Colorado

Here I am a few days later, in Colorado. I had just spent a few days in Rapid City with my parents letting my infected heels get better. Luckily they turned out alright. They sure were pussing, and I couldn't wear shoes for a while, but they did heal. I'm heading to Ft. Collins to meet up with Matt Buechler so we can have a go with an adventure race in Breckenridge. We had always talked about doing one, but we finally got the cahones to take a stab at one. Luckily it turned out to be a good story.
Since Matt was working, it was my job to get up to Breckenridge, scope out the area and get a campsite. Well, I made my way up Thursday and low and behold, in classic Opi form, it's raining. I ended up sleeping in my car at the campsite because the ground was so wet and basically a mini river. It ended up raining all through Thursday night and into Friday. As it turned out I didn't even need to get the campsite because Matt and I both ended up in a hotel because it was so soggy around the area and we didn't want to sleep in it.
Friday night we get our first map of the race and they give us points to find on the map and do our first stage of orienteering: trying to figure out where we should theoretically be. We spend the rest of Friday night getting our gear together and going through the logistics of the course. We were doing a 12 hour course, which all in all was pretty true to it's time. You can imagine how good we felt at the end of the race. Sure it was nice to be done, but after ten hours of constant movement, one is bound to get a little tired.
Saturday morning we wake up, have a little breakfast and get all of our meals together for the rest of the day. Once we step outside, we both notice the one thing we'd rather not have: rain and fog. We're up at about 10,000 feet, so the clouds really sock in the area. Initially when we get to the course, the rain lets up and the sun actually comes out for the first section of the race, but the rain will start up later in the day...
The first leg of the race is a kayaking section around Lake Dillon. It's pretty big with many nooks and crannies. Initially Matt and I sit in the kayak with the main field, and then.... we start going all over the place! We can't steer this thing for the life of us! We're running into the other teams all over the place and before you know it we're way behind everyone. Finally after we had run into about three other teams we got our shit together and actually starting going in a straight line. So, right from the get go we're already coming up from behind. As we continue on, we find that the checkpoints are pretty hard to find and at one point when Matt jumps out to get the checkpoint, he jumps back into the kayak and we almost tip over! To which the team of two women behind us say "we'll save you!!" After that point we knew we were going to win... or something. After the kayak section we get to the orienteering/trail running section and when it's all said and done, we received a lot of penalties. Basically we missed some checkpoints, ran out of time and my knee injury came back. Really quite eventful. I'm sure everyone can imagine looking for a little box in a vast amount of woods. We felt like a couple of geniuses because we were so close so many times to these things without actually seeing them. The ego was slowly deflating all day...
Finally we made it to the mountain biking section. By this point we had been on the move for about six hours, but we were heading into our best section. We were a wee bit tired at this point and had a huge uphill biking section to contend with, but spirits were still good even with our ego deflating. A little ways into the mountain biking section it started to rain again. Mind you this section is pretty rocky and has tons of tree roots on the trail. Essentially we were getting rocked by the wet rock and the mud. About halfway through the mountain biking section full on exhaustion was setting in. Matt was about spent, I was getting tired, and the rain wasn't helping anybody out. At one point my brakes were about done because the mud was so thick and it was making my brakes useless. Do keep in mind that we will be going back down all of that uphill. At one uphill section Matt and I couldn't even pedal anymore because our tires were filled with mud. We ended up walking the bikes for a little while until the mud wasn't as thick and we could actually pedal again. After this section it was the long downhill to the glorious finish line!
While we made the finish line and felt really good about ourselves, we didn't do very well. Mind you it was our first race and all, but we actually landed.......... LAST! Yep, we got dead last in our group. We weren't last overall, just last in our racing group. As it ended up we were racing against sponsored teams. Almost half of the teams there were sponsored, and us being the rookies.
Overall the race went well. We didn't get disqualified, no bad injuries, and we weren't the last ones on the course. Maybe next time we'll notch it up to second to last. I am setting the bar pretty high, but I think we can do it.