Sunday - Race Day

So, for anybody who read my recent posts, you will know that today was race day. Myself, Maria (Sweden), Andre (Germany), and Dre (United States) headed out at 6:30am bound for the national stadium. I'll be brief in recounting the events:

1. Sprint to the Puzzles - fun I lead the pack and was first to arrive at the puzzle station.
2. Puzzles - the first three were fairly simple, involving word searches, simples quizzes etc. The third one took us, and a few other teams, until the end of the allotted 10 minutes. It was a number sequence, and we missed the fact that the portion below was the clues and not another puzzle, as was the case in the previous puzzles.
3. Sprint to the bridge - once again good, with our team gaining a position.
4. Bridge Jump - The jump was about 20 feet, but it was very much a matter of not thinking about the jump. I know that about 15 feet from the water my eyes nearly bulged out of my head. Dre and Maria said it looked funny, like I was taking an extra step. However, ton's of fun.
5. Swim - the swim was fairly good, but the water was quite gross, and extremely salty.
6. Run to the cycling/kayak point - this was definitely the low point of the race for me. All we had for breakfast were sardine buns (yes with sardines in them). I felt a wee bit nauseous and the 2KM run was not that much fun.
7. Kayaking - it took me a few minutes to get into the rhythm of the kayaking and I was steered us in a strange looping pattern, but Maria and I made it to the shore just as Andre and Dre arrived with the bikes
8. Biking - this was good, but a bit too short. We arrived well in advance of the kayakers because they had a much longer route. I had the chance to drink some water and ring out my socks.
9. Run to the G-Max tower – this was good, another short sprint.
10. G-Max tower – upon our arrival sky opened up and began pouring. This was welcome relief from the hot sun, but it meant that the race was put on delay and we couldn’t climb the 200M ladder that was at the G-Max. It was too bad that we had to miss this part of the race because it looked like fun.
11. Run to Fort Canning Park – ok, I’m really not much of a runner. Time to stop with the running.
12. Fort Canning Park – here we had to fill in 5 different questions that were on answers on signboards throughout the park. We ran around like chickens without heads looking at every sign to try and find the answers to questions such as “the other place that has one too”. This task took a lot of time and was a challenge because we didn’t know the layout of Fort Canning and didn’t really know what exactly we were supposed to be doing.
13. Run to the Finish – more running. We crossed the finish line at 11:13am, just over 2 hours past our start time of 9:07am.
14. Climb – the final part of the event was a short climb that Andre did for our team. He climbed about 10M up one side of a wall, and abseiled down the other side.

Synopsis: I’m tired, but it was a great event. It was really well organized and a lot of fun. I wish there was less running and more biking, but that’s just my personal preference. I think we ended up finishing around 17th place, but Maria is convinced we should have been top 10 based on our time. The good part is that we were only about 20 minutes behind the top team, which I think is pretty good for a 2 hour race.

Anyhow, that’s all. I’m off to bed.

Goodnight!