Superhero Adventure Race 2014

The Superhero this year was held in my home town at Blue Springs State Park, and Junos and I were looking forward to having a home town advantage of racing in a park where we at least knew most of the trails. Courtney was planning on racing with us, but overslept so we were reduced to a 2 person male team.
Reference http://naturecallsar.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-superhero-6-hr-ar-2014.html
The race started with a foot prolog with 4 two control sets that required us to collect 3 sets to complete (that would be six controls).

A1 - A2
B1- B2
C1 - C2
D1 - D2

I quickly figured out an optimal route based on the bearings and distances given in the instructions and we were off. The route I chose took us to control D2 which was unfortunately misplaced. We bailed after about 8 minutes of looking for D2 and went for the C controls and ended up finishing in 21 minutes (where the fastest team Enginerds finished in about 12 minutes).

From there it was on to the paddle. I was able to calculate that Enginerds who  could see in the distance had about an 8 minute lead and Team Jax was about in the water with us at about the same time. We had no trouble with any of the paddle controls, and were able to whittle the lead of Enginerds to about 4 minutes as we exited the boats on Hontoon Island for the foot section. (boat time 53 minutes)

It was now getting pretty hot, but we were able to keep a decent running pace as we got CP4, CP10, and CP9 and headed for the first control to give us a challenge - CP6. You can see from my track, we actually all (3 teams) went right by it multiple times before spotting it. Manny from Nature Calls I think was the first one to spot it.

 That time cost us as we ended up picking up a penalty returning to the TA at Hontoon after the 11:45 deadline  (by 2 minutes) and got 1 penalty point for it. Well that and the fact that I was facing heat exhaustion and already had started in cold sweats towards the end of the run. However a quick cool-off in the St. Johns River had my core temp down and I was able to keep it down by paddling easier on the paddle back to Blue Springs (Run 1:35, Paddle 1:02) Team Enginerds had attempted a 2 point control that would add 45 minutes to their paddle, so we arrived back at Blue Springs nearly tied with Team Jax and with FL Xtreme close behind us.

The next leg was the bike leg and we were pretty good with this area. Even with knowledge of teh single track we still missed one control as we simply did not see it as it was blocked by a team we were passing. This had us completing the Orange trail of the bike leg twice. What took even more time than that was a bad attack on CP20 (after a good attack on CP19) - as shown

We were out there with Team Jax, and we headed down a trail we knew to the paved trail an back into the TA.



At this point we had 25 minutes to the do the tube section, which was enough time to get 3 of 4 controls. We knew it was close with Enginerds - in the end we looked like we had won, but after recalculation and correction, Enginerds edged us due to our penalty point.

Still the race was quite awesome and hope to add more pictures and details to this blog in the next few days.

Note errors - D2 missing (13 min); CP6 looking for CP (17 min), CP20 bad attack (13 min) - total 43 min.