Bell City Chase Toronto |June 24 edition|

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Nathan has an amazing post about our race!!! I honestly couldn't wait to blog all about it!
The morning of the race Nathan and I walked to Yonge-Dundas square-the official starting line. We got there super super early and I had to sit there with knots in my stomach for like a whole entire hour before the festivities began. I was so excited yet so nervous at the same time, I guess that combination equals a feeling of wanting to puke. Anyway, finally around 9:30 they started a warm up and announcements. Whew, something to take my mind off things. Only Nathan starts acting like a loser-face attempting to Tai-Chi dance and I pretend I don't know him. Only our matching hats that Erin made for us gave me away...
Finally the host got up to speak and we all cheered. I really felt like a camp counsellor could have done a much better job. All I thought of was Sarah, Erin, Mike etc, that would have us racers ready to go camp style. Anyway, at this point, something happened that made my heart sink. Nathan told me that he was going to get on tv no matter what. I sighed thinking to myself, annoying boy...but little did I realize that he was going to rope me into this stunt. The host asks for two volunteers...Nathan jumps up and down, I laugh and then the host says: "okay you, yes you, jumping up and down..." I'm like, shoot. Nathan grabs my arm and pulls me toward the stage, while I mutter, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you the entire time...We get onto stage and the host tells us about a new element called Friend or Foe. Luckily I pick the right card, the one that says 'good news' and we win gift certificates for the RunningRoom, otherwise, Nathan would have been shaving off his eyebrow in payment for his 5 minutes of fame as a result of the bad news card. Silly Nathan. You won't learn will you, at least I am prepared now that this will probably continue to happen throughout life...I'll better prepare myself next time.
Anyway, the race is about to begin and I whisper to Nathan, "hey, we don't have clues yet". The host then tells us that in order to start the race we have to run to one of two fire stations. Nathan and I have no idea where either are and everyone just starts running. I have to say that one of my biggest pet peeves on the Amazing Race is when teams don't figure out clues/directions for themselves and just follow...and what did we do right away? We followed the hundreds of other teams running toward one of two fire stations. Which one did we go to? I still have no idea. But we got our clue sheet and then after staring at it blankly realized we knew NOTHING about Toronto. I glanced at the paper and saw Union station so we took off. We called my mom along the way and got her to google a couple of places, but we could have been sooo much smarter. We should have given her every clue, every location and then got her to plot out the best route with the least amount of time between ten checkpoints in order to make it back to the finish line as fast as possible. However, we just made decisions on the fly and although this was good at the time to keep going, we ended up paying for it in the long run. But a huge thankyou to my lovely mom for helping us out so much throughout the day. I thought I might be annoying her but nope, she told me after that she was so excited to be a part of the race that she didn't even care to give up a whole Saturday to look up clues on google. Love you mom, you're a true hard core racer at heart!
Anyway, the checkpoints were pretty cool. Nathan outlined all the checkpoints we visited so I won't repeat that part. My favourite stations were the basketball station where we rocked out our foul shots while other teams stripped...and getting to meet this eleven year old kid who knew like every world cup soccer team and flag.
The thing was, Nathan and I were killer at all the challenges, we just were awful navigators and our lack of knowledge about Toronto killed us for sure. It was too bad we only finished 9 checkpoints, I know we could have done much better.
One of the girls in my office was in the race too and she is this super athlete marahthon runner, and she got 9 done too, which made me feel alot better. Plus, I didn't want to be the loser in the office that couldn't even finish the race.
Anyway, Nathan and I had alot of fun throughout the day. I wanted to kill him at points, but that went away and overall we had the best time ever. So much so that we'd even do it again!!! And I know Nathan wouldn't do it if I was too annoying as a partner so that makes me happy. We'd really like to get a few teams to sign up to do it with us so we could compete against each other and race our friends rather than just strangers. I've already challeneged my sister and her fiance as well as my mom and dad. Hopefully Mark and Krista will take us up on the offer too...any other Amazing Race fans out there or those I missed...feel free to join us!
Side bar: Anyone interested should DEFINITELY sign up for the next City Chase in Toronto, this August 26th! Seriously, we had a blast.
All in all, I got to cross off a life goal today on my 'LIFE TO DO LIST' and that was exciting...I can't wait until next year, but boy am I sore today. Make sure to start training. I guess Nathan and I will put those RunningRoom gift certificates to good use in order to improve for next year.

posted by Rachel Pede @ 12:00 AM   2 comments