Raced with Team Cortez Chiropractic in last weeekend's Moab Adventure Xstream 12 hour race - what a great race!  If you've never tried an adventure race do it, do it now, cause it's more fun than anything else I've ever done.  A little biking, a little running, a scary as hell 300 foot rappel - I get affected by Tourette's (swearing like a drunken sailor) every time I look over that damn cliff - and a little, well way too much, kayaking in a duckie.  All mixed together it is really fun, check it out at:  http://www.gravityplay.com/adventureracing/

We had a great group campsite in the Goldbar campground, and Shane and Fergie, aka the DB, aka the Android, provided great entertainment as they tried to figure out how to rappel without a rappel device or even a caribiner, and how to paddle down the river without a paddle - Fergie figured he could paddle with just his hands and rapel by just hanging onto the rope like in P.E. class - okay, so I made that part up but it was close to that!

Our team settled into the front of the race with the World Champion Nike team and the top 5 in the World Crested Butte team until the climb up Long Canyon got real - then we faded like Floyd Landis sans testosterone (allegedly) and had to fight hard to hang on to a fifth place finish - though we were ahead of Team Nike until the half way point (but only because they missed a checkpoint).  Turns out we were missing our proverbial paddle in that one of the team had gotten the flu on Wednesday and had puked for 2 straight days and hadn't eaten for 4 - not a good combination when racing such a tough group of pros!  The race became a real battle to just survive and my hamstrings were humming some tune from Queen (bicycle - bicycle) for the first few miles of the run (did I mention that running sucks?).  The rappel was as always wet your pants scary, but I survived without letting go of the rope or smashing my face into the rock - so I'm getting better at it!  The second bike leg was flat and fast so I hitched up Emily (we actually can pull each other in adventure racing, like sled dogs) and took off with Kiv and Tom helping when I'd get tired - at one point we were all hooked together like a slinky and we were flying, imagine 30mph in a team time trial only you are hooked together - one crashes we all crash!  As we approached the boat put-in we saw team Bagelworks - last year's champions - just taking off so we got a little excited and gave chase in the kayaks, only to fry ourselves and go back into survival mode for the final hour - paddling a duckie in still water against the wind is really the true definition of hell!  Boring, hard, slow, and your ass hurts for days after!  Other than that though I love the kayak section!  :)

The next day Tom Ober and I went on a little recovery ride on the Kokepelli trail - I'd heard it is all flat dirt road, mostly downhill and really pretty boring - perfect for a little recovery spin right?  Ah, nine hours, 10,000 feet of climbing (or so it seemed), endless miles of technical 4-wheeler road and out of food and water for 3 hours, later, we made it back to camp.  That, Dave Harris, is a recovery ride - oh God I'm mutating like Dave and Lynda now!

If any of that sounds even a little fun to you check your hematocrit - and make sure they are red blood cells not the green alien ones that Dave, Lynda and now apparently I seem to have - what is really in those Healthfx products Shane?

rc