Prime Suspects Rookie Season

This is our rookie season and our 5th scramble this year.

Racing on foot with 10 and 11 year olds who started the season protesting, whining and complaining has been a challenge! With them, we have learned to never give benadryl before a race (see results from disappointing U-District race); and we have learned about camel baks; power bars and goo.

Our current motivational strategy with them is power bar before the start, lots of water all race long, goo just before the halfway point (or just prior to our 10 year old's "death-from-exhaustion" at the 2 mile mark). Now our 10-year-old son is the one who finds the answers; our 11-year-old daughter is the one who cheers us along. With each race, they are getting physically and mentally stronger and we are able to go harder and faster in the same time period. They are feeling a great sense of accomplishment and we feel a lot less like we are dragging them to do something dreadful.

On this Scramble, we visited 12 checkpoints in 1.5 hours and should get 320 points. Here is the route we followed:

13-42-32-31-44-26-35-53-24-33-12-11

We chose to skip the checkpoints in the park due to crowds and instead get up and away from the park for more points. We had one miss, where we walked right past the turnoff for point 27 (looking for streets in exactly the opposite order). But we didn't want to backtrack and lose momentum so we just kept going and planned to pick up 12 and 11 as replacement points.

We, too, struggled with the missing garbage cans at 35. We had to learn once we got back to the finish line how to show you've been at a point but the answer is missing. We hadn't heard of the circle "all the answers to dispute" option.

All in all, a very fun race!