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GOALS ARA takes on The Savage

Jon Neely Team Goals ARA / 03.05.2006

One hundred and five teams! It’s been quite some time since I entered a race that had anything approaching one hundred teams. Recently, it seems, forty teams is a large field and twenty something is the norm. This past weekend Team GOALS ARA (Bruce Wong, Kristen Dieffenbach and Myself) showed up at Hibernia Park in Eastern Pennsylvania for a GOALS ARA produced event: The Savage. Sure, this was a sprint race and we tend to do longer stuff which naturally have smaller sets of interested participants. But one hundred and five teams was an unbelievable number to be standing in the midst of before the starting gun.

Right from the starting gun it was clear the Race Directors (Bill and Anne Gibbons) had an excellent plan for handling the volume of racers in such a small area. Captains sprinted about 150 meters to pick up a PVC tube from a pile in the middle of a nearby field. Each tube was sealed with end caps and tied shut. In each tube there was a passport containing the order of sections for your team. The course was divided into four sections: Biking, Running, Canoeing and a Special Tests Section. The sections were randomized on the passports. So roughly 25% of the field started on each section. Better still, the order of checkpoints within each section was left up to the racers. Differing opinions on route split the field up even further. In three hours of racing we only reached a punch at the same time as another team once.

Our passport had Special Tests listed first. Personally, I haven’t done anything like this in years. Remember the now defunct Hi-TEC/Balance Bar Sprint series? Where have you gone twelve-foot wall? Why have you abandoned me Crisco pit? I apologize for the moment of weepy nostalgia. There was nothing quite that elaborate here but some fun outdoor party games for children. For example: fill a vertical PVC pipe with water one cup at a time to retrieve a ping-pong ball within. By the way, the pipe has holes and you have to take turns being the person plugging the holes and running to get the water. Other tests involved balance beams, a cargo net crawl, hoisting a bag of sand and a lobster claw safety-line run.

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