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Summary from the Flagstaff Amazing Race

April 9th, 2007 by Kenric

I wanted to wait until Wednesday to post about last Saturday’s Flagstaff Amazing Race because we don’t know the official results yet. They are supposed to be posted online on Wednesday.

This was the first race of this type that the Flagstaff Athletic Club ran.  The race setup was fairly simple.  You get a race passport which tells you addresses and locations that you have to visit.  You can only run, bike or take the bus.  The bus only came every 30 minutes, so this was pretty much a biking race.

Once you get to the location, you have to complete a task to get your passport stamped.  For each location that you do not visit you get a 45 minutes penalty.  Your time clock stops when you return to the starting point.

It was apparent that being from Phoenix was a huge disadvantage.  We did not know any of the streets or clues to locations.  From the start we were immediately behind.  We spent some time looking at the map and planning a course of action.  Most of the locals just took off.

I don’t want to go into detail about the whole race.  That would make this post huge.  Although, this race is nowhere near the caliber of the one on CBS TV, the same concepts apply to a much smaller scale.  It’s one of those things that when you look back, you wonder what you were thinking at the time.  It’s like yelling at the screen watching those people on TV make dumb mistakes, and then you’re the people on TV doing the same thing.

For example, we totally missed a location/checkpoint.  How?  It’s because on the folded passport they listed the locations on the right side numbering 1 through 7.  The sneaky bastards stuck a location on the left side within the instructional text which were the race rules that they had just gone over.  I’m sure most people ignored that side because it read verbatim to the director’s speech 3 minutes prior.  We were told to read the whole passport.  Only 9 of the 43 teams caught it.  Lesson learned, take time and read everything, even if you think you know everything!

We weren’t thinking!  One task was a 3.5 mile run with some memorization about a statue!  Well, we don’t run well.  We finished in just under an hour.  We could have skipped the task and incurred only a 45 minutes penalty.  If we were thinking correctly, we should have just skipped it after they told us how far it was! Lesson learned, think before you do!

We lost alot of time just looking one step ahead.  We would be on Main street and know that we had to make a left on Colby St.  Once we made the left, we’ve pull out the map and look again for the next street to turn on.  Even the times that we tried to remember 2-3 streets ahead of time, we were never sure and had to stop and check the map again.  Lesson learned, make a plan and make an effort to remember it!

One example of this were these two girls that seemed to be really fast.  Then caught up to us on the 3.5 mile run and we had a chat about the next location.  We looked on the maps and all agreed on a route to take.  Then they took off on their bikes.  I mean they were gone.  We couldn’t even see them further up the road.  So it was really odd to see them come up from behind us later on that same route!  Where did they go?  As they passed us, me being Mr. Niceguy said “You’re going the wrong way.”  I showed them the correct directions and they were off again!  If it was for a million dollars, I would have let them keep on pedaling.  They ended up finishing just ahead of us, but they had missed a location so they incurred a 45 minute penalty.  So we ended up beating them.

I’m pretty sure we placed at the back end of the race.  I know we weren’t last.  I guess we’ll find out on Wednesday.  The race covered about 15 miles on bike and 4 miles on foot and took about 4 hours.  I’ll update this post when the results are available.

The picture above is the road going to the Lowell Observatory which was one of the locations that we had to visit.

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