Saturday, May 2, 2009

From "medaling" to coming in about dead last: My Day with Tristan at The Great Urban Race

Team "Massie Maniacal Monsters" at the start of the Great Urban Race. Little did we know how badly we stunk at this scavenger hunt/race at this time.
Tristan and I posing "Lady and the Tramp" style at the Rosslyn Ledo Pizza. I am glad Tristan and I were married because it would have weirded me out to do this with a friend or other relative...

Tristan shooting a basket at the ESPN Zone in DC. (we actually had to figure out a crytograph to determine this clue). Even though we are mathematicians I would give us a "C" on how long it took us to do this.



This is how many bedrooms (19) in the White house would be unoccupied based on a crazy equation in which we needed to figure out prime numbers, the ages of the Obama kid's, the number of rooms in the White House and some other facts.



Tristan and I in front of the Spider sculpture. This clue was a word scramble we had to figure out.



Today Tristan and I competed in the "Great Urban Race" in DC. This is a race similar to the amazing race involving some puzzles and a scavenger hunt throughout DC and northern Virginia.

This is the first time Tristan and I competed in this event and I believe we may have placed last or nearly last. The time limit was 5 hours and we arrived back in just about 5 hours with several tasks not completed and several wrong answers. But we had alot of fun!

While we were allowed to phone friends, use a blackberry or even use internet access, Tristan and I decided to be old school (or else you can read this as we are cheap and weaklings so did not bring our Mac laptop computer nor did we pre-arrange for any friends/relatives to be home to help us). Realistically most of my friends out out running, exploring or just doing stuff on Saturdays. As for family, my sister is in Fiji, my dad typically hikes on weekends, Tristan's dad may not be as computer savvy as others and both Tristan and I were participating in this activity. Perhaps next year we will need to leave one of us home as the "phone a friend".

Alas we were able to figure out some puzzles but not all. And Tristan is still nursing a small knee injury from his recent climb up Mt Elbert so as we moved from place to place we pretty much walked. This was okay with me because I was not wearing my sports bra (and I would have started complaining like my sister at Umstead if we really did start running alot) and I have the Frederick Marathon tommorrow. Oh yeah in addition to walking while going from place to place, we had a few personalized pit stops that definitely extended our finishing time. We went to EMS to see if there were any good deals on hiking/climbing equipment for Tristan's benefit as he prepares for a summit climb up Mt Rainier and for my benefit we went to a local running store. We also had a smoothy mid-race which was a bit off course (oh yeah and availed us to a "private" bathroom").

The tasks we were able to do included getting a picture of us looking like Lady and the tramp at Ledo's Pizza and Pasta, we have a picture with the answer to a crazy math equation in front of the White House, we did some aerobic exercises at a fitness center including sit ups, push ups, squats and punches and even a picture of Tristan scoring a point at the ESPN zone. During our 5 hour journey we walked and used the DC Metro system to get to a variety of places. It was alot of fun and we met alot of nice people. I think next year we would need to improve our strategy--I think my sister would be a good asset to our team because she is really tech savvy and would yell at us if we tried to be slow.

I will insert pictures from this event tommorrow...because I am doing Frederick Marathon tommorrow (leaving my house about 4:15 a.m.), my camera is already packed and asleep!

2 comments:

Glaven Q. Heisenberg said...

we have a picture with the answer to a crazy math equation in front of the White House ...

Wait, don't tell me, I KNOW this equation:

2000 + Idiot Texan + Half a Million fewer Votes + Moron Floridians + Fox News + Activist Right Wing Supreme Court Justices = WE GET RETARD FOR PRESIDENT FOR FOUR YEARS!1!

I'm right, aren't I?

Whud I win?

Runner Tammy said...

That is a good guess for the question...but the answer was 19 as you can now see in the posted pictures. I guess our answer of 19 was the number in dog/cat/guinea pig years (?) to your guess:-)

Well, you didn't win anything. But now that I know you can do simple math if we decide to do this race next year perhaps we will use you as "phone a friend". Then we could share our spoils with you (maybe a partially eaten strand of spaghetti would be sufficient).