22nd February 2009 / 2 comments

We’d been feeling a little bored since being back in the States, so decided to take on something outside of our normal comfort zone – The Great Urban Race. Sort of like a mini Amazing Race, it is a series of twelve clues covering 6-9 miles through the Tampa Bay area with 5 hours to complete the course.
Whether it was standing on stage at the Improv to deliver a joke, lunging through a grueling Boot Camp at Lifestyle Fitness, or buying food items to deliver to Tampa Bay’s 2nd Harvest – the first Great Urban Race of the year brought out the lighter side of all who participated.

By 11am on Saturday, most of the 136 teams were congregating at Gaspar’s Grotto in Ybor City. Cheryl and I were running under the team name What Boundaries? Live Your Dream!, we were joined by teams of Mojito Banditos, Boozehounds, Thing One and Thing Two, Oceanic Airlines, Where’s Waldo, and the final winners of the race, Yay Broccoli!

At noon, the envelopes with twelve clues were given out and it was a sprint to the start. Since we knew the race would cover Tampa, Channelside, Hyde Park, and Ybor, our strategy was to grab the cable car first, take it to the end of the line while reading and deciphering what clues we could on the way. We’d do the clues far away first, then work our way back to Ybor.
It was an incredible day. Racing down streets, calling friends and family close by to look up Tampa trivia, a good joke, or to help find a bus (none were running on Saturday, so WE found ourselves running instead), interacting with strangers, and making frantic Google searches on the cell phone to find a phone number for the place we’d have to feed each other fried cheese and take a picture to prove it.
We hit the DETOUR clue hard. Find a box of grape Mike and Ike’s candy or a copy of The Boat Shopper. At every store along the way we were met by someone smiling behind the counter, and before we could even ask, they would say, “No, we don’t have what you are looking for. Many people have been here asking.”
Many people? Just how many were ahead of us? Our goal for the day had been to NOT be last. Out of three hundred people, certainly our odds were pretty good. We kept on. Running across the Platt Street Bridge, the Kennedy Bridge, Bayshore Drive, Hyde Park, The Forum, Ybor City, and all through the University of Tampa to find an “anti-gravity rock” – it never seemed to end.
Along the way we discovered exactly what this race is all about – learning about the city you live in, seeing it in a new light, making new friends, and challenging yourself to move outside of your normal boundaries. We were running down the streets, finding secret pathways we’d never knew existed, passing restaurants we’d read about but had never tried, helping other teams complete their clues, and all the time having a blast.
Our finish time? An impressive two hours and fifty-seven minutes out of the five hours allotted. We were number 41 of 136 without other teams penalties figured in (if you skipped a clue, you received a thirty-minute penalty). Not too bad at all.
Of course now our bodies are protesting mightily about all of the running we’d done and will be sure to let us know every time we try to move over the next few days, but it was so worth it. The Great Urban Race was a Great success!