Team Geckos entered their first Adventure Race in Corpus Christi this past April. The Race consisted of a mystery event to start, then a 2 mile bike ride in loose sand, then a 2 mile kayak in the Gulf of Mexico, and then a 2 mile run, and finally a 2 mile bike ride in the sand to the finish. At the pre-race briefing we quickly learned that we would get wet in the first minute of the race, then start biking. We didn’t bring the right kind of shoes so we decided to do the race in sandals – better than the shoes we had, but clearly not the best choice (more on that later). The gun sounded and we were off. Deb and I decided to hang back and let the others splash ahead of us and we waded through a short obstacle course. We cleared that with no problems and proceeded to grab our bikes and start moving in the sand. We hadn’t prepared for the added difficulty that loose sand brings to riding. At many points we pushed our bikes, or I pushed Deb while I ran along side of her. We made a tactical choice here. At the start, the race officials made it clear they would assess a 2 hr time penalty for not traveling in the designated loose sand route marked by cones, and would disqualify anyone if they caught them two times. We decided to stay inside the cones, even as we watched others go outside of them. Our thinking was those teams would at the very least get a 2 hr time penalty. In this race that would be the difference between first place and possibly last. Well, that proved to be a miscalculation on our part. In the end, the officials didn’t penalize anyone. We transitioned to the ocean kayaking. Deb had never kayaked in the ocean and was having the jitters. That didn’t last long as we made our way into the breaking swells we caught a wave wrong and tipped over. It turned out that’s just what we needed as all the jitters went away and we were able to get out into the ocean past the breaking waves and into the 6 foot swells. From there we turned parallel to the shore and almost directly into the wind. The wind was generating a 2 foot chop on the swells and was pushing us towards the shore. We finally got our pace right on the kayak and made it to the marker 2 miles up the beach. As we exited the kayak, Deb’s legs gave way. She needed to get them moving again. Once we got on firm sand we started running back to where we parked our bikes. We began to feel better as we got in stride and downed lots of fresh water. Biking back to the finish seemed easier in the sand this time. Maybe we were getting used to it. We finished in 3 hours 31minutes and took 4th on the Coed Masters division. All in all, we learned a lot, and felt good having mastered two events we hadn’t trained for. We also learned to never run a race in sandals as we both got rub blisters from the sandal straps and sand.

More race details at and results at http://www.youthodyssey.org/adventure_race.htm