Sunday, April 25, 2010

Urban Dare Pittsburgh 2010


On Saturday, DB~ and I did the Urban Dare Pittsburgh 2010 race. Urban Dare is like a mini-micro-Amazing Race contoured to a different city each week across the United States. We had heard about it last year, but we couldn't do it...so we've really been looking forward to it this year.

The race started at 12 noon at Finnegan's Wake next to PNC Park. We were given a clue sheet with 12 places we had to go. But to figure out each place, you had to solve a puzzle by using that clue and then determining what place to go. For instance, one clue said "Anthony Quinn played this character in a 1964 movie. Go to the restaurant with this character's namesake."

Our race got off to an auspicious start when we were jogging past Bettis 36 Grille, on the way to the Fred Rogers statue, and DB~ was reading her iPhone as she ran. She ran over one of those metal planters around a tree and tripped over it (it was raised up ever so slightly). If we were skiing, it would have been a total yard sale. She fell in stages and I watched the whole thing in shock. The first stage she just stumbled and I thought "She'll pull out of this" and then the second stage she went full-bore and sprawled all over the sidewalk, ripping her jogging pants in the process.

There were no tears but I thought our race was over before it really started...but she got up and dusted herself off and we soldiered onward.

We went from the North Shore to around the Golden Triangle to Duquesne University and back, solving puzzles and using the Googles on the Internet machine, thanks to our iPhone and Samsung Omnia. And no thanks to our "phone a friends" -- 2 of which didn't answer and the other...I don't know what version of Google he was using, but it didn't involve helping us try to win.
Some of the clues were hard, so we sort of stalked some other groups at times. But we figured out most of them with our own smarts and knowledge of downtown Pittsburgh.
We finished in 1 hour and 55 minutes...a very respectable time -- we thought in the middle of the pack. But when we got back to Finnegan's Wake, there weren't that many people there. When we clocked in, we found out we were roughly 15th out of 95 teams!! (Official results haven't been emailed out yet). We were only 10 minutes out of 5th place...which we easily could have made up....there's our goal for next year. The winners did it in 1 hour 10 minutes, so they must have sprinted the whole thing....freaks.

I was very proud of DB~ for fighting through her fall and resulting scrape...which was a nice bloody raspberry by the end. She was a real trooper and was the engine behind us finishing the race and finding all the clues correctly. I'm proud that she's not a quitter (when she could have after that fall) and that she is smart and semi-athletic.

/big e-kiss to DB~/

1 comment:

  1. Whoa..."semi-athletic"?!?!?! Plus, I'm sure your readers didn't REALLY need to know of my klutziness to gather a full vision of the race. Right, readers? Right. :) ~

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