Dear Austin Urban Assault Race...

...I can has do-over please?

I wasn't going to write about this tonight, but I obviously am not going to quit thinking about it anytime soon. Maybe writing some of it down will stop the incessant second-guessing in my head and let me get some sleep already. :)

Our UAR was...not as good as it could have been. I mean, it was fun, more fun than last year...but due to a flat, some less-than-ideal route choices, and me ONCE AGAIN thinking in completely the wrong direction on the landmark clue, we had to forgo the last two obstacles in order to meet the time limit. Our course still ended up at about 25 miles. I have no idea what our on-bike speed average was, because my computer absolutely refuses to work properly. It decided to go on break about 2 minutes into the preride, and just never came back.

The bright side:

• 78% on the bonus quiz got us into the first wave! In fact, it put us in the top 20.

• My teammate (B.) and I were more evenly matched this year than Noah and I were last year.

• We only hit one really long checkpoint line, and we were able to alter our route to skip it and go to the 1st landmark, so that we could use the line time to figure out where the 2nd landmark was. (Unfortunately, I still had no bleeding clue, even after we had completed the next TWO obstacles.)

• I wasn't completely incompetent on any of the obstacles this year, although the inflatable at Bicycle Sport Shop was a trial. It was fine until the rope climb, where the girl immediately in front of me just could not make it up. After 15 seconds or so of watching her struggle and slip back down, I tried to help by bracing her feet, but it just wasn't happening. After about a minute's struggle, she decided her socks were the problem and let me play through while she took them off. After spending all that time observing what NOT to do, I actually got over pretty quickly (That girl may still be in there, for all I know.)

• B. ruled the rowing and letter hunt obstacles (though once we had most the letters, I figured out the anagram).

• We had good search help, and everyone was very nice and cooperative. Including that other team who gave us the answer AND directions when I finally, desperately asked them about the 2nd landmark.

• The food was good.

• I set a new PR for field tube replacement! (more on that in the suck section)

• Even though we were nearly wiped out (or at least, I was), we didn't walk that final stretch...we crossed the finish line running. Well--jogging. :)

• I won hats in the raffle!

• Though we still didn't finish every obstacle, we finished 9 of them and covered 25 miles of road in 4 hours. This is compared to Noah's and my 6 obstacles and 14-ish miles in nearly 4 hours last year. Yay, improvement!

Teh suck:

• On the way down to the rowing dock (our third obstacle), B. hit a huge pothole, causing a front-tire flat. While the flat-changing itself didn't take that long (personal record!), it let a lot of people get in front of us...a lot of people who were taking the obstacles in the same order, which meant lines.

• I didn't discover until 5-6 traffic lights in that I was pushing the wrong pedestrian button to make the light change. This is despite the large black arrows on the buttons indicating which is which. Yeah hi, I'm an idiot.

• I nearly lost a cleat, after being lazy with the screw-tightening when I put them on yesterday. Also? Probably should have ridden those shoes before today. I mean, I only fell once, but I spent most of the race clipped out on the right side. While it was better than trying to run in road shoes, the "nothing new on race day" rule still holds.

• I had a tendency to WAY overthink the landmark clues. Other people, they search for "austin composer coffee lake" in some order and they hit it right away. Me? I ask my google researcher to include "take care of business" (based on that being part of the secondary clue) and somehow get it stuck in my head that it's a music venue of some kind. Thus starting a virtual wild goose chase all over Austin that didn't get us anywhere near the right place. I would make such a shitty detective. Hoofbeats almost always = horses, Joy, not zebras. Or Elvis, for that matter.

• I'm also discovering that I'm not very good at letting go of an idea and listening to another perspective, even when I'm trying to keep an open mind. It's humbling and frustrating to realize I am not always the smartest person in the room. Also, I think there's such a thing as being too prepared. The bigger and fuller your box is, the harder it is to think outside of it.

• Also, I think I picked the hilliest possible route to Mozart's. 35th east to Exposition to Enfield, up and down rollers the whole way. Even if we weren't already half-wasted by that point, we would have been afterward. And then I had some brake issues at the intersection Lake Austin, and nearly got creamed by a duckboat. And tourists yelled at me. Awesome!

• Also, when we got there, the volunteer said they were closing the checkpoints in 5 minutes. When we got to the 3rd landmark, the volunteer said that while we could try to make it to Rio Grande Mexican, they were starting to close up the obstacles. So, after assessing how tired we were and considering that it would take us another 10-15 minutes (at least) to make it to the final two checkpoints which might be closed anyway, we headed back to RunTex. While waiting in line for raffle tickets, though, we overheard someone saying that they had extended the checkpoint times another hour because people were complaining that the course was too long for the time limit. So we totally could have made those last two checkpoints, had we known. Damn!

So, while I can't help but be a little disappointed in our finish time (especially since our sister team finished nearly an hour before us), it was mostly due to bad luck (B.) and flawed strategy (me) and not a lack of athletic ability. And it was an improvement over last year's performance, so that's something.

Next year, baby. Next year.