Why was I exhausted yesterday? Well, I participated in an Amazing Race-like event that took place in the heart of Toronto. I really didn’t know it existed until a friend told me about it. He found a Groupon for the event and needed a partner to make a team. I agreed. He had two other pairs of friends and they all decided that we should all be an alliance. Fine by me. Given that there were about 250 or so teams, we wanted to do fairly well. At about noon we were all given a clue envelope. It had 12 clues, some of which told us to go directly to a certain location to do a certain challenge. Others had a puzzle involved that gave an address upon completion. Honestly, the clues weren’t so bad. Given that we were allowed to use Smartphones, we were able to get all 12 locations mapped out fairly easily. I was actually able to get some clues that required unscrambling by cross-referencing BlogTO or Torontoist listings. Those two sites are entirely useful resources. We ended up identifying three clumps of clue locations which we decided to attack one after another.

For travelling around we were told that we could only go on foot or by public transportation. Seems like for a lot of the day we were sprinting. You, the reader, should know that I am not a sprinter in the least. I can hold my own, but really I am a long haul type person. And if I waste all of my energy sprinting early on I’ll only end up burning out quickly. For the first few clues we were around a gaggle of women in pink who were obviously allied together. They seemed to follow us around. We finished the clues at about the same rate, so we saw a lot of them. We ran hard with them, and it seemed like we were all having fun being competitive. I remember one of them yelling: “Just follow the Asians!” Yeah. Classy. At a candy store clue they eventually left us behind. We were having a lot of difficulty identifying mystery Jelly Belly flavours. It was way more difficult than necessary. Seriously.

On some legs it was really difficult identifying whether it would be faster taking transit or running the distance. We made a few bad decisions here and there, but overall we made it through well enough. As we covered clumps, we often saw the same teams at the different stops. It was hard to tell whether we were ahead or behind since it was possible that they covered the clues in a different order than we had done. As we ran through the streets, I could hear strangers commenting how The Amazing Race might be going on through the city. Heh. Rookie mistake to think that. Where’s the film crew? By the last few clues the unnecessary sprinting had caught up to me. Along with a lack of food energy to keep me going I was starting to suffer dehydration. I was dry as hell, and all of the fluids I had brought along were done. I didn’t buy water because I figured that would slow me down. While my teammates were still sprinting I was slowing down to walk. It wasn’t pretty. Didn’t matter to me though. I knew that I’d contributed a heck of a lot to the team by clue solving, mapping, and planning. So there.

After our final task, we got on a bus to head back to the finish line. The bus was packed with people who were also heading back. As soon as our stop came up we all piled out and started bolting for the finish line. I swear, we had cut off a few lanes of traffic. I didn’t start it, but since someone already did I just followed along. We did really well. I think we came in at 3 hours and 24 minutes. We heard that the winners came in at 2:08. We also learned that we were in the top 100 of the 250+ teams. Neat! I swear, we had an awesome time. Could we have done better if I was able to run better? Sure. At the same time, taking transit more efficiently would have worked just as well. I’m perfectly content with my Smartphone and Google-Fu. I’m sure there were more legal tricks we could have done along the way, too. In any case, would I want to do this again next year? You bet. Even though I was feeling wrecked and exhausted after the fact, it was all well worth it. Great afternoon out.