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Really dumb awesome idea

September 1, 2018 (Morning)

Exercise Type: Bike

Comments:
Andy Beast Garin and I signed ourselves up for an urban bike orienteering race. What this means is that at 10 o’clock in the morning we and a dozen competitors were handed a unlabeled map of five Boston suburbs with various locations circled. Our goal was to reach as many of them as possible within the next 90 minutes and report back a particular piece of information about each place such as the number on a telephone pole or a date on historical marker to prove that we’d been there. What this meant in practice Is that it turned suburban Boston into a giant game board on which we raced around with wild abandon barely dodging cars, other bikers, and bewildered pedestrians, frequently consulting the map And counting the number of intersections till we had to turn since there were no names on the map and we weren’t allowed to use GPS. Since Andy is much handier with directions my role was mostly to look for the The designated telephone poles, signs and other identifiers we had to report back. We ended up winning the race by default; it turned out all the other bikers had entered the three hour division. Crazy workout and a lot of cool parks and streets and trails we didn’t know about revealed to us along the way. A bit dangerous and a lot of fun. Afterwards I hopped in my car and rushed home so that I could change into dress clothes and bike over to the political science conference that I was already late for. Nothing wakes you up in the morning for a day of meetings like a bike race