Desert Rage III Race Results

AR Josh / 09.12.2005

Adventure racing is a funny sport. In the beginning you're clueless as to how everything works and the objective is simply to finish and have a good time. Stage 2 is to do better and iron in specific sport
disciplines in which you are weak, and to become better at navigation. Stage 3 is placing top 5 or top 10 and feeling solid about the result. I should note that for me I thought we would get to top 10 and just be complacent, but I was wrong. Next thing you know we were getting pretty decent and even won a few races last year.

The races we didn't win we still placed very well in no matter who the competition was and what state the race was held. Now this leads to stage 4, the "we've done this a while now, are confident in our skills, we'll just do fine" stage. This one is funny in the not so funny way. Basically this is the stage when you expect to place well, but weird things start to happen like marking coordinates wrong, making dumb navigational errors, sink a canoe, struggle on mystery events and so on. 2005 sums up stage 4 pretty well, but as we have neared the end of the year I think we have reawaken and are now back in the groove for a solid race season next year.

The DR3 this past weekend was the series closer for the Desert Rage race series. I heard that 150 people made it out to race between the short and long course options. Temperatures were perfect and with a dark 5am race start it started off with a nice change in scenery.