Where’s his whistle?

I currently have a spider monkey climbing around my legs. Oh no wait, it’s my daughter. My mistake. And this is almost an hour after I literally crawled out of her room on my hands and knees after putting her to bed so as not to wake her back up. ‘Twas no army crawl, mind you, but it was a crawl nonetheless. Apparently I could have back flipped my way out, for that “bedtime” lasted approximately 5 minutes. Superb, here we go again, after a grand total of 3, maybe 4 hours of sleep with her last night.

But to the real point of this post, today was the Milwaukee Challenge, that urban adventure race I mentioned, and it was awesome! It ended up being me and 4 other girls, and we were team “Jolly Green Giants”. None of us had ever participated in one of these races before, so we had no idea what to expect. The description said the top teams usually finish by about the 1.5 hour mark, so personally, I was considering a sub-2 hour finish a success. Plus, they posted hints on their Facebook page at midnight last night, and all they did was confuse the hell out of us. Here’s what we had to go on going into this thing:

360 degrees of blades
“DD”
Elroy
As You Like It 2/7
Where’s his whistle?

You’re kidding right? So let me get this straight. Each of those hints is supposed to correspond to something in Milwaukee that we had to find? Um, yeah right. I think you can see why we all had a mixture of anticipation and trepidation brewing by the time we got underway. Here we were, about to start a race that was billed as “part 5k, part ‘Amazing Race'”, and our preliminary hints were utterly vague and confusing. Sweetness.

Fortunately, once we got our sheet of actual clues at the start of the race, those ridiculous hints became much more clear and appropriate. Here’s how it worked: each team captain stood in a big circle outside Rock Bottom in downtown Milwaukee, the race staff handed each captain a sealed envelope, and when the clock struck 2:00pm everyone was able to rip open their envelope, make their way back to their respective team, and it was off to the races. Literally. There were 12 clues in all, 11 of which had to be completed for a successful finish. I must admit, as soon as we started reading through everything I was kind of lost in a cloud of wtf? Each clue was its own little paragraph, and 5 people all trying to read the same list of 12 paragraphs was slightly awkward. We finally decided that we had a good enough idea of what a couple of the clues meant, headed off in that direction, and just tried to decipher the rest as we went. It was a pretty good strategy, for we were able to complete our first handful of clues in no time. A couple were definite stumpers, and a couple of us tried using our phone-a-friends (totally allowed, per the race rules), but they turned out to be pretty much worthless. Ha, sorry phone-a-friends! But we did end up figuring all the clues out on our own.

And get this… We took 5th place!! Read that again. We, the 100% inexperienced, 110% confused team, came in in 5th place!! Out of roughly 160 teams that finished (about 170 entered). BOOM! Take that, Milwaukee. The Jolly Green Giants turned out to be a force to be reckoned with, and we Jolly Green Giant-ed all over your ass! Our official time was 69:28, and we ended up doing at least a 5k’s worth of running through downtown to get to our clues. And I think that was definitely the difference for us – those extra jogs through the streets instead of the leisurely saunters some teams were doing. It was so much fun. I was so unbelievably proud of us and just simply amazed that we did so well. None of us expected anything like that, but when we ran up to the finish line and saw they were just then beginning to bring the water bottles out for the racers and the finish line sign wasn’t even hung, I think we all got a little twinge of butterflies, like, we actually might stand a chance here! And we so did. We got 5th!! Sorry, I’m still riding that high.

And what did we get for placing 5th, you may ask? A $50 bar tab to be spent at Rock Bottom. Why yes we would like to spend that right now, thank you very much. How nice of you to offer. 1st place got $200 cash, 2nd place got $100 cash, 3rd place got $50 cash, and then both 4th and 5th places got the $50 Rock Bottom tabs. We were so stoked, I can’t even tell you. All I can say is watch out Challenge Nation – next year we’re out for blood. It’s 1st place or bust, and yes, we will knock you down and run you over to get there.

Here are pictures from our day, and I’ve tried to give you some idea of which clue we were completing in each caption. Even with a heat advisory we rocked this.