THE EDGE ADVENTURE RACE, GREEN LANE, PA...

WE'RE #3!!!

"Get off of me you (expletive)," Graham said, referring to the pricker bush that had affixed itself to his legs while we were bushwhacking a portion of the trekking/trail running leg at The Edge Adventure Race in Green Lane, PA. At that time, it wasn't clear that we were going to hit all the checkpoints and finish the course as it was designed. This was a challenging 6-hour race.

In the end, our mini-epic adventure (which involved 15.5 hours in Sonnick's Pathfinder and a night of camping in a Montgomery County PA Park) turned out to be one for the record books--literally!

After we arrived at the race finish, checked in, ate a meatball sub (or two) and salad, we began our ritual of politely applauding for all of the teams that finished before us. Then IT happened. It was a shock. A moment of total disbelief.

There must be some mistake, we thought. Maybe they're mentioning our name because it's so cool? (We do get lots of chuckles and compliments on it.)

It turns out that the only thing that could have made our adventure more absurd actually happened--we won something.

3rd place in the 3-person, male division in fact!
It was surreal. We had to go up on the stage to get our prize packet, our medals and pose for a photograph. Weird. I'm pretty sure the uber-athletes in the audience thought it was weird too.

Needless to say, we are pretty psyched. We wore our medals all the way home, which solicited some strange looks in some rest stops in New Jersey and New York. And everytime one of us thought about that fact that we actually won something, we would laugh.

We'll pass along all the play-by-play details later. For the moment, we're just basking in the glory.

Now that we have medals, we're expecting sponsorships start roling in. Well, maybe not. If nothing else, maybe our friends will by us a beer to celebrate?

Well, we're three days away from the next race. This one is in Green Lane, PA. The team is planning to leave Vermont early Saturday morning (after a night of Halloween festivities). We've not paddled since the last race, but I think we'll be ok. There was the rather embarassing episode of loading last time though...two if us were responsible for dumping the canoe before we even got started. (The picture above shows the aftermath.) Anyway, I'm looking forward to the road trip, it should be a lot of fun. We'll take some photos and let you know how it goes.

Here's another picture of the 3 of us during another of our favorite activities, backpacking. In this picture we are on top of Butternut Mountain in northern VT (on the Long Trail).  After a day of hiking in the 95+ degree heat, you can see how happy we all look...

Welcome to the official blog for Team Runs with Scissors!

We're fairly new to this sport and thought that it would be fun to use a blog to chronical our training, adventures and other unrelated activities.

So far, we've participated in two races and there's a third race coming up soon.

Our first race was a 4-hour urban adventure race on a blistering hot August day in Burlington, Vermont. We finished (results) 10th out of 19 teams. And they gave us a free loaf of bread, a t-shirt, lunch and some funny multi-tool thing with a little compass! Kudos to the folks at www.runvermont.org for putting together a great race.

Our second race was a big one...the one that for nearly 4 months we had been training for. As it turns out, we needed every minute of training we had invested and then some.

The 12-hour race on September 17, organized by those crazy guys at Adventure Racing Unleashed (www.adventureracingunleashed.com), was AWESOME. Aptly dubbed the Pillage Plunder Booty Siege, and staged out of Smugglers Notch Resort, it's fair to say that this race may have changed our lives--forever.

Of the 20 teams that participated in this race, only 12 finished and only 2 finished the course as originally designed--and we're proud to report that we are among them. To call this race challenging would be a monsterous understatement. The pictures above show us at a one of the biking checkpoints and at pre-race registration the night before (where, by the way, we learned we had to be back at Smuggs for a 4:30 departure...there's nothing like 60-70 miles on 3.5 hours of sleep).

We'll post some of the other team shots shortly. If you want, you can check out all the pictures here!

Finally, our next race is coming up on October 30th. It's a 6-hour sprint race in Green Lane, PA. We'll pass along more details when we can.

Thanks for visiting us, we do hope you'll come back often.

Cheers!

Team Runs with Scissors