adventure girl challenge

things have been busy lately. don’t get me wrong… there are still lots of ideas and projects running through my head, but lately there has been very little time for execution. the very thin book sitting by my bed is getting dangerously close to becoming overdue, everything is in serious need of a good cleaning, and the holidays are fast approaching… i can’t seem to find the pause button. can someone please tell me where it is? =)

one of the more interesting things that i’ve gotten myself into in the past few months is the adventure girl challenge. it’s a triathlon of sorts… a run, bike, and kayak race that includes puzzles in between each leg of the race. there was absolutely NO swimming involved. yippie! those of you who know me, know that i am hydrophobic. don’t get me wrong… i like sitting by the water, looking at the water, being on top of the water… I just don’t like being IN the water. i saw this as my chance to participate in a multi event race without running the risk of drowning.

as usual there was little to no training leading up to the event. i think my compadres and I have adapted a kind of “of-course-we-can-do-this-without-training” kind of attitude which inevitably comes back to bite us in the rear end. anyway… once we were there we had a lot of fun. the bike portion of the race was uphill the ENTIRE way. or so it seemed to me… ;-) but the run and kayak portion were quite manageable. we escaped with just a couple of cuts and bruises and finished sort of in the middle of the pack.

we couldn’t have asked for better weather.
lake del valle, livermore… we’re thinking that we’ll have to go back and do some camping at this spot…


the bike pen. i learned that race etiquette is to turn your bike upside-down so it takes up less room in the staging area.


puzzle number three. you must traverse the zigzags while holding one end of the pvc pipe. no changing hands and no stepping off of the zigzag. it’s actually harder than it looks.