Adventure Xstreme Race - Moab (April 08)

I know this happened a couple months ago, but I thought I might add it to the blog to make things a little more exciting.

Beginning January, 2008, my brothers (Aaron, Jeff, & Brant) and I began training for the Moab Adventure Xtreme Race!

Yeah, that's us to the right here, we're the only guys actually looking in the direction of the camera. This was the beginning of the race...our nerves were high and the potty break became more frequent for us the closer we got to the starting time.

As mentioned, we started training for the race in January. The race took place the first weekend in April. So, we spent 4-5 days a week for three months to training for this rockin' awesome race!

Here are your race details: the race began with a 10 mile flat water kayak. Some may say that's not too bad! Well, I would like to emphasize the "flat water" part. If you have no upper body strength, and not to mention upper body endurance, then you would have spent a little more time on the river than you wanted. Believe me, it took effort to paddle consistently for 10 miles. We managed to paddle the distance within 1 hour...not too shabby! (If you look closely enough, I'm the guy looking up toward the camera. I was blowing my sweet wife a kiss...I know, I'm sexy!)

As soon as we were finished with the kayak we were on our bikes. I never knew I could spend this much time on a bike and still want to bike again later in life. The first half of the bike started it's way through Long Canyon. While biking it, I figured out why they called it Long Canyon...it's long! It's also up hill the entire time...talk about a leg burner!

Our "long" journey soon took us out to an area called Gemini Bridges. We got a break from our up hill climb and we descended to the bottom of Gemini Bridges. This wasn't all that easy considering our bike trail followed a river wash...sand is not easy to bike in. We found ourselves walking a lot in this area.

By the time we got to our check point we had traveled 26 miles by bike. We left our bikes at the bottom of canyon and changed into our running shoes. As we changed into our shoes we admired the people that were faster than us already rapelling down the side of the 275' cliff. We knew we would have our opportunity, but first we had to run 6 miles to get to the top. Yes, we ran up hill most of the time!

Our 6 mile run took us almost 2 hours, but we finished and that's all that mattered. It was now time to rappel! This was the highlight for me...I love the thrill of descending a rope 275'. Good Times!

Ufortunately the rapell ended quickly and we were back on our bikes...the next destination was the finish line. We biked out the way we came, so we were back on the river wash and making our way out of the Gemini Bridges canyon area. Since we descended into this area, now we were biking up hill to get out. By the time we got out of this area we were practically out of water, I had a flat, and our bodies were wasted...we wanted to be done!

Well, if you remember Long Canyon we were heading right for it, except this time we were anticipating it. We traveled up Long Canyon previously, and now it was all down hill. It's interesting to bike down hill for a long period time. The down hill was so long, fast, & bumpy I had a hard time peeling my hands off the handle bars when we were finished.

Just in case you were wondering, the final distance of the bike came to 52 miles. I was very saddle sore!

Needless to say my brothers & I finished the race. By the time we had reached the finish line 10 hours and 45 minutes had passed. We celebrated by kissing our wives and then heading back to the hotel where we remained, in bed, until the next morning.