The morning of the first race…

Race weekend: June 21, 2008. Hidden Valley Resort in PA. Actual race day was early Saturday morning, so we decided to camp out at a nearby state park the night before so we would be at the race on time. It was just our luck that it decided to downpour on Friday night, which made for quite the camping adventure. Luckily, we didn’t set up camp over a small creek like the summer before, but that is a story on its own. The camping wasn’t the worst, actually it was pretty fun and we ended up meeting a couple adventure racers who were camping there too.

Race morning, excitement was turning to some nervousness and the only way to combat the nervousness was to blare whatever station came in on the radio and scream along to a Beastie Boy song. We zipped into the parking lot and spied fellow racers unloading gear. We turned down the music and tried not to look like newbies. Of course, as we were unpacking, a guy asked us if we had an extra tire and of course, we didn’t (note to self: poss pack extra tires for the next race). We followed our fellow racers to the TA (transition area) and started to organize our little amount of gear. A kindred spirit helped us with our tire pressure (note to self: investigate appropriate tire pressure for mt biking) and we were feeling ready to race…about 30 mins before the actual start time. During the 30 mins, we had time to reflect on the fact that teams were not talking to the other teams and everyone was very serious. We could barely illicit a smile from anyone besides Frank and Bethann, the race organizers. Were we in over our heads?? About 5 min before the race started, Frank called all teams over to talk about the course. During his description, we learned that the biking and running were both going to be longer than we thought AND there was going to be a short swimming element involved. Oh. Man. It was too late to back out, so we trekked on.