Spoke with Thad about two hours ago. For some reason his emails are not getting to me. Shawn told me he had no problems. I sent two to Thad and nothing. He told me he had replied to both, so we just talked about my issues.
Canoe - we need a real canoe. No tandem kayak. So, my parents have the fiberglass. Not super fast, but works. The problem with my brothers is the bottom is smooth. It is lighter than my dad's but the smoothness slows ya down. Double sided paddles (Kayak paddles) are legal and I have two of those available.
I am using my road bike on the course. It doesn't sound rough enough to just use the mountain. I will use a little lower pressure tire to keep myself from getting flats.
Orienteering - 1:25,000 scale map with six points marked. You have a compass and go. It appears that the goal is not to go directly from one point to another in a straight line but to find, topographical the easiest way to get from one point to another. So pacing or distancing is not as important to making sure your map is oriented right and you understand the terrain. The compass's most important function is to orient the map. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orienteering a link explaining orienteering a little.
Finally, times. The person who won it last year was just over 7 hours. You may know him, Toby Angove, that is correct the son of Mr. Angove, our physics teacher. He is bordering on world class. I ran into his brother Scott three years ago. Scott also does adventure racing. Toby is good (wins lots of races). Toby may not be there this year, he is currently active duty in the military. By the way he beat the best relay team by an hour.
Updating the chart based on Thad's average times he gave me for each event:
Goot News is the Caone looks shorter & if Shawn can Finish the swim in an hour, we have a huge lead. He did say the swim is an average and some people really struggled. Also, the orienteering time had one team that was on the course for 6 hours before Thad went looking for them. I would be shocked if my bike time was average, that is only 12 MPH. I hope 15+ is not dreaming, I usually don't drop under 17 MPH. He said the best bike was sub 70 minutes. Runs were right about what I thought. The wild card is the orienteering. The best time was around 2 hours. Much slower than I realized, sorry about that.May need to bone up hard on that map. A walk about about a week before should have been the plan, but I can't squeeze that in now.
Hope this helps.
2 comments:
Regarding the orienteering. From the bit I've read, a good idea is to look for landmarks which will give you an indication that you've gone too far. Sometimes the person planning the course will build that type of thing in. You just have to remember to look for it.
I'm curious what you are thinking we should be wearing? I should have bought new water repellent trail running shoes and worked on breaking them in up here in NH. Ah well, I'll figure something out.
I planned on wearing normal running shoes (trail runners would seem better, but I don't have a pair and need to replace my regular running shoes). I will probably wear longer socks, I usually just wear short crews, but the longer will be better. Some scratches will be inadvertable (is that a word). I also tink heaver shorts than those nylon running shorts, but haven't picked a pair yet. I will wear a ball cap and one of those shirts that wisks the moisture, my underware choice I will leave to myself.
Thad, definately indicated we would be in the RimRock area and that he did not have plans to purposely drag us up and down the hill.
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