The superhero is always a fun race, usually little less brutal than most elite races (except for the rock springs run slog). The weather was looking pretty good this year and we would not be challenged with heat (it stayed below 90 for most of the race). The big challenge of this race is that it is short (6 hours) meaning it is FAST! This year was no exception. We started with a short prelude on bike and foot. We also quickly learned that Wanda's bike, which had just been repaired, had not. It started skipping badly on the gears literally 10 minutes into the race. Here is where adventure racing is awesome. Dave Brault (Team Sun-tek) who was biking besides us, noticed the problem and offered to switch bikes. We did and Wanda ended up racing on Dave's bike the remainder of the race. Poor Dave ended up on the bad bike, but good gearing strategy made it "not too bad".
Prelude Times
| Team | Trek | Foot | Bike |
| Primal Instinct | 9 | 15 | 24 |
| Florda Xtreme 2 | 11 | 15 | 26 |
| Florida Xtreme 3 | 10 | 15 | 25 |
| Nature Calls | 10 | 14 | 24 |
The prelude times were all pretty close (as you can see)
We were 4th off the prelude and hit the water right with Florida Xtreme 3. As we headed out on the paddle - they went right up the thin channel for CP14, while we went left heading for CP12. Our strategy was to paddle to CP13 and then trek down the small channel to CP14 and back. This worked pretty well, but we still came back to the intersection of channels at the main TA quite a bit behind them - so it was probably slower. At this point we started hammering the paddle, catching up to Florida Xtreme 3 at CP7 and getting within a couple minutes of Nature Calls at the pull-out.
Paddle Times
Primal Instinct - 1:33
Nature Calls - 1:36
Florida Xtreme 2 - 1:40
Florida Xtreme 3 - 1:42
We came out of the water right with Florida Xtreme 3, though they were a little faster out of the TA. As we approached the Wekiva TA we saw Nature Calls a few minutes ahead of us on foot, and also saw FLX3 heading out on bikes. We decided to go foot first. I figured we could pick up the time on Nature Calls on the foot section. We did at the second CP and we pretty much worked together at that point. I did cut a lot of corners where they chose to stay more on the trails, but time-wise it was pretty much the same.
We did get through the foot section very quickly, and I was a bit slow switching to bike shoes for the next bike section. On this section we stayed pretty tight with Nature Calls, pulling away literally at the last CP as they took a little extra time there. We flew through the TA and sprinted to the finish. I saw Dave Shuman out on the course taking pictures so I knew the Primal had finished and Dave had enough time to double back to take pictures.
Bike/Trek Times
Primal Intinct - 1:45:02
Florida Xtreme 2 - 1:51:54
Nature Calls - 1:57:57
Florida Xtreme 3 - 1:57:48
Here is a track of the course using my tracker - no surprises, we were spot on with pretty much every CP.
Great race and big thanks to Pangea for a lot of fun on a Saturday afternoon!
