Death of the blog...

Dear readership, I mean Dad, I realized some time earlier this year that it requires too much time for me to try and keep the blog/journal of racing and travel so I am going to end the madness here.

As an adventure racing team we have developed many ways to track our team including the top 3 here:

Team website - http://www.dartadventure.com/
Facebook - Team DART site
Twitter

I am currently and will continue to be a contributor to the updates going on in all three places. If you are interested in the DART team or west coast Adventure Racing please check out the links above.

My friends and family will see my picassa account being active and get regular photo updates, pictures are usually better than stories anyways ;-) And I will still be using attackpoint to track my fitness/workouts.

This will be the last entry on this blog until I retire...not happening too soon as far as I can tell.

Hope to see you on the trails soon.

RVG

Colinoba 2010

One of my favorite underground Adventure Races, or birthday bashes went down on Saturday March 6th, in and around downtown Seattle. I think we ran between 8-10 miles throughout Seattle on an urban adventure of a lifetime. After climbing fences, dodging cars, getting our picture taken with a pink dildo and drinking a beer or three we were all smiles.

This was a fun way to hang with a lot of peeps from the local AR community, take a small break and see Seattle...all dressed up as mimes :-) That's right, this is how we do it:

2010 Colinoba

We are in training for the E-Fix in West Virginia in 3 weekends. We are looking forward to seeing a new part of the country and doing a new race. 2 guys and 2 girls toeing the line for DART; JVG, Hayes, Jenn Rinderle and myself. We probably wont do that race as mimes.

See you on the trails.

2010 - here we go

Off the radar lately, too busy to write about stuff.

Raced NGAR and took second. You can read about it here on the DART site.

Hit Colorado for some sun and powder.

Trying to figure out the 2010 calendar...more on this later.

Off Season

The season is officially over for DART and myself. I'm letting the body rest a bit and not doing anything called training for a while...now its just called biking, trail running, orienteering, paddling and skiing. G, Aaron and I are going to do the Deception Pass Dash next weekend which should be fun and I am looking forward to some dawn patrol sessions up at Snoqualmie. Both Jen and I have been getting out and assaulting the Cougar Mt. trails, as they are now in our back yard.

Something new for multisport:

Last week I experienced a world record set at a multi sport endurance event surrounding bacon, that's right I said BACON and it was called the Bacathalon. Erik "the Red" Denmark set a record for the most bacon consumed in 10 minutes...out of this world. It turns out I know some his friends and they filled me in on some of his feats, secrets of success and inside tidbits. He ate over 30 Habeneros in one minute...need I say more? I think not. Here he is getting ready to devour bacon at the first ever bacatholon.

Aftermath

Worlds are over, no one seemed to be sure what was happening during the race. Some would say a state of chaos others speculated on strategic mayhem. The website was not very helpful, I turned to a mosaic theory of piecing tidbits of info from the site, posted pictures and tweets into my own dillusional version of what was happening. I was wrong. Now that racers and spectators have had some time to sit back and write down their thought I wanted to post info that I found interesting and eye opening to the race:

*New* World Champion's thoughts

Great thread with lots of info on Attackpoint

Friends from Blackheart in Australia

Team Orion's thoughts

Adventure world Mag article by Untamed Adventurer, check him out on twitter too, he added the first real color to the race, thanks Untamed!

Wish I had more info from my team, but at this point they I understand that they were a bit confused and obviously took them a while to figure the formatt out. They wrangled a bit of support from a local who was to suport another team, but still were left out of the information loop and learned the hard way.

************************************
Motherload...Mari's team conquers, Glenn breaks finger...good weather, everyone is OK. Nice work Mari :-)

World Champs and Motherload

Everyone is out there racing or getting ready to race!

Aaron, Aaron, Seegs and Cyril are in Portugal getting ready for the 2009 World Championships... you can follow the race here.

Down in California Glenn and Mari are getting after it on day one of the Gold Rush Motherload. There is spot tracking and a cool map overview here.

Good luck and safe travels to everyone out there gettting after it. Can't wait to follow all the action.

2009 USARA Nationals

Good race, bad results. We worked well together and had a great pace when we were able to do work. Fitness was never an issue for us, we were fast and could pick it up when we needed to. Mechanicals and rookie mistakes got us in the end. We did not deserve to win... GraniteAR raced a good race and are the new National Champs, well done guys!

Here are our cliff notes from the race:

• -It rained 5" the day before the race so everything was under water and real wet/muddy.
• -Race started almost on time at a cool location.
• -Hammered out to lead on bike
• -Got flat tire
• -Hammered back to peleton
• -Got flat, found torn tire in tread (Not sidewall). Used a bar wrapper and duct tape to fix.
• -Hammered on Canoe, forgot to get CP 5 when we paddled past it.
• -Portaged 2 miles in kick ass recovery move with canoe, finished 15 minutes out of first
• -Bike, run, bike, flat, run, 2 Flats (Mari and RVG), switch RVG rear tire with Mari's front tire, problem solved.
• -Mud bog on bikes
• -RVG birthday celebration begins at midnight
• -Realized we did not bring second map, poop pants, then wait for team to follow on a large out and back section.
• -RVG got attacked by an armadillo on his bike. Almost decapitated critter with rear spokes.
• -Swam to an underwater earthen dam at 3:30am. RVG finds large snake in water under control flag, mostly likely poisonous type that likes the south. Glenn Tells RVG to throw a stick at it an get going
• -Crawled, bushwhacked in swamp and thorns for 2 hours, nearly found the CP and started over again. Glenn finds snake in another bog and runs away the wrong direction while RVG suggestes that Glenn just throw a stick at it a press on.
• -Hammered the mud bog.
• -Finish, eat, sleep, eat waffle house, sleep, last team at party since our room was next door.
• -Road trip after party to Gainseville with CPZero for Ice Cream.
• -Try to go to a cowboys game after dropping MC off at airport. Instead G goes to church at the hilton with Rev Jeremy and I people watched in the lobby.
• -Go to tequilaria to night cap in DFW airport.