Urban Dare 2012

Yesterday DB~ and I did the 2012 Pittsburgh Urban Dare.  This was our 3rd year in a row that we have done it.  In 2010, we finished 15th out of 85 teams and went from the North Shore into Pittsburgh and back.  In 2011, we finished 34th out of 270-some teams and the Dare took us from the South Side to Oakland and back.

This year there were again around 250-some teams and we finished 27th in a time of 2 hours and 6 minutes. We came into this Dare in perhaps the worst shape of our lives and had the modest (albeit perhaps unrealistic) goal of finishing in the top 15%.  With our 27th place finish, we accomplished that goal.  This year's Dare started on the North Shore at McFadden's and took us into Pittsburgh.  We then mapped out our route to get the clues on the North Side (Buhl Planetarium, Children's Museum, Heinz Field, Science Center, and Commons/Federal).

Both of us are feeling pretty sore today, but we're glad we did it.  There were piles of teams younger than us, with young toned girls in workout shorts and muscle shirts, guys all ripped up with muscles on top of muscles...but we were smarter than most of them.  We solved the clues quicker and planned out a tight route through Pittsburgh and the North Side.  We mostly speed walked it, with some intermittent jogging tossed in,  but I was proud of how we did.  The winners did the Dare in 1 hour and 31 minutes -- hats off to them.

Hopefully we can get in a little bit of better shape for a potential 2013 Urban Dare.

Go on, I Dare you

It's pretty well established at this point that DB~ and I are huge nerds, but we're also athletic (sort of) nerds too. We enjoy hiking, geocaching, kayaking, watching DB~ stomp me at basketball, that kind of stuff. But we really enjoy competition first and foremost, especially if it is modeled after The Amazing Race, DB~'s favorite show.

Last year we teamed up to do Urban Dare Pittsburgh (15th out of 95 teams) and Diamond Dash (8th out 200+ teams) within a month of each other. In October of 2009, we recruited one of my friends and one of her brothers to come in 1st place at Transit Treasure Hunt in downtown Pittsburgh. Each of these combines solving puzzles or clues and doing challenges then quickly either running the course around the city or riding a bike, like during Diamond Dash.

This year, Urban Dare is on Saturday, Diamond Dash is May 21st, and Transit Treasure Hunt (after a year hiatus) is in mid-June, so we're pretty psyched for these three. We just got back from doing some scouting of the South Side. We catalogued key memorials, pieces of public art, restaurants and bars with funny names, churches, and parks.

Both of us felt we didn't give our best effort last year. DB~ tripped and did a yard sale 10 minutes into it on the North Side, right by Bettis 36. She ripped her jogging pants and bloodied her knee. I wrenched my knee pretty awful about halfway through and peg-legged it the rest of the way. We also should have planned our route better at the start of Urban Dare.

If you are reading this and did Diamond Dash last year (there's approximately a 0.002% chance of both those things occuring), we were the team where the guy did the whole race on an adult tricycle, due to my irrational dislike of bicycles. I broke my leg when I was 10 after falling off my bike and have never been on one since, but because I love DB~ so much I told her I would ride a trike for Diamond Dash. She rode a bike like a normal person and I rocked the heck out of that trike.

But first things first and that's Urban Dare. I want a top 5 finish this year!

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~/