Huntsville Hammer Adventure Race

I left directly from San Antonio on Friday, November 12th driving to Huntsville, TX, where I met my buddy Corey. We teamed up for a Texas Adventure Race called The Huntsville Hammer.

Neither of us had ever participated in a so-called "adventure race", but we were both pretty excited about it. All we really knew was that the race was 6 hours long, and consisted of about 6 miles of running, 20 miles of mountain biking, and 4 miles of paddling.

We donned our "I'm running Ubuntu" t-shirts for the start of the race.

During the course of the race, we learned how the race would be conducted. The entire field started out with a 2 mile trail run. I suspect that the goal of this segment was to spread the field a bit.

Once we got back to the starting line, we were given two maps -- the standard state park map and a 20,000:1 military topographic map. We were also given two "clues". We next set out on our mountain bikes for about 10 miles of riding, collecting two more "points".

Points are collected by stamping your "passport" with a special hole punch attached to trees spread throughout the park.

After the refreshing bike ride, we were given a second clue sheet with 4 more coordinates and clues. These were to be gathered by foot, and were quite a bit deeper into the wilderness of the park. Here's Corey climbing a tree for one of the points.

We managed to gather 3 out of these 4 points. The 4th one eluded us, and we wasted way too much time searching for it.

The next four points were to be gathered by boat. We paddled about 3 miles around the lake (some of it in a the face of a very stiff wind), again gathering 3 out of the 4 points. We made the strategic decision to skip the 4th point, as we were starting to run a bit short on time. The rules of the race required that you be back at the finish line by the 6 hour mark or stiff penalties were enforced.

Driving into the park we did notice this sign...

Which you start to think more about right about now...

We got better about plotting the target points over time, and developed a much better strategy about 5 hours into a 6 hour race. Oops :-)

We did finish, and we didn't come in last, so that's something...

Results are here. We came out 22 of 36 teams, so nothing to brag about. But we did learn quite a bit about adventure racing and would have a much better strategy next time around ;-)

Corey and I packed up after the race and drove to College Station for the night, where we hung out at some of my old watering holes on Northgate (Dudley's Draw and Fitzwilly's), watching A&M beat Baylor on TV.

:-Dustin