The Amazing Race

 

If you missed yesterday’s post, you might want to go back and see the really meaningful way God met me in my nervousness about participating in our county’s version of The Amazing Race this past weekend.

            Probably most of you are familiar with the TV show by the same name. I’ve actually never watched it, but I have a friend who is a huge fan, so I was familiar with the general premise of the show. Our event Saturday is (clearly) a scaled-back version of the TV show.

            We registered in teams of four in this fundraising event that supported three local charities. Each team had to pay a base entry fee, but the team who turned in the most money got a five minute head start on the race. (Not us.) There were also a couple of advantages for fundraising winners #2 and #3. (Also not us.)

            They gave us shirts to wear, a sign to display in our car window that said we were race participants, and a cold-packed lunch to keep in our vehicle to eat in transit. We all met up at the county fairgrounds to get started. Every team chose a color at random, and they gave us an envelope of that color holding our first challenge address. They had organized all the routes so that the teams were heading in all different directions around the county and we didn’t all end up at the same place at the same time. We were the red team.

            As I said yesterday, Ryan and I were on a team with another couple from our church, and they said it was okay if I shared our pictures with you! (Sad news on the picture front: the rules prohibited the use of cell phones during the challenges. We could use them for a GPS in our car, but not during a challenge. So I have NO pictures from any challenges unless the site hosts took a picture. So far I’ve only found one from a site host online. Maybe more will surface eventually.)

            Here are some pre-race pictures:

            The race included 20 challenges in all. You could forfeit one if you paid an extra $50 at the location when you arrived to it, and I heard many teams did that, but we did every single challenge. I was pretty proud of that!

            I won’t bore you with the full list of everything we did, but I’ll tell you a few highlights here in a moment. But before I do, I’ll tell you that some challenges required all four of us to work together – either in unison as a team or individually in a relay fashion. Other challenges only required two people to participate while some took a break. Some challenges were very physical and others were more intellectual. And some were just fun, whimsical sorts of things.

            Our overall time mattered, of course, on how we placed, but every team also had the ability to have minutes subtracted from their time if they completed a challenge in under so many minutes or if they did something to make the challenge harder (and succeeded). In the end, we were (I think) the fourth team to arrive back, but we had almost an hour’s worth of minutes we could subtract, because we worked really hard at every single stop along the way!

            Here are some of the things we had to do:

·         The two guys kayaked around a bay (in our lake!) to find and retrieve some flags

·         All of us went to a gym and had to make a certain number of layups, free throws, three pointers, and we got a bonus if anyone could make a half-court shot. (Ryan did!)

·         At a church, we did a scavenger hunt where all the clues were in Bible verses. My mad skills in looking up verses from a book-Bible (no phones!) came in handy.

·         At a nursery, we had to alphabetize perennials based on their Latin names. My alphabetizing skills surfaced there!

·         At a fitness center, we each had to do two skills. Turns out no one in our group other than me liked to plank! Ryan SMASHED it on the rowing machine. All of us did really well here. I was proud of us!

·         We had to work together at a fire station to turn water on from the truck, run the hose, and use the water to knock a ball off a cone.

·         We had to make a hospital bed while holding hands.

·         At another fitness center, we did a mini triathlon.

    Here are a couple of pictures I found online:

During the race, I learned the following things about myself:

·         I can do more than I think I can.

·         I cannot hammer nails into a board.

·         I cannot do pickle juice shots.

·         Banana pudding with olives in it is disgusting.

It took us five hours to complete the race, and after all points were calculated, we came in SECOND!!!! I cried when it was over, not because we placed, but because I did something I never thought I could accomplish. For our teammates, this event was a bucket list item. I never dreamed it could BE a bucket list item for me, but it sure is something I’m proud of myself for attempting!