My First Adventure Race

Alright Gentlemen, here goes.
I convinced a good friend of mine, John, to partner up with me for a sprint length adventure race (I believe that means <6 hours) at Lake Perry SP right around Lawrence, KS. Bonkhard Racings Sunflower State Games Adventure Race. The website didn't go into much detail about the course, except to tell us that it consisted of 2-3 miles paddling, 10-15 on mtb, and 4-6 hiking/trail running. Sure why not, I feel like I'm better than average at all of those, and my buddy, while having only 1 bicycle outing on off-road trails under his belt, is a college runner and a pretty well rounded athlete. We'll be fine.
Friday evening after work we headed to KC where we shacked up with a college friend of John's, and got our things prepped for the following morning. The plan was to depart KC around 5:45, and arrive at the park around 7 a.m. 5:15 rolls around, and we're both stiff from a bad nights sleep, but moving and ready to get out nonetheless. We got in the car and had some breakfast in the form of clif bars and trail mix, and headed down the hwy 70 toward Lawrence. We got off at the Lawrence exit, passed a gas station, and headed north toward the park. After driving for almost 15 minutes, I noticed that we hadn't passed any more gas stations, the roads were looking pretty desolate and my tank was approaching E. Worry sets in. I turned us around and headed back to 70 to fill up at the station that we had passed. No big deal, we can spare the time. Filled up, and turned back toward the park. We passed the point that we had previously turned around, and then we passed a couple of nice looking gas stations, shit. Kept driving and finally spotted the big sign for Lake Perry SP, and we turned in. The main road took us by many campsites, and around the giant reservoir, over a dam, and with the clock only a few minutes from 7:30, we were wondering why we hadn't seen any race signs, or signs of a race taking place. When 7:30 hit we were on the other end of the lake that we had began at, and panic had taken over. There was some loud cussing and my voice tone was one of worry that I had just made our trip completely pointless. Finally after seeing very few people in the park, we saw a ranger and he informed us that we were on the wrong side of the lake, and that we had in fact turned into the park 1 turn too early. By now its 7:45, 15 minutes after check-in closed, and 15 minutes late for the pre-race meeting, the latter we would come to find out being pretty important. So here I am, whizzing around state park roads at 65 mph, trying to get us the campground where the start is.
As we rolled into the Turkey Run campsite, the racers were lined up at the start, and someone was singing the national anthem. I kicked John out of the car to go see if we could still check in and race and I went and parked and prepped the bikes. He came back with a passport and map with 11 checkpoints on it, said we were cool to go, so we packed up and headed out about 10 minutes after the starting gun shot off. We ran about a half mile to the water, grabbed a canoe, loaded it in the water, and started paddling. Over the 1.5 mile canoe we were able to overtake a few teams, and while some may say that our extra exertion on the water was useless, it was just what I needed to get my body warmed up. We got back to shore, stamped our 2nd checkpoint (1st was at the start), and followed the rest of the racers toward the woods to find checkpoints 3, 4, and 5. Here is where we made our first mistake. Instead of tracking ourselves immediately, we followed some racers into the woods and onto a trail before we took a serious look at the map. Checkpoints 3 and 4 were never found, even after marching over what seemed to be all of the trails the park had to offer. This ordeal took about and hour and a half. No one else was around, and we didn't really have any idea where we were. We hopped onto a nearby road, found ourselves, and headed toward checkpoint 5. Once there we realized that we had missed some critical details in missing the pre-race meeting. On our first 2 checkpoints there were race officials that stamped our passports, and we were expecting to have people doing the same at the rest of the checkpoints. Well it turns out that we were supposed to be locating orienteering flags that were hung from trees, not dudes in lawn chairs with coolers of beer, camped out and creeks and such. Anyway, by this point we had decided that it was no longer a race for us, and that we just wanted to push through the rest and get the best time we could. Checkpoint 6 was back at the start line, and it was there that we would mount the bikes and ride to 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, and finish. While jogging back to the start we were passed by two groups on their bikes, heading to the finish. Had to laugh because clearly we screwed up pretty bad if people were finishing already. No big, we were still having a great time. Got on the bikes and headed to the trailhead. We took our time on the trails, making sure to make the correct turns, and still failing. After finding the remaining checkpoints the only way back to the start was by road, and up one monster of a hill. I was pretty stoked that even after all of the mess, I still felt well enough to pedal the singlespeed up that hill, and encourage John to stay close on my tail and push to the finish. We did, and there were only 5 teams behind us. However the missed CPs would kill us. We ended up getting 2nd…to last. One team DNFd so YEEAAAHHH. 41st out of 42, and damn proud of it. Things can only go up from there.
Lessons learned:
-Arrive early, plan ahead
-Don’t follow other teams unless they are going the way that you yourself decided to go
-Sprint races probably don’t require bringing an abundance of food and water
-Use the map, correctly
-Pace yourself, but don’t stop moving
-No matter how bad things go, and even though the odds may seem heavily against you, this is supposed to be fun, and a team can still lose with style and class.
-Let race organizers know how much you enjoyed the race, they appreciate it and without these people we would all be bored.

Results Team Lame Name