4:30 came early this past Saturday. Up and adam an making some P and J's for the long day ahead. I picked up Nathan at 6:00, Soon discovered his brakes didn't fit on my rack, so we changed racks and put his Thule on my car....Expecting the worst, we called ahead to Jason to be ready for the same dilemna in Concord, Sure enough same problem, however Jason had his handy Sawzall and problem corrected within minutes. Off to Portland.

After plenty of staging, small talk, worry and porta-potties, the race got underway at noon.

Our first task was to do a orienteering relay using all 3 teammates. First guy did a loop finding 3 points, return then second guy, ect. I by default went first. This was done at a local high school, so it seemed fairly straightforward. We dashed away, and I quickly noticed Chris Naimie run the other way. My immediate thought, was he knew something I didn't, I stuck to my guns and managed to grab the 3 checkpoints fairly quickly and made it back to tag my partner, Jason, in second place. He sped off quickly, took the lead, lost the lead, and handed to Nathan who zipped around in good hurry. We mounted the bikes next probably in the top 5 overall, behind the elite teams.

Once we got on our bikes, I figured we could make up some excellent ground, which we did, until we took a wrong turn. We ended up taking a right too early, following some clearly lost team, and not taking the time to stop, study the map, and pick the best route. We just kept moving. By the time we couldn't see the other team, and we realized we screwed up, we met up with a couple of roadies who set us on the right path. For some reason Maine doesn't use the same road names on maps, they just change em all willy nilly without notifying race managment. After our at least :30 minute blunder we raced to the boat docks and finally started seeing other teams again. We donned our Orange Life vests and Gov't issued paddles to test our water skills. Most other teams had kayak paddles and sleek life vests....we had Nathan in his kids alligator knee pads, and Jason with his unzipped ziploc bag with the map in it.

It is tough to pass on the water, when you paddle for all your worth and make up 30 yards in 10 mintues, it hardly seems worth it, but we managed to pick up 5 places on the water with our generic equipment, and probably had our best leg of the race on the water.

Back on the bikes we started feeling good again about our position, we came into a checkpoint that looked like everyone missed and finally found and there were about 6 teams there all at once. Saw S & W and Chris and got on their tail. Followed them through a few checkppoints as our map was starting to deteriorate from wetness. S and W snuck by us after one check point just as our maps became unlegible. We had to wait for teams behind us to get through 3 check points, before our other map kicked in. This proved to be our slow time, as we got lost heading for Baxter school. Followed a team for about 20 minutes before we just started asking people, which worked and we found the school and off and running for the final leg. We made up some ground on the run, as our legs were plenty rested from our easy bike leg. One point was located on one of the Portland piers, we needed to check all the piers just in case and finally on our 7-8th pier we got it. The race to the finish was fun after that, zipping by a few teams, finding the leaf, and a downhill run through town to the finish.

All in all great race. 13th overall out of 30+ teams. We didn't deserve that well of a placing after our many, many errors.

1. Highlights for me was seeing Chris try to decipher a color map, being color blind.
2. Watching Jason zip out of the canoe in deep smelly sewer mud just to get a checkpoint.
3. Having Nathan run into one of his buddies who lived on the trail, and then having to say hi to the wife and kids, use the toilet, have a snack, while the other teams just kept on going. (we had no map at this point)
4. Having a frosty cold one at Grittys to end the day.