On Saturday, June 26th was the Great Urban Race's stop in Madison. This is basically a two-person team event (our team was myself and my lovely wife Jess) that is a scavenger hunt around the downtown Madison area. You can only use your feet or public transportation (aka a bus in a city like Madison) so there would be lots of hiking, running and learning to take a bus. I haven't been on a Madison bus since 1998 (and that was a bus that ran for free to curb drunken driving at 2am on the UW-Madison campus) and I have ran once this whole year...we were in for an adventure! The top 25 teams qualify for nationals in Las Vegas. We arrived at 11:30am for the noon start and soon realized that this was going to be hard. It was already in the mid-80s and humid out and we saw so many teams, I estimate around 300. Our friends Kendra and Jess also had a team so we agreed to team up when we got the clue sheet.
The clue sheet: Basically it was a sheet with 12 clues on it. We could skip one clue of our choice. You get the sheet when you start and you can try to figure them all out right away. There is no set order that you have to accomplish the clues as part of the sport was figuring out the best and most efficient route for doing the race. Knowing bus times and locations and being able to run fast and far were a definite advantage we didn't have. Here is a run down of the clues:
1. Go To Tenney Park beach and act out an improv skit judged by someone in the Monkey Business Institute
2. Head to the restaurant that claims "we're serious about fun food" and eat a delicious treat (Bluphies)
3. We had to find a mystery word by answering trivia like who the mayor is, the state tree, etc., which one phone call to Riz and some googling later turned out to be Wandos.
4. Buy a pet toy somewhere and donate it to the humane society in front of the Barrymore theater
5. Head to Wingra Boats and use a paddle boat to go out in the lake, head around a buoy and come back
6. A scramble (NISOCEN NOTANI) led us to Sconnie Nation store and we had to watch a 4 minute movie and answer 3 trivia questions about it.
7. At 115 State St (Ian's Pizza) we had to do an over the head pizza dough twirl
8. At Library Mall we had to do a circus activity
9. We had to play Tic Tac Toe and get three in a row of activities, almost all required a photo: honk a stranger's car horn, all teammates in front of a cow (real or fake), a penny from 87-90, shaking a dog's paw, stranger with 2 or more visible tattoos, single piece of fruit, pretending to dive into a real fountain, a job application, high-fiving someone in uniform.
10. Jess figured out a riddle that had us taking a photo of us in front of a street sign that had a double letter.
11. A word search got us to Tenney Park where we spun around a bat 8 times and then ran the bases
12. At certain GPS coordinates we had to eat an entire jalepeno pepper, ended up being Tex Tubbs Atwood.
Here we are with the clues planning out our route with the team Ooh Shiny.
The game plan quickly became, head to Atwood to hit the Barrymore and Tex Tubbs. We didn't have a bus map so we figured if a bus came down Willy we'd get on it. We ended up running/speed walking almost 2 miles to get to the Barrymore with one stop at a pet store to get a cat toy and one stop at the Russell St. sign for our photo.
It was then decided that Jess and Kendra wanted to go at a little more casual pace so we parted ways. We hit Tex Tubbs for the jalepeno pepper and Jess ate half and was burning. I took the other half and chewed once or twice and swallowed it.
We both felt like crap, Jess with a burning mouth and myself with a burning stomach. A gatorade and a Clif Bar helped stabalize the pepper as we headed towards Tenney. At Tenney a tattooed guy was fishing so we got the photo for tic-tac-toe. 
We did the dizzy bat challenge and headed to the beach. There we had to act out things with an ice scraper and talk about what we were doing without saying it. Our scraper was a bat and a tug-o-war rope and something else. 
We then waited 5 minutes for a bus to go downtown, the east side was done. Sweet, sweet air conditioning!!!
It was then decided that Jess and Kendra wanted to go at a little more casual pace so we parted ways. We hit Tex Tubbs for the jalepeno pepper and Jess ate half and was burning. I took the other half and chewed once or twice and swallowed it. We both felt like crap, Jess with a burning mouth and myself with a burning stomach. A gatorade and a Clif Bar helped stabalize the pepper as we headed towards Tenney. At Tenney a tattooed guy was fishing so we got the photo for tic-tac-toe. We did the dizzy bat challenge and headed to the beach. There we had to act out things with an ice scraper and talk about what we were doing without saying it. Our scraper was a bat and a tug-o-war rope and something else. We then waited 5 minutes for a bus to go downtown, the east side was done. Sweet, sweet air conditioning!!!
We got to State St and knew Ian's pizza was a block away so we did that between transfers. Dough spinning was fun! 
The buses were way behind, we probably could've knocked out all of State St at that point but oh well. We got on an already overcrowded bus to head west to Monroe St. Every stop had tons of teams waiting and eventually the bus was full and teams couldn't get on. It was insane how packed the bus was and they probably could've had a second bus equally as packed. I felt bad for the dozen or so people who weren't racing that Madison Metro didn't pick up either but what can you do? It took forever to get to Monroe St and then it was a mad dash to Wingra boats. We beat many of the teams from the bus and only had to wait about 3 minutes to get on the boat (Jess personally beat about 5 teams by filling out the waiver faster.) 
The boat took only about 3 minutes then the mad dash to Bluphies. Yummy, a cookie dough egg roll had to be fed from one teammate to another. Took an extra for energy. At this point the bus stop in front of Bluphies was packed. So we walked a block up the street to avoid that crowd. Soon that bus stop was packed so we went one more block and other teams followed. At this point someone was walking a dog so we got a photo of me shaking a dog's (Olie) paw.
A great move as some of the teams that waited at Bluphies couldn't get on the bus and we had our dog photo. This bus driver flew and before we knew it we were on campus.
The buses were way behind, we probably could've knocked out all of State St at that point but oh well. We got on an already overcrowded bus to head west to Monroe St. Every stop had tons of teams waiting and eventually the bus was full and teams couldn't get on. It was insane how packed the bus was and they probably could've had a second bus equally as packed. I felt bad for the dozen or so people who weren't racing that Madison Metro didn't pick up either but what can you do? It took forever to get to Monroe St and then it was a mad dash to Wingra boats. We beat many of the teams from the bus and only had to wait about 3 minutes to get on the boat (Jess personally beat about 5 teams by filling out the waiver faster.) The boat took only about 3 minutes then the mad dash to Bluphies. Yummy, a cookie dough egg roll had to be fed from one teammate to another. Took an extra for energy. At this point the bus stop in front of Bluphies was packed. So we walked a block up the street to avoid that crowd. Soon that bus stop was packed so we went one more block and other teams followed. At this point someone was walking a dog so we got a photo of me shaking a dog's (Olie) paw. A great move as some of the teams that waited at Bluphies couldn't get on the bus and we had our dog photo. This bus driver flew and before we knew it we were on campus.We got off at Sellery Hall so we could buy a piece of fruit at the Madison Market (kiwi) and head to Library Mall. I pretty much stopped taking photos at this point as we just wanted to get done and there wasn't much in the way of exciting on these last 3 stops. We had our choice of circus acts but one was getting 6 juggles in with 3 balls. Did that on the first try. Here we had two left, Sconnie Nation and Wandos and only had to do 1. At this point it was certain we weren't even in the top 100 teams so we decided to do both just in case we messed something up and to get the full experience. Wandos we had to throw a ping pong ball into a fish bowl. Jess nailed it on try #2. We also had to find a Bud Light beer cap. No one had one so I bought a Bud Light. $4 for a bottle in the afternoon? I slammed the Bud Light and we headed to Sconnie Nation and finished up the course. We pretty much had a 1 mile hike to the end and we even opted to skip the bus that was loading right in front of us, which was a bummer. We get a block from the finish and see the bus dump off 8-10 teams, all of who finished ahead of us then. Oh well, we ended up 70th place out of 211 finishers (and 267 total teams who started.) Perhaps next year we might have to train and try a little harder, we did alot better than I though. I was also happy that Ooh Shiny did end up finishing, 7 minutes before the cut-off. Wasn't sure if there were going to make it but they recovered nicely!
We then had to check in and thank god we did all 12 events because at Bluphies we did eat the egg roll but forgot to bring a flyer from it so that ended up being the one we skipped. The official results list that we recieved a penalty but that isn't true as no time was added so not sure where that came from. Since we finished at 3:30, had to go pick up Nina and be in Blue Mounds by 5pm, we really didn't stick around (saw the end of the US's World Cup loss at various stops). We made it to Blue Mound by about 5:15 for a cookout and movie night at Irbys which was the perfect recovery for a tough day.
