Cipro Slackin's Route
The route
51-60-47-38-39-54-46-43-40-35-30-44
The pre-game
I had originally planned to be half of team Teriyakidonut as a seven hour mixed bike team. I was particularly excited to go into the event this year adequately trained for seven hours biking, as I had completed STP the weekend before.
Unfortunately, the wet weather was not terribly inspiring and I woke up on event day in need of rest and antibiotics (hence the team name). Greg and I decided to split into two teams and I would walk for three hours.
Route Planning
I figured I could walk about 15 minute miles, so a 10-12 mile route would be best. I made a 2 mile by 3 mile rectangle with my fingers and moved it around to see where it covered a lot of checkpoints. The area NW and N of Green Lake and the points around Ravenna park really stuck out as densely packed with checkpoints. I also knew that I could get between checkpoints 46 and 43 via bridges not shown on the map, so that set my basic route.
I decided to go clockwise, through these areas, possibly adding on checkpoint 61 or 50-44-36 depending on how I was doing for time when I hit Ravenna park.
I completely neglected the fact that checkpoint 35 closed at 6pm. Oops!
Route Execution
You can see from the gmaps route that I made several errors:
- overshot heading S on 1st avenue en route to checkpoint 38. this happened because I changed my route from heading down 2nd to heading down 1st to avoid a bit of hill and then forgot where I was. D'oh!
- overshot checkpoint 54. I blame my aging eyes. I'll probably pay for a larger scale map next time.
- completely in the wrong place for checkpoint 30
While it was my intention to walk, I did end up running from checkpoint 40 to checkpoint 35 (lululemon) when I realized I might make it before closing. I did just make it, but tired myself out enough that I screwed up checkpoint 30. I would have been better off hitting checkpoints 50, 44, 36, and possibly 33 and walking instead. It also looks to me that switching the route to go counterclockwise may have worked better -- it would have been easy to bail out at any of checkpoints 38, 47, or 60 and run downhill to the finish.
Thanks!
Many thanks to Terry, Eric, Bob, and the rest of the team for a super-fun scramble. I didn't even notice the rain until the end!
-- Elizabeth