City Chase Seattle

Ok, now I'm a little tired. After doing the triathlon last weekend, and Holley and I upping our workouts and now the City Chase, I'm feeling it a little bit. In fact, Friday the day before the City Chase, Holley and I rode our bikes into town, swam 30 laps and rode back home. So that means we swam almost a mile in the pool and then rode our bikes for about 16 miles. Needless to say, we were a little spent, but not worn out. Then the next day Andy and I got up at 5:30 a.m. to drive to Seattle to do the City Chase. On the way down, I kept thinking, "What are we doing? I am so tired!" but once we got there I was wired and we had a great time! It felt a little like we were in college again, running around at the University of Washington, riding the bus to different areas, with just us two and no kids along.

City Chase was a little different than our last one. In this race we had to actually do activities rather than just taking a picture of ourselves at the site. This also means that we got much fewer pictures because we were trying to finish the activities and get done and race to the other site as fast as possible. So some I will explain and others you can see us. If you ever get a chance to do a City Chase, do it!

Before the race started:

We started out in Westlake Park in downtown. They were going to give us 14 tasks and we had to complete 10. In order to get our clue sheet we had to answer/do 9 out of the 10 questions they would read aloud to us. The questions were:
1. How many bookstores in the readers guide to good . . . (I missed this part). . .in the Seattle Weekly. We counted 10, but there were really 12. They gave it to us anyway.

2. How many Palm Centro phones have been sold to date? Over 2 million

3. Both teammates had to put their shirts on backwards. Easy, easy!

4. Show a tan line. Easy because I just did a tri last weekend and you always get one from being outside exercising for 3 hours!

5. A red lipstick kiss on one partner's cheek. Easy, since there was a Sephora store right there I went in and put some lipstick on and planted a kiss on Andy's cheek.

6. What other city is City Chase going on in today? Regina, Sask., Canada.

7. A live animal, humans do not count. There was a homeless person that had a dog, so we used her dog for a tip.

8. Find a non-participant that is the same height as one of your team members. Didn't do this one.

9. Temperature today in Marrakesh, Morocco. 32 degrees C.

10. Who carried the American flag in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies? Lopez Lomong.

You might wonder, how did we get some of those answers? James was our go-to guy for trivia answers. He got us answers to question #2, 6, 9 and 10. Thanks James!! We got out of there within 30 minutes and headed straight for the 'Sea-"Fare"' Chasepoint. This clue read:

Nemo, Flipper and Willy all wanted to be free. These all fall into a category of the type of challenge this will be. Pike Place Market is where you should go and try to find City ____ Market. This Chasepoint was with the roll of the dice. Depending on what you rolled on the die you either had to eat swedish fish (if you don't know, that is candy) or a herring (yes, a real, dead, herring). So the deal was, roll a 1, you got swedish fish, roll anything else you got a herring. Luckily I rolled a 1 and got out of there fast!

So at this point we had 2 tasks completed, our next was trivia again and we had to get it checked at one of only two Chasepoints. So as we were running to Pike Place Market Andy called James and got the answers to the questions. The clue read:

Seattlites: Flip over this page to find trivia answers you'll need to find. Research and complete this task in between others to be efficient and save some time. Please check in your answers at AdventX or Circus School. Trivia:

As suggested above - once you have answered 10 of the 12 following questions you can check your answers in Only at BUCKET HEADS or CIRCUS SCHOOL. (They made a mistake on this one, but luckily it didn't hurt us)
1. What was the first skyscraper built in Seattle? Smith Tower
2. What year did Pike Place Market first open? 1907
3. How many inches of rain does Seattle average in a year? 36
4. How many stairs are in the Pike Place Hill climb? didn't do
5. How much elevation did Mount St. Helen's lose when the volcano erupted in May of 1980? 1,314 ft.
6. In what year was the first revolving restaurant built? 5-22-1961
7. Before being named the Emerald City, what was Seattle known as? Queen City (remember that Andy was getting these answers from James while walking to the Pike Place Market down a very busy and noisy street. He actually heard "CLEAN city" so we ended up getting this one wrong, but it didn't hurt us as you will see!)
8. Who was the first US Hockey team to win the Stanley Cup? Seattle Metropolitans
9. What was the population of Seattle in 1870? 1,107
10. How tall is the Space Needle? 605 ft.
11. How many miles and stops are found on the streetcar formerly known as "S.L.U.T."? (stands for South Lake Union Transit) We originally did not ask James this question, we only asked him 10, but on our way to UW Andy said "Let's find the answer to another question in case we get one of the others wrong." Thank goodness we did or we would not have gotten this trivia Chasepoint! The answer was 11 stations and 1.3 miles.
12. How many killer whale pods are native to the Puget Sound? 3

Thanks again James! Without you we might not have gotten 2 Chasepoints!

Then we decided to head away from downtown and towards the University of Washington where there were 3 Chasepoints to do and one was MANDATORY. We hopped on a bus around 3rd and Pine and got off in the University District. The first clue we did was:

Smarty Pants: It will test your smarts - just like this Klue - your pencil must be sharp and A #2. Your test taking skills might dePend on the condition - at LeAst now they don't count for college admissioN. Try your best on this test and give it all that you have, when you get to this location on the University Ave. Did you figure out why they have the odd capital letters? They spell out KAPLAN. This is the tutor - testing help place. We had to go there and get 10 out of 14 questions right on a sample SAT. Well the pressure of running a race does not help your test taking skills! The first time I went up I got 6 right, Andy got 5. Ok, well we guessed on most because we just didn't want to take the time. So we kept guessing until we got 10 right and left. We beat the guys who got there just before us!
We then headed down to the water for this clue:
Up the Creek: Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Unscramble these words and you'll see what we mean. Auqa dereV daPdling ulCb. I saw right away that is said Paddling Club, and then I figured Aqua would be the first word. So Andy looked up Aqua Paddling Club Seattle on Google maps on his palm phone. (By the way if you have a palm or smartphone, get Google maps on it, it's great!) Turned out it was Aqua Verde Paddling Club. In this one we had to get in a kayak and paddle around Lake Union! We did great and made it back in no time.

Our next stop was a mandatory Chasepoint:
Circus School: You'll take your steps slowly and one at a time, your balance may be tested walking a very fine line. The U of W turf field next to the IMA building is where you'll go. If you were doing this professionally you'd be the star of the show. We showed up at this point to find out we had to do three activities: walk on stilts, juggle 5 balls between each other and walk the tightrope. Andy knocked out the first one in no time, we did the juggling pretty quickly and then the tightrope came. Andy got it in two or three tries.


I, however, took a little bit longer. We either had to do this or climb up a rope (See the guy behind me as I'm falling? Remember those ropes in gym class?). We chose tightrope.


At this point we were done with all the Chasepoints at UW and we headed to Capital Hill for two more. We have 6 Chasepoints done at this time and needed 4 more! The next Chasepoint we go to is:
AdventX: A drill seargant would stomp, yell and tell you what to do. From sit ups to push ups to help better you. Across from the conservatory in Volunteer Park this exercise will be the same and doing what they say is the name of the game. We had to run this course and at the end there was a ping-pong ball to pick up with an exercise to do, you then had to run back through the course to get to your partner and complete the exercise. Andy ran the course 4 times and I helped him do the exercises. We had to do push-ups, jumping jacks, burpees and jump rope. Andy was a little warm by this point but luckily the next Chasepoint was close.
I know Andy looks like he's dancing but he's side-stepping one part of the course.

Andy is the guy with the medicine ball over his head at the end. This is where he had to pick up the ping-pong ball to get the exercise we had to do.
PG13: This point requires creativity and not for you to be smart. You'll choose your side of the easel and what you'll wear at the G_g_ Academy of Art. Through the magic of Google maps (can't say enough about this feature!) we found the Gage Academy of Art quickly. The activity here was to draw a nude. They had a nude model, a male and a female that took turns modeling, and we had to draw one of them. I have little to no artistic talent, but it was the time and effort we put into it, not the end drawing (thank goodness!).

At this time we had 8 Chasepoints and we realized that this has taken longer than we had expected. It was after 2 and the course closed at 4. We had to hustle. We caught the bus outside of the Art Academy and headed back downtown to another clue.

WTBBL: There's a library with books that you read by touch. Sharpen up your senses cause you'll need them very much. I realized this was the Braille Library (I remembered from our last Urban race because we passed right by it) and we had to do a word search in Braille. We got through this in no time, beating the team who made it there just before us. We then decided to do:

Going Green: Geared with an energy efficient light bulb here's a green task you must fulfill. Replace a regular bulb in a home or office which should take little skill. Turn the regular bulb in at Chasepoint 1 and you just helped the environment - nicely done. They had given us two energy efficient light bulbs in our race day bag, so we went and traded the bulbs. (this one will come back to haunt us!) We now had 10 chasepoints done so we just wanted to get two balloons that were on the course because you could be entered to win a Palm Centro smartphone if you got these balloons. That was our last stop and then we ran to the end of the course and JUST made it before 4 p.m. With about a minute to spare. Once we enter into the end (at Jillian's Billiard by Lake Union), they count our Chasepoints completed and she counted 9, but we had the bulbs to turn in. Only to find out that the bulbs were supposed to be turned into Chasepoint 1, and we had it in our heads that it was supposed to be at the end of the race. So yes, another race that I screwed up! I still can't believe it!

Here we are at the finish.


We had a great time doing it, and since there aren't many times that Andy and I can spend a day together by ourselves, it was wonderful just to have a great time with him. We worked really well together and could do so much better next year!

As soon as they post our times and pictures I'll post them for you to see. I know we were in some of those pics. You can see one photographer taking one of me when I was falling off the tightrope.