12hrs of fun

So this weekend was the HART training camp. It was fine. It was actually considerably easier than the one I attended at the beginning of the year. It started off with an easy mile run around Double Lake. After that, we went on a two lap hike and bike along the roads in the park. Tommy, Iris, and Raymund were on my team. We came in from this leg first. Then we sat down for a quick nav class in the lodge. We plotted points for the paddle and then biked about 6 miles to the put in. We came in first here, too. This, however, is where it all turned sour. All but 2 or 3 of the sevy's had holes in them. They looked like some kind of rodent or insect chewed through them. So we spent about an hour or so trying to patch them up. We had one good boat, but the one that Iris and I paddled in had a slow leak and had to periodically pump it back up. To make things worse, I made a steering error and punctured the boad at a tight turn in heavy brush. We had yet another hole to patch. During the final leg back to transition, our boat was barely inflated and it was a real struggle to keep that thing tracking straight.



We biked back on the hilly road to transition and had to quickly get ready for the nav. Teams had already took off before us, so we were at a disadvantage there. We eventually headed out and were the last ones out. We made quick time, though with Iris' double time pace. We actually caught up with a team that headed out 30min before us on the way out. After finding the first point, we passed them and never saw them again. Then we caught up with the rest of the group... a huge merging of 3 or more teams. I couldn't we caught up with all of them! One team we never caught up with was the "girls team": Justin, Lori, Jaunda, and Cynthia. We couldn't make up any time on them because it was now night and we didn't want to risk twisting ankles while running. I made one nav error when I didn't read the whole clue for the last cp and overshot it. Raymund caught it and we headed back and found it. We got back to transition in less than 4 hrs, which is about a 3mph+ pace. Could have been faster.

We had the option to go back out for the short nav section, but we all decided to bag. I didn't want Renee and her friend to just sit around waiting for us while we went out again. We packed up and headed back into town. It all lasted about 12hrs--9 to 9. We didn't bike the trails because the boat debacle took too much time.