Josh and I ran in the Great Urban Race a few weekends ago (GUR). My dad was gracious enough to take on an extra day with the monster Ben so Josh and I were kid free on race day.
We arrived at the Boat Basin around 11:30a to pick up our race numbers and t-shirts. I wish I could say I had pictures of some of the costumes people ran in…but I don’t. People were super creative, though how you can run in most of them is beyond me. It seemed like there was a definite split in the crowd, A)those into costumes and b)those actually trying to win the race. We fell into the latter with our LONG SLEEVED Ed Hardy shirts. I am fairly certain most people didn’t realize we actually were in costume. It’s a sad day when we are mistaken for people who may wear Ed Hardy un-ironicly (yes, I know that isn’t a word).
Promptly at noon clues were handed out, nobody waited until go, and everyone tore into them. I immediately called our phone-a-friend and got down to action with deciphering clues. We were able to solve all but one clue almost immedialtely and too to mapping out a route. The one we couldn’t solve,take a picture in front of the pictured clock at a specific time, we figured we would either skip or figure out on the way.
Our route had us starting on the east side in the mid-40’s, crossing back to the westside, head down the west side, then return to the middle pretty much before heading to the finish line which was back at the Boat Basin. (We later realized we had made a mistake on one clue that actually would have changed the route we took but no way to predict that at the time)
We headed off to our first stop, Dylan’s Candy store, and made what was probably our biggest mistake of the race. We ran there. It was less than three miles but took a ton of our energy very early in the race. We should have waited for the cross town bus and conserved our energy for later in the race when we would have had no other options for transportation than our own two feet. Mid run we realized that the clue we couldn’t get was actually at the Fuller Building (41-45 East 57th Street and Madison). This was a bit confusing because Fuller Building is also the former name of the Flatiron building but I used to work next to the Flatiron and knew this clock wasn’t down there. We were lucky this didn’t take us too far from our path and rerouted to head here first. We found another team of racers once we arrived and felt confident we were in the right place. We waited only about 5 minutes and had our picture taken in front of it and then dashed off to Dylan’s where we had to take a picture in front of the chocolate bunny making bunny ears.
From there we raced across the city to some clues that were on Ninth and Tenth Avenue (we did take the cross town bus this time and it was SLOW). After some knot tying, deciphering braille and beer tasting, it was time to start heading down. This unfortunately is where mistake number two occurred. Tenth Avenue heads uptown so we should have headed back to Ninth to get a bus downtown. Unfortunately, our bus map checking on our phone misled us into thinking we could head over to Eleventh Ave and catch a bus down. We soon learned, there is no bus on Eleventh Ave so Josh and I were stuck running again. This time it was only a little over a mile and a half but we were beat. We did finally arrive at Chelsea Piers but we were exhausted.
Once there, I had to run around the track once and Josh had to rock climb. Neither of these activities were challenging and off we went again. We thought we only had to travel one avenue to reach our next clue but this is when we realized that we had in fact done some incorrect math to find the next address. While we thought we had to only go one avenue, it was actually about five and it was a real struggle to continue keeping up the running. We finished our final two clues (take a picture in front of a case with fake body parts and feed each other a chocolate dumpling at Rickshaw Dumpling) then we headed off to the subway. Thanks to the 1 train going local right before our stop, we found ourselves running 7 extra blocks once we exited the train. We were very very very tired. BUT, despite being tired, when faced with a foot race for all of those 7 blocks with 3 other teams, we managed to hold on and beat 2 of them into the finish.
We were pleasantly surprised with our own mini cheering section of my dad and Ben as we hit the finish line and could finally sit down for a moment. We quickly realized we were nowhere near the top of the finishers and immediately began analyzing our race. Have I ever mentioned we are competitive??
In the end, we can in 99th place out of 355 teams. Not what we strived for, but not terrible either. When we calculated the distance we actually ran and found it was over 9 miles, we felt a bit better about our finish.
All in all a fun day and I would recommend it to all who are considering trying it in the future.
