Untamed NE - leg 8 (last one!)

[Photos courtesy of John Beard, Dmitri Kaganovich, and Andreas Strand]

If you have been keeping track in the previous Untamed posts (which would be impressive!), you'll see that I skipped leg 7.  Our whole team did, actually, because we were short-coursed around a monster lake paddle.  We were looking forward to the nav in that section, but I'm not sure we (or at least I) happened to be overly upset that we missed the paddling part.

We left the final TA in the dark of night, on foot, lugging all the packraft gear again.  The Danish team left just ahead of us, but they stopped at the main road to see what we would do.  It seemed odd at the time, but we knew where we were going so we continued on foot down the road to locate the entrance to the trail system.  It was the same place we had biked out of during leg 2, and it was dark then too so it should look about the same.

The Danes didn't follow.  We had a bit of nav to focus on until we got to the right dirt road.  Once we were satisfied about going the right way I took a look at the map in a more "overhead" view to see what the other team might be up to.  Hmm, do you suppose they decided to packraft the upper part of the Dead River?  We were slightly incredulous about this at first, but it had to be the reason they were carrying their paddles all assembled and wearing extra clothing.

Looking closer at the map, we were still completely happy with our choice.  The river was less direct, and when we got a view of it later from the trail it didn't appear to be moving at all.  The dam was scheduled to be opened at some point in the morning but no one could tell us what time that would be.  In the meantime, we're pretty sure we would never opt for paddling the little boats when we could trek an easy flat trail next to the river instead.  Unless we had major foot problems or there was a good current to float on.  One that wasn't scary (spoiler alert).

So we went for a pleasant morning walk.  Eventually the sky lightened, waking up the danged mosquitoes.  We pulled out the bug spray to wet ourselves down with it - yay!  The trail was nice and packed down from all the bikes passing through the field a couple days earlier.  All in all, a pleasant morning.

We were on a bridge made of wooden slats, when Druce somehow dropped his shades through a gap between the boards.  He had been having issues with losing things at a rate of approximately one item per day (the magnet from his bike odometer was missing, one of his lights got soaked and shorted the battery).  Understandably, he had had enough of that!  He jumped down to look for it, and after some searching he located it in the one puddle below the bridge.  Strange luck.  At least he found it, no more losing stuff!

The trail led to the site of the ropes from day 1, and it was fun to see it in the daylight.  We traveled around the little trails by the "Try to Sleep Beach" and the top of the rappel.  Very cool.

Somewhere in here Dima told us a story about a porta-potty and Russian newspapers, which was funny in itself, but then Val asked what the modern equivalent would be, and we got started laughing about iPads, iPod Touch, I can't remember what all else, but in our sleep-deprived state we thought it was extremely hilarious.  Giggle fits all around, and when Val and Druce started alternately making each other laugh, I completely lost it.  We had to cross a gate, and I dropped to the ground to slide under but I was laughing so hard I couldn't move.  Dima apparently captured some of this insanity on his GoPro, so we might get to see it eventually.  On the other hand, I'm sure it was WAY funnier in the moment than it could ever appear later.  You'll just have to stay up for 3 days straight first to really appreciate it.

Another happy moment when we discovered a small trail leading through the woods up the hill to the hut (which was actually the "lodge" we had been searching for in leg 2, the same building that we had passed right before figuring out how to get to the ropes site).  We didn't have to hike the roads around to it, awesome!  And we had previously skipped biking a rather gnarly little section of trail, also awesome!

Up to the top, we found a couple nice volunteers at CP34 at the hut.  We couldn't go inside this one or use the amazing bathrooms, but we sure had been treated royally well at the previous huts, so the only minor bother was the swarm of mosquitoes also manning the hut.  We hung out and plotting our remaining checkpoints, chatting with the guys.  They had not seen the Danish team yet, so at least we didn't lose any time by trekking instead of packrafting that section.

To get to the finish line, "all" we had to do was find several checkpoints along the Dead River and then finish up with a bit of trekking on the way to the finish line at The Forks on the Kennebec River.  The lead team had not reached the finish when these volunteers had called down at 2 a.m., but it looks from the leaderboard that they just missed catching them there less than an hour later.

Time to get down to the river.  We thanked the nice volunteers and headed down to find a good put-in spot.  Because the first couple CP's were on the opposite bank, we had no obvious choice but to attempt packrafting several miles.  In fact, we were looking forward to sitting in the boats in some moving water for a while.  Well, I think 3 out of 4 teammates were looking forward to it.

I'm going to interrupt this race report with an injection of personal opinion.  This race was extremely well designed, fun and interesting, with only minor nav quibbles but mostly complete raving.  So why, at the very last leg, were teams required to ride little packraft boats down some serious whitewater?  We were not (at least I was not) under the impression before arriving in Maine that there would be anything above a bit of class 2 water.  And I'm very far from being an expert, maybe class 2 looks a lot bigger up close.  We were not told that we should bring high quality packrafts, and there was no suggestion that spray skirts might come in handy (that would have been a big clue!).

The course designers could have rewarded teams that brought the best gear and knew what they were doing in whitewater, without overly penalizing teams like us who tried to get away with "light and cheap" and had no experience with this, simply by putting the checkpoints on the trail-side of the river instead of on the opposite bank.  Hiking down the hill on over 23 km of slow up and down trail vs. getting to ride the waves seems like it would be penalty enough.  At least that's my opinion.

As it was, I feel like this section was a safety risk.  I heard stories of people bouncing off rocks and getting caught in underwater holes.  Multiple teams lost various pieces of gear.  Throw bags were on the required gear list for paddling (on a lake) but not for packrafting - I saw one team had figured out that they should carry them here, but our team did not think to do so.  Heck, we were 3+ days into a race with minimal sleep.

So we did the best we could, somehow managed to get the upper two checkpoints, and got the hell off the river as soon as possible.  We started with two 2-person packrafts and ended up with half of one (one floated away, one busted on a rock).  Luckily that was all we lost to the Dead River and none of us got hurt.

It was a long, long walk down the trail.  As much as it took a long time to bike up that trail on day 1, it took even longer to trek down it.  Wet feet, feet that had already trekked from CP33 to CP34 this morning, and tender skin gave way to blisters partway down.  Thank goodness for trekking poles.

And dang those mosquitoes again.  We ran out of bug spray and had to resort to hand-slapping, pine bough-waving, and fern-wearing.  Yep, the fern thing was me - I couldn't do much with my arms since I was leaning on my poles, so I got desperate and plucked ferns to shove under my cap, over my ears.  Amazingly, the mosquitoes couldn't find their way through the greenery, so I no longer heard them buzzing around my head. They still landed on the back of my neck.  Solved with another fern.  My forehead was the real problem.  I put up with bites on my face for a while until finally I couldn't stand it and stuck a fern over my face.  It was hard to see, but I wasn't moving very fast to begin with.  Druce called me Fern Goddess of the Forest or something funny in a "regal" tone of voice.

We could hear the river from way above, and we had visions of the whole field of teams passing us in the fast-moving current.  We caught sight of another team with packrafts on the trail behind us, and it looked like they were looking for somewhere to put back on the water.  One team had stopped on a rocky beach on the opposite side, but we couldn't tell why.

So we walked...

At some point the sleep bug finally hit me.  After holding it off surprisingly long, it came after me in a big way.  I looked for any opportunity for a short nap, but between the vicious mosquitoes and the guys thinking we were a lot closer to the bottom than we actually were, the team tried to keep moving.

Eventually Val and Druce took turns carrying my pack as I staggered along.  Druce made several good suggestions of things to try, and the one regret I have is that I turned down his idea of caffeine.  As John said later, why did I go completely off caffeine in prep for the race if I didn't take advantage of how good it would work when I finally had some?  I really appreciate my teammates' help this day and I think back upon it fondly.

Finally, we did make it down, walking along the campsites by the river and down the dirt road toward town.  I'm not quite sure what our team looked like, all dirty and smelly and one of us with a head covered in ferns.  But I didn't really care.  We are almost back to civilization.

Still, we had one major problem remaining.  Two of the last checkpoints were again on the opposite bank.  The Dead River was running fast but it looked doable without any obvious rocks or obstacles.  We knew the Kennebec would be easy.  All we needed was a boat or two...

We emerged from the woods staring at a possible answer - a whitewater rafting company!  We practically salivated over the idea of renting a "Duckie", a heavy but practically bomb-proof inflatable boat that would fit the whole team.  Trying our best to convince the folks of our ability to pay and our promise to return the boat right after the race, we still did not succeed.  Something about insurance, I guess.  Or maybe we really did look half-insane (but I took the ferns off even!).

Gosh, how cool it would have been to finish the race in a Duckie!

They did allow us to rest under the cover of their outdoor boat storage area, and right at that moment a massive rainstorm hit.  We had been ignoring recent thunder, but we couldn't ignore the pouring rain and our sudden amazing good fortune to be under cover at the exact right time.  It was worth not taking a nap on the way down.  And now Mother Nature was making sure I would get the little bit of sleep I so badly needed.

I was immediately out cold, vaguely hearing the comings and goings of groups of rafters but not caring one iota.  A while later, when the rain slowed to a light patter, Val woke us up and we were ready to get on the move again.  It wasn't quite a boat, but at least it was a nap!

We started walking down the road toward the other rafting company in town.  On the way we spotted another team trekking alongside the river, so we called over to them to see what they were up to.  It was team Florida Xtreme, and they had also lost some gear to the Dead River.  It turned out that our teams matched up well in terms of available gear to share and willingness to work together to finish up this race.  Awesome!  Our luck was definitely turning for the better.  Thanks Florida Xtreme!

What fun to have some company over the last couple hours, all of us in various states of sogginess and tiredness and sore feet-edness.  Other teams converged and diverged with our ragged band as we gathered the remaining points on land and across the river.  We were all looking forward to finishing, sitting down, eating hot food, showering, and getting some sleep.

As we were closing in on the finish line, John caught us on camera a couple times:

One last climb up a trail for one last checkpoint in the woods, then one last hill to limp down to the finish line.  We were done!

At last we could sit down:

It didn't take much to make us start giggling again:

With our new-found friends, Team Florida Xtreme.  Y'all rock.

What a ride!  The last bit of the race got kind of crazy, but we made it to the end on Saturday evening.  15th place overall, 12th in the Premier (4 person co-ed) division.  Thank you to Untamed New England for putting on such an incredible event!

GUR in the City

(Continuing my recent trend of "out of order blog posting", here's the news from last weekend; the Bitter Pill AR will get a report of its own at some point... the summary being that we had a great time racing in VT the weekend before last!)

Back to NYC for another urban race!  Our fabulous friends Ron and Jerome were again our hosts, providing delightful stories, local knowledge, and a convenient place to stay on the Upper West Side.  A short subway ride to the 79th St Boat Basin, and we were ready to start the Great Urban Race, New York City edition.

This time we did a better job with studying and practicing on the subways, although this is by far the most complicated system of public transportation we've ever dealt with for an urban race.  Quite the challenge!

After getting our clue sheets, we opted to skip the subway ride altogether and just run south on West End to 11th St and down to American Retro for our Miller 64 challenge.  John made quick work of the challenge while I tried to recover from the fast run.  Running seemed like a good option at the time, but the blocks would start to wear me down by the end.

Early on:  "Red light, bummer!"
Later on:  "Red light, thank goodness!"

Anyway, we were still going OK at this point:

On foot heading back toward the subway lines, Sheila and I discussed where to go next.  I suggested we try the checkpoint that was furthest south and we could work our way up from there.  Greenwich Village it is!

We jumped on the subway and took a closer look at the tic-tac-toe board (needing to get 3 scavenger hunt items in a row).  Yankees shirts, a truck selling gyros, these didn't sound too bad.

Back above ground, I called Sheila who had some bad news.  Our cupcake place wasn't in Greenwich Village, but much further north. We were down at West 4th Street, and our next closest clue was up on 21st Street.  Ouch.

Well, CP3 MIGHT have been closer (a yoga challenge over on Broadway), but our crew was still working on that one.  By the time we all realized its (approximate) location, we were long gone from the area.  It actually sounds like we dodged a huge bullet on that one, as we heard later that many teams spent a lot of time trying to find it.  It's really too bad, as the clue sounded very cool (enter a key code to get in a presumably unmarked door and go to the 4th floor to do some kind of inverted yoga pose).

We better retrace our steps a bit then. I couldn't quite hear Sheila regarding the subway options, but it seemed like we would have to do some running no matter what.  While trying to figure this out, we bought a postcard with the Empire State Building on it from a street vendor (part of the tic-tac-toe).  Bagging the subway in favor of running, we dashed north along 6th Avenue.  In hindsight, we could have worked harder to get back underground for this section.  Our legs would have thanked us later.  Good training!  And we saved $4.50!  Hmmm...

So we ran, eventually making it down a side street to the Abracadabra Super Store.  Magic!  I immediately nominated John to do the challenge.  That worked even better (for me, not for him) when it turned out to be a worm-eating challenge... but he didn't flinch nor even pull out the vegetarian card...  I actually had to slow him down to get the requisite mid-challenge photo:

And after!

We ran back outside and around the corner to McDonalds.  We didn't even have to go inside to find an empty french fry container with the golden arches on it, so we stashed it to carry to the finish line as proof of completion for CP11.

Several blocks west and north to a parking lot where there were several cars.  We had to write down a few answers and then get our photo with one of the Chevy cars, a pretty red Cruze.  John took time out to practice his levitation skills:

Next checkpoint was 14 blocks north.  We could either backtrack to 23rd St to catch a subway or run up 8th Avenue.  Backtracking?  Apparently I was still feeling peppy, because I nixed that and we started running again.  Somewhere in this section I started counting blocks and hoping for more red lights to catch my breath...

We found the Drama Book Shop on 40th Street and ran up to work on the rebus puzzles posted in the window.  This checkpoint is the other spot we got really lucky, because the clue sheet said it should have been on 8th Street.  None of us noticed this error, nor did we spend time looking around on 8th Street as other teams did.  Normally a lack of attention to detail turns into a problem for us.  This time the oversight somehow worked in our favor, but I don't expect that to ever happen again.

In the meantime, the rebus solving went well and we moved on to the next checkpoint.

Finding the library and Bryant Park was the easy part.  Finding the actually challenge turned out to be the hard part.  We went through the park, out to the street, located the "Bear Naked" truck parked on 40th Street, went around to the front of the library, and finally ended up back where we had started.  Which is where the challenge was!  We had walked right past them...

In the middle of all that, at least we spotted some "I Love NY" T-shirts and got our photo for the center square of the tic-tac-toe, so that was something.

John took on the pedometer exercise while I tried to upload the picture to Facebook.  We're such newbies with these smart phones!  Suddenly John was done and I was juggling John's phone, the non-phone camera, 2 stickers, 2 packages of granola, my water bottle, and a pen... we did manage to get our act together so the volunteer could get our photo at the checkpoint, before I dropped John's phone on the ground:

Still, the photo wasn't uploaded by the time we jumped down some stairs to finally take another subway ride, and we fought with the whole "upload the picture to GUR's Facebook site" for a while.  But eventually we got it, phew!  I need more smart phone practice, that's for sure.

Anyway, we finally took another subway ride.  The F-train took us north to 59th/Lexington, and while we waited for it to arrive we worked on the tic-tac-toe some more, as we now knew we needed to complete it instead of possibly skipping it.  We had been trying to spot a couple folks wearing Yankees gear for a while but never managed to find any.

Back above ground for our shortest running leg of the day, maybe one block to Pylones.  John got a finger tattoo of a sheep (yes, I did just write that sentence) and we went into the store to locate another sheep to take a photo with.

John found this completely adorable little guy to pose with:

A short run south to Sprinkles for our cupcake!  And a logic puzzle.  I'm still struggling with the details of that (the puzzle, not the cupcake), but I guess we got the most likely possible answer because it matched what they wanted at the end.

After that we started on a quest for street names made of prime numbers.  We needed 3 of them, and we were in a good spot for it.

59th Street - trying to keep my ear bud in with all the sweating - have I mentioned it was rather humid out?

5th Ave:

7th Ave:

We made it across the bottom of Central Park and over to Columbus Circle where we bought 2 items for Ronald McDonald House (the race charity) in exchange for a flyer.

Then up a couple blocks to the American Folk Art Museum - a museum, cool!  We located the Encyclopedic Palace of the World to count a whole slew of windows in the bottom 3 tiers.

The clue sheet made it very clear that they wanted only the rectangular windows.  So we skipped the odd-shaped panes with diagonal edges.  We also skipped the 8 doors at the bottom, because according to my house construction-knowledgeable husband, a "door lite" is not a window.  The counting and multiplying and adding took a while, as you can imagine!

In short, 36 windows for each floor; 49 floors of rectangular windows; minus 8 doors.  Our answer was 1756.  Depending on how the concept of "rectangular window" was interpreted, I would think the following answers would also work: 1764 (counting doors as window), 2080 (adding the additional 9 floors with nonstandard windows), and 2088 (doing both).

We were so close now - all we needed was to finish the tic-tac-toe.  Happily, Sheila found a pub for us not far from the finish line.  Thank you Sheila!  We hopped on the subway for one last ride, then ran over to McAleer's Pub on Amsterdam.  A nice lady found an old takeout menu we could have, so we thanked her profusely and then dashed downhill to the finish line.

Wow, that was a lot of hard running.  As we crossed the line, the volunteer asked if someone was chasing us?  Well, there is always that possibility!  You never know with these races.

At the photo check, everything was good except we did have a discussion about rectangular windows.  They agreed to take our answer as an alternative to theirs (2088).  Apparently there was supposed to be an additional instruction sheet on location that they weren't allowed to post on the wall, and we never saw it.

So we won the race - which is exciting of course - but many teams were justifiably upset over the clue sheet and challenge issues.  We have done so many awesome Great Urban Races, it's a surprise when something like this happens.  I expect the GUR Crew will work hard to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.  I hope so, because we will certainly be back for more!

Our Sunday long run was much calmer - along the Hudson River pathway, discovering the Highline walkway (neat!), Brooklyn Bridge, Flatbush Ave, Prospect Park, Ocean Parkway created by Frederick Law Olmsted, and Coney Island!  We were ready to sit down after that...

Next weekend = staying home (mostly)!  And working on blog posts (maybe)!

Vermont 100 ultra marathon

Vermont 100 with the Texas and Vermont clan!  What a weekend, full of running and gatherings and chatting and eating and having a good time.

For my part, the (very) positive side was that my knee handled 100 miles without a peep.  Amazing.

The challenge was for my leg muscles.  100 miles without long run training is highly UNrecommended.  We (me and my legs) survived but it wasn't pretty.

Luckily Jason and I had matching running paces and styles so we stayed together the whole race.  It was a joy talking and laughing with him and sharing the trail hours.  We suffered together, just like our old adventure racing days.  Thank you for running with me, Jason!

John was the Smart One and decided to crew for everyone.  So he "ran" around the countryside in the car and was a huge help at all the handler aid stations.  Hugs to John!

He also took a bunch of pictures, so that's how I'll tell this story.  Because I don't have much time before our next adventure, and anyone playing along week-by-week is likely aware that I still have one story left unfinished (I have started that last UNE post, I swear)...

Pre-race grins or early morning loopiness:

Counting down...

And - go!

Dave and Kip look great coming into Woodstock:

Go Team V!

Running through town was an interesting treat (not the normal course, but the regular bridge wasn't available):

There he is again!

John had time to check out some solar panels.  We appreciated the cool foggy morning.  Not much solar energy here though.

Drop bags at the first handler aid station:

Ryan went through quickly (Kip and Dave were not much later):

Here we are!  My legs were already getting stiff.  Yikes, it's going to be a long day.  It was really early to be looking for a porta-potty to keep from having to squat.

Hi boys!  We met up with Michelle and the kids at Stage Road, a fun reception.  The gang was (easily) able to keep up with us.

I like this photo:

Coming into Camp 10 Bear the first time.  Ryan and Kip were about an hour ahead.  Sadly, Dave's knee gave out and he could not longer climb the hills so he had to drop here.  Bummer!

It got rather warm during the Camp 10 Bear loop.  Jason and I both put ice cubes in our bottles whenever we could, and stuck to the shade as much as possible.  The course was mostly tree-covered so that was nice.  The wide open sections (especially the big climb after Camp 10 Bear) were a bit rough.

We made it into Tracer Brook still doing OK:

Roads around to Margaritaville:

Jason did great with strong uphill walking and smooth downhill running.  He was well on his way to his first 100-miler finish.

Getting weighed at Camp 10 Bear the 2nd time through.  We met Jeff-Dan (the 2 guys in front of us, I can't remember which is Jeff and which is Dan) and had fun chatting with them for a while before they took off ahead of us.  Jason and I were mostly passing people starting around here, but these 2 were passing even more folks than we were.

It got dark on the way to the Spirit of 76 aid station.  The trail sections in here were new to me since the last time I ran the VT100 in 2003.  Fun and windy but they seemed to take a while.

At the aid station John helped Jason drain a couple toe blisters, while I slapped a blister block on my heel.  That took care of what little blister issues we had.  Nicely done.  Now back to thinking about those tired leg muscles...

Jason and I did some excellent running in the dark on the smooth roads, especially the long gentle downhills and whatever flat sections we could find (not many!).  The cooler air was great.  We were also motivated by looking at the pace chart.  We were starting to wonder if we might somehow manage to break 24 hours, hmm...

The barn at Bills:

John didn't have time to get photos of us at Bills because we came charging in all excited to make a quick turnaround and keep moving.  Our pace was looking great for a possible sub-24, and we didn't want to lose time here.  John ran around helping us get weighed, wrapping Jason's shin in an ace bandage, filling bottles, and trying to ask how we got there so fast, why we were in such a hurry, and was I trying to kill Jason?  No time to answer, but believe me, Jason was running just as strong as if not stronger than I was at that point.

We picked up Jason's friend Randol as a pacer and took off back into the night.  We enjoyed chatting with Randol for a while, then it was all business.  There were some long uphills in the last 10 miles, phew.  I also had to make a bathroom stop, and while that was going on Jason and Randol walked up on Ryan.  When Ryan figured out who it was, he took off like a rocket and we didn't see him again until the finish.  Too funny!

He even flew past Kip, who had been ahead since the Camp 10 Bear loop.  Meanwhile, not far behind, we made our way along trails and roads, past the last 3 aid stations (thank you one more time John!), and up toward the finish.  Right at the end Jason's shin really started hurting.  Thank goodness we were only a couple miles from the finish!  That could have been a huge problem otherwise.

Ryan broke 23 hours, well done!

Kip finished in 23:10!  He was in 99th place - so close to 100th place with bib #100 for a 100-miler!

Jason, Randol, and I crossed the line 10 minutes later (23:20), so thankful to be done and in shock that we broke 24 hours.  Jason was extremely grateful, while I just wanted to be sure he wasn't going to try to kiss me...  :)

Look what we did!

Super job, gang:

Kelly was 3rd female in the 100K race!

Shauna finished the 100K in the early morning hours, but wasn't feeling well enough afterward to make it to the awards ceremony.  Awesome race, ladies.

Cake and friends:

Badminton at the Harpoon Brewery on Sunday evening:

Also ice cream-eating:

We were lucky to have a chance to hang out with the Bogles for several hours:

C is for Confidence.  I have confidence in sunshine; I have confidence in rain...

Thank you to everyone who flew up to New England or drove down from Waterbury, it was so wonderful to spend the weekend with y'all!

Challenge Nation in NYC

Our first urban race in New York City!  And it showed  :)

But first we got to play around for a day.  Including a "have to do this someday" walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.

A bit of sightseeing... and playing around with public art as we are prone to doing

Not art but funny!

La Maison du Chocolat, mmmmm - and the first place in New York to give us a free sample of something!  We were so excited we splurged on one of these:

Sunday was race day, game on  :)

We started in lower Manhattan with this really cool sculpture of "Briefcase Man" in Zuccotti Park:

That ain't no bull.  Oh wait, yes it is...

Posing like George Washington in his boat crossing the Delaware.  With some guy at the bow taking selfies...?

There was a woman sitting in this car, so John made sure to let her know we were just doing a scavenger hunt.  Otherwise, it could be really weird to have 2 people run behind your car for a second and then run away!

We're a bit embarrassed to admit that we are making the shape of Texas (to match this friendly man's driver's license) with our arms... not so much exactly:

At Castle Clinton, defending the fort!  Amazingly, the cannon lit with my water bottle, and John got a good aim at the attackers, so we held them off:

We thought we were doing pretty well, until we realized that we needed to head up to Times Square.  Oh wow, that means we need to get on a subway.  Other Challenge Nation races have finished so quickly that we guessed we would be staying closer to the start/finish.  Our bad for this assumption, and especially for not having a backup plan.

Instead, we ran around like discombobulated chickens for a few minutes trying to figure out which subway stop to use.  We ended up on the R-line and waited 10 minutes for the train.  And it was a local (i.e. slow) train.  Lots of time lost.

No help for it, we rode up to Times Square and started milling through the crowd looking for 4 people who might help us with a "jumping" photo, i.e. everyone leaping in the air (or at least some semblance of leaping).

This is a challenge for us, we're not the most outgoing people.  But we got some help from a few friends!  They seemed rather flat-footed but I made up for it with my best jump ever.  I was excited to be hanging out with the Smurfs and Spongebob.

A couple blocks away to find this giant needle (there is a button too) - love the kid trying to climb it:

And a side trip to a fire house to pose like firemen at work - I think John is getting the hydrant open, while I'm about to chop something (I apparently didn't learn much about how to use an ax from watching the Death Race):

A few blocks south to find Mr. Seward and pose like him (or in my case, pretend I'm on stage?):

We finally found someone with a non-NY college sports shirt on!  This guy was originally pretending to spin a basketball but at the last second apparently decided to give the thumbs-up (or in a pinch you could say he was calling a jump ball):

Back to the finish line - 4th place!  That gained us free entry into Nationals in New Orleans in December, good enough for us  :)

We hung out at the Dubliner where we met Team Ramen Noodles and had fun talking about the race.  I'm still not used to having people know our names, but we always enjoy meeting them.  So come introduce yourselves anytime!

It was a fun race and a fun weekend.  We especially love having to come up with creative poses - we should keep practicing that...