Chrismas in Christmas

I had the fun of doing the Christmas in Christmas Adventure Race in Tossohatchee Wildlife Management Area this Sunday. It is always a lot of fun to race with Erik and Jeanette as Team Mojitas on Monday. I wore my tracker during the race so you can see an bit of an embedded play of what we did. Here is a little narrative


http://www.flickr.com//photos/pangeaadventureracing/sets/72157632281724820/show/

(link to slideshow)

Bike 

 We drew the marble for the bike leg first. I originally did not want this - the last few races I have been the first through the trek and bike legs and have had my share of eating spiders. Sure enough this was the same for the first part of this race, first one through - plenty of spiders. We did however move very fast (45 minutes for leg - fastest of all teams) and later in the day the route got "chewed up" by bikes slowing it down. Nothing really to report - navigation was easy and we were dead on every control.



Trek

This was the leg where teams could really get lost. We went first to CP1 and then just went bearing and distance to all the other controls. From CP6 to CP4 brambles forced us a bit too far east - but I used the open area to the west to correct. We nearly completely blew CP5, Looking at the track below, we were heading nearly due south (way off our bearing). We came out at the open area that I was planning on using as a back-stop. I used the "shape" of the tree line to determine we were south of the control, and I corrected us north and back to the marsh where it was located. That was an 11 minute mistake - doh! On the way back north we completely missed the east-west road to CP3 and ended up running the yellow trail instead - no real time loss (maybe 1 minute). Straight trail jog back in and then to boats.

Paddle

The paddle was really a bike leg with a short paddle thrown in. As we headed out we realized Jeanette had forgotten her bike helmet - she was wearing a cap and it is a pretty easy mistake to make. We went back, got the helmet and restarted. The paddle was easy and uneventful and Jeanette navigated this section nicely.-The bike helmet cost us 5 more minutes .



In the end Jeanette felt bad about the time lost to the bike helmet - but my mistake on the bearing on CP5 cost us twice as much time as that did. We raced our race and we raced it well and finished well under 3 hours (2:55) for a podium finish.