Jan 27 – Equinox Mid-Week – Night Orienteering

First time out at night, first time really trying to read and use topo maps. We got all the points, but have to say our trusty guide, Barrie, helped a lot!

Feb 14         UCSD Valentine Orienteering

What better way to spend Valentines than running around holding hands and finishing as many checkpoints as possible in 1 hour time limit? We got 13 from 30, and happy with that for firs time on our own using those topo maps. Have to say that as the orienteering was around building, this helped the navigation most of the time. On one area I was fixed on the building ‘knowing the campus’ and lost 15 minutes for 1 checkpoint!

Feb 20 – Scavenger Dash LA

A race around a city we don’t know, dressed up in matching t-shirts (thank you Spreadshirt!), answering clues from friends in Chicago (thanks Ali) and doing crazy stunts like getting arrested! Fun, fun, fun! Finished 13th on this one and then had to try and beat in San Diego a few weeks later….

Mar 6 – Scavenger Dash San Diego

Return of “Bangers & Mash”. We knew the drill so mentally had an advantage until the owner said he changed the course just for us! Oh no! Our confidence in maps and getting to checkpoints was much better from our practice and even with a fatal mistake of missing one clue (which added 2 miles and 20 minutes to our time) we finished 9th. We later got bumped to 8th because of a disqualification from using a pedi-cab!

Mar 14th – Orienteering in O’Neills Park, Los Angeles

A combined trail run event as well as a advanced orienteering race. Was worth the drive to a new place and we enjoyed having to navigate in the open park land. It was meant to be 5k which of course meant we did double that because of our ’shortcuts’! We will learn how to read a map eventually…lots of thistles on this run which led ot some lovely scratches on the legs!

Mar 27th – Peaks & Valleys Adventure Race

The full race report is available for this one in another blog post, including a bonus video! We are getting better and able to go for longer distance and time (4 hours from 1 hour in 8 weeks). Yeah!!!

A goal is to get up to a 12 hour race this year….but as most are in the summer, we might be pushing too hard to get to this one this year….

What’s next?

Apr 3           Urban Dare San Diego

May 2          Sprint Sprint Triathlon

May 16        Central Coast Sprint Adventure Race

Are you attending any of these? We like to hear from people that are attending or training….we need the tips!!

We had to prepare for the treasure hunt contest, not with understanding the city or puzzles, but by getting a matching outfit ordered! We decided to get matching t-shirts made to match our geocaching name, Bangers & Mash. We got the t-shirts made by Spreadshirt where you can design your own t-shirt log, color, and shirt style.

So on the day of the scavenger hunt, we drove to Los Angeles and that was the 2 hour of learning the city! We looked at a map, read some of the fun facts about the city, and studied about the transit routes we had as options.

At the start of the treasure hunt contest, we had to run to a local square to get our clue sheets. We then took a photo of the clue sheet to send to our ‘pit crew’ friend who helped to work out the clues with the trusty internet whilst we used our iPhones and tried to work out some clues.

We tried to map out the clues across Downtown Los Angeles as much as possible, so that we could be efficient with our route to save time (ad our energy!). We are definitely not runners and we were knackered after the first 10 minutes. I guess Red Bull and adrenaline got us through it. Here was the route for our scavenger hunt.

We took lots of photos from the adventures we had across the city which included getting ‘mock arrested’ and ‘presenting a rose to a stranger’ as well as finding a bronze statue somewhere in Chinatown….during the Chinese New Year ceremony. Now that was interesting!

The final checkpoint for us was to visit the YMCA. And can yo uguess what we had to do? Of course, sing the famous song! We had a nice dance and sing song before running to the final point – Casey’s Irish Bar.

How did we do? There wer 29 teams and we finished 15th with a time of 3:17 hours. The winners were runners and took 2:04 hours. The last team crossed at 3:59 hours (4 hour time limit) and they had taken a nice break eating a steak sandwich at one of the checkpoints. Nice one boys!

Well, we get to repeat the fun in 2 weeks when Scavenger Dash come to San Diego on March 6th. Can we beat our time and place….we’ll see