We are fast running out of summer, which means the time for frivolities is running out, too. I did manage to have time for one more adventure race this summer. This was was the shortest I’ve done, a mere four-hour sprint called the Summer Quest. After the twenty-eight-hour race a month ago, I was wondering how they could make a four-hour race interesting. But the guys at Infiterrasports clearly can.

One of the great things about southeastern Michigan is its abundance of parks. These are generally not your Central Park variety, but uncultivated, wild forested areas that display Michigan’s native swamps, thickets, briers, and poison ivy growths in a glorious way amid the suburban sprawl. This race took place in Oakland County’s Addison Oaks park, another discovery for me.

The race was billed as a beginner-friendly outing, and it meant the navigation was on the easy side. In fact, two of the disciplines used no navigation at all: The race began with a quick and dirty (yes) trail run on a marked course, though definitely not a trail: there was bushwhacking, and the was hip-deep wading, as checkpoint 3 was in the middle of a swimming area. Also, there was a fabulous, six-plus-mile single-trail mountain bike section, all on a marked course. But there was navigation, too. An optional paddling section — canoes for twosomes, kayaks for singles — involved some very easy but extremely muddy navigation. Some checkpoints had a bit of crowding, on account of the large number of racers and the short distances. This meant that many impatient racers — I might have been among them on occasion — got out of their boats early and waded through the muddy waters to the punch the checkpoint. One checkpoint was submerged in the middle of the lake, but it ended up not being as difficult to find as you’d think.

Photo courtesy of Infiterra Sports.

This is the map for the final navigation section. I missed the easy CP 21. Blah.

The real navigation was left for the final segment. The checkpoints were clustered in two areas, one relatively easy and one a bit tougher. (Rankings are on the basis of checkpoints achieved and only secondarily on time.) The group hadn’t really spread at all during the trail run; the paddling spread folks out a bit more, but only a bit. But the time we biked, groups were bunched at all anymore, but the differences were still pretty minimal. I had gotten all of the nineteen checkpoints when I began the final orienteering section an hour and forty-five minutes into the race. I decided to go for the harder part first, figuring most other people would do the opposite. (These CPs could be reached in any order.)

Despite my ambivalent past with orienteering — twelve goddamned years of mandatory orienteering in school PE — I feel relatively decent about my navigation skills. Most of the checkpoints were OK. None were ridiculously easy, but the distances between them were short, almost always less than half a mile, and I knocked them out at a steady pace. One of them, CP 30, was advertised as a difficult one. It was the furthest out checkpoint, in the middle of a swamp with no other helpful topographical features to identify it by. In other words, one actually had to take a very good compass bearing and count one’s steps to know when one got to it. Usually in these races you can sort of eyeball the bearing, so that was a change. As it happened, I got to within forty meters of the CP, and since this was actually open swampland — and quite runnable to boot — it was no problem.

Unfortunately, a much dumber sort of error cost me a slightly higher placement. Having done the hard part, I headed to the easy part, which was quite doable. The clock was ticking, though, and on the second-to-last checkpoint, a bike trail not on my map got me confused. Had I had more than eleven minutes to get the other remaining checkpoint and run to the finish, I’m sure I could have regrouped, but I ended up missing one easy checkpoint in the race.

Still, that got me to the seventh place overall, so I’m not complaining.

Oh, what’s up with the title of the post? Two things: First, I registered my “team” (of which I was the captain, lead navigator, and the custodian) as “The Finn with a Tribal Tattoo.” And, boy, you know us goddamn’ ferg’ners are an invasive species, if any is (at least if you ask white Arizonans). The other invasive species were the originally Chinese multiflora rose, which some of you might actually have in your gardens. Pull them out forthwith! They spread everywhere, including the native forests. Michigan already has plenty of really nasty prickly things — blackberries, buckthorn, for example — for us to need any more. Just look at my knee here: blackberries could have done it all on their own, and the multiflora rose was just an injury to injury.