Kenny's Ride for the Roses

This is actually a photo of me at the 24hrs of RHR....I think this is on my "last lap" not my real last lap.

Alright, this weekend was pretty fun. I first drove out to Martindale to prescout the Martindale Triathlon bike course with Mike and Debbie. Mike's paddling friends were there too. It was a pretty cool course at first but as Mike warned me, the backside of the bike loop was hilly, riddled with crappy roads and there was a stiff wind out this weekend. It will be pretty miserable come race day. But thankfully I'm only doing the bike...the run looks pretty rough. I am totally looking forward to it. We rode about 30miles then called it a day.

After that, we had late lunch in San Marcos right on the river...very good burgers and mojitos. I bid adieu to everyone and headed into Austin to get some gear for the triathlon. I forgot that the Ride for the Roses was this weekend, so EVERYONE was at the bike shops. It was fine because the salespeople were extremely nice and they had deals on almost everything. I even got a nice bottle rack for 20 bucks off at Austin TriCyclist because it was slightly used. Why don't we have a shop like that here in Houston?!? Man, I want to move there...the outdoor culture is much more vibrant.

After picking up some goods, I continued onto highway 71 towards Smithville to meet with Bobby, who had done the Bastrop individual meet that morning. He had a few problems during the meet, one of which was losing his passport. Not good. As I was driving through Bastrop I figured that Bobby needed something to eat for dinner before he went to bed, so I called him and we decided to meet up at Mama Mia's in Bastrop. While I waited, I talked to Ross who also did the meet and won his age group on the orange course. Along with Bobby's plight, he told me a lot of the top navigators in the texas adventure racing world were there, including Kip Fiebig, Art Cook, Scott Appleton, Tom Lane, etc. Now I was really disappointed that I didn't do the meet...that would have been cool to see how I stacked up head-to-head with them, purely on navigational skills. Oh well.

After dinner, we headed to Pinepoint Inn in Smithville to stay the night before heading back to Bastrop for the relay orienteering meet on Sunday. For some reason, we could only get 5 people from HART to do the meet, leaving Tommy and I without a 3rd. So that meant one of us would have to do double duty, running the 1st and last courses. That morning, we decided that Tommy would pull the double since I had to do something similar at Rocky Hill when I went on an extra lap. Also, I figured this would be great training for Tommy since this was the first meet he has done. It was a crazy mass start where everyone on the first leg had to sprint to get their maps, which were hanging all together on a clothesline...what a scary mess. Tommy came in with a respectable time on the first leg, beating all of the other adventure racers back, but there was a problem. But I had no idea until after I ran my leg. I had a yellow course, so it was really easy--everything was pretty much off a road or trail. It was so easy that Tommy wasn't expecting me back so quickly and was taken surprise when I came back in...I had to yell out his name to have him come over and tag me. I then found out that he had missed 1 or 2 points on his first leg, essentially DQ-ing us. That was crappy because I had given us a huge padding of time and we would have beat all the AR-ers by a huge margin. Foiled again. We did come in 5th, the first AR team, but it didn't matter.

Now the real excitement started as we saw one by one all the other AR teams came in, but still no Bobby, who was on a team with Andrea and Ross. We finally couldn't wait anymore since HOC was pretty much packing in everything. We went out to do the last course in reverse, in hopes that we would run into Bobby. We eventually did--he got screwed up early in the nav on the first 2 pts and that slowed him down dramatically. That sucks. So all was well again and we headed out for lunch as soon as he finished.

To finish my tour, we were supposed to go riding at Warda, but with Bobby coming in late, we decided to bag it. That would have been a nice topper to a fairly relaxing, fun weekend, but I'll take what I got. It was another weekend with near perfect weather--I'll take that any day! So I drove back to Htown, washed Eve, my mountainbike, and then settled in. We really need more serious navigators in HART--that's sad that we were only able to field 1.667 teams this weekend. Really sad.