the parallel trail (he had found it the first time we attacked too - but I had not told him the importance of the trail for the navigation). This second time after seeing the trail we took 5 minutes and narrowed in on the control quickly. I also shouted for the other teams searching as they had been out there long enough.
For the third time of the evening we rode the north trail from CP23 to CP22 (the most challenging of the trails we rode all night). CP21, CP20, CP19 all proved quite easy - but we ended up blowing by CP18 as we were rushing because we were running out of time. We checked in at Parrish TA and flew back to the Main TA where we got our bearings for CP26 and CP27. These were two bearing controls, which were south of the road in the woods.
Working with Nature Calls we quickly found CP26. This would have been a lot easier if I had not left the control descriptions with my bike (they were on the passport sheet). We did not have enough time to find CP27. We had gotten a bit separated in our search and it took us a few minutes to regroup and get out of the woods - unfortunately we did not have a few minutes and went 1 minute over time costing us the one point we had gained in doing the bearing course in the first place.
The bike and trek course we took is below.
View Luminescent Bike/Run in a larger map
Jim even made a spreadsheet to compare split times of the top teams
FLX2 FLX1 Primal JAX Zombie Nature
BIKE1 0:37:00 0:32:00 0:34:00 0:37:00 0:41:00 0:33:00
BOAT 2:22:00 2:05:00 2:04:00 2:22:00 1:39:00 2:19:00
BIKE2 0:10:00 0:11:00 0:10:00 0:15:00 0:18:00 0:13:00
FOOT 1:50:00 1:41:00 1:38:00 1:44:00 2:16:00 1:38:00
BIKE3 2:38:00 1:38:00 2:08:00 2:24:00 2:06:00 2:47:00
BIKE4 0:07:00 0:08:00 0:10:00 0:09:00 0:08:00 0:08:00
BRNG 0:17:20 0:16:58 0:28:22 0:11:19 0:27:27 0:20:58
8:01:20 6:31:58 7:12:22 7:42:19 7:35:27 7:58:58
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