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The Great Race: LA

Every muscle in my body is still sore.

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of participating in the inaugural Great Race: LA. This was a day-long adventure race, inspired by the most excellent of reality game shows, The Amazing Race, except contained entirely within Los Angeles and lacking any cash prize (just a pretty trophy and a smug sense of accomplishment). The entire thing was coordinated by Tom Donnelly, a friend of a friend, a class act, and a very devoted race designer. (Tom did all the hard work, but we had all the fun. What a champ!)

I was along at the invitation of my friend Beth, and we were joined at the last minute by her co-worker Stephanie. We made a tight, savvy team – and quickly divided the responsibilities among the group: I would drive, and Beth and Steph would complain about the driving. When we tore open our starting clue envelope, we found a series of snapshots depicting local signage, cropped close so they were hard to recognize. We were told to find each sign and then make the next turn. As far as which way to turn, the clue only said "this will help you" and then a list of letters A-J (corresponding to the letters on our photos), with blank space next to each. Also included was an invisible-ink pen with an ultraviolet light attached. This seemed significant, but we couldn't decide how it might be useful, so we promptly ignored it.

The first few signs were within sight of each other, so we made our way quickly, writing down which direction we turned in the blanks beside each letter. Once we began to get stumped, we looked at the list and noticed we'd been alternating left-right turns, so we kept up that pattern. Before long, we were way off course and called back to base for help. (Donnelly spent the entire day following teams in his car, checking on the race progress, and fielding calls for help on two cell phones. What a trouper!) Suddenly, the ultraviolet light pen revealed its purpose: turns out, we should have been using it to see which direction to turn – "RIGHT" or "LEFT" would be printed in invisible ink next to each of the blanks. It was only by dumb luck that we made it almost to the end of the course without using the light. Stupid! Stupid! Laughably, we vowed never to make such a silly mistake again. Once we were back on track, we found ourselves at an indoor rock-climbing gym in Brentwood. Our first Roadblock! (And, despite leaving last and making early navigation errors, we had already caught up with quite a few teams. Our first bunching!)

Having done the rock climbing thing before, I quickly convinced the girls to let me scale the wall and earn our next clue. Nervous as I was, the experience came back to me quickly, and I was up and down lickety-quick. Beth and Steph cheered and retrieved our next clue as I unfastened my harness and flirted with the smoking hot belay girl. Then we were back in the car, and raced around the corner to decode our clue, which was again printed in invisible ink. It directed us to PACIFIC LADIES SPA and HIKERS LANE, which turned out to be anagrams for Pacific Palisades and a place called the Lake Shrine, which I happened to be familiar with, due to a visit with my parents a couple of years ago. We screeched into the parking lot, complaints about the driving were registered, and then we raced – discreetly – into the idyllic splendor of the Lake Shrine to find our clue. I detected something hanging off a bench and tried to get to it quickly and quietly so I wouldn't alert other teams. I was so quiet, I lost Beth and Steph, too – so I had to flag them down once I'd photographed the clue and we could all leave.

The next clue directed us to a very tall set of stairs in Santa Monica, frequented by joggers and other exercise nuts. We initially planned to divide up, sending Beth down the stairs while Steph and I drove around to the bottom. But, I found a sweet parking space, so Steph and I descended behind Beth, and then raced back up some other nearby stairs toward our clue. The clue – written in maddeningly cryptic rhyme like all the others – instructed us to follow a path and then "turn around at locked door." We found a locked gate, and directly behind it (turn around 180 degrees) was a futon with a blanket and night table, like a little bedroom. We were impressed that Donnelly had set up this whole scene, and started searching through it for our clue. Before long, it became apparent that this wasn't part of the race – we were just rifling through the belongings of a random homeless person. It was hard to believe that everything could be so clean and tastefully arranged, but I guess we learned something about the decorating styles of transients. The clue turned out to be taped to a piling, a few hundred feet farther down the path. I'm still amazed that little settlement could be so well arranged in such a prime location and still left entirely undisturbed (until we got there). It had a really great cliffside view and it was in a clean area with no other evidence of people anywhere. Clearly, the top of the homeless real estate market. If I weren't afraid I'd miss TiVo too much, I'd move in there myself.

Of course, once we located the clue, it was time for the ultraviolet pen to screw us again. Stupid! Stupid! Once again, the clue was printed in invisible ink – and despite joking that we should strap the light pen around Beth's neck, we did no such thing. We left it in the car at the top of the staircase. 189 stairs, straight up. Insanely, I volunteered to go back to the car and drive the pen around to the bottom of the stairs, where Beth could quickly relay it back up to Steph and the clue. I completely forgot how steep the staircase was (and how long!) and just sprinted up as fast as I could. Near the top, my legs gave out, and I was pulling myself up the bannister hand-over-hand, drawing curious gazes from iPod-wearing joggers making their way slowly up the stairs (in other words, pacing themselves, like a smart person would do). Panting like an emphysematic wolfhound, I made it to the top, where I thought I might collapse into an unconscious heap. But I pushed on, knowing I wouldn't forgive myself if I faltered in my determination after having spent countless hours on the sofa screaming at Amazing Race participants to get the lead out. I drove the pen down to Beth, then drained a giant bottle of water and gobbled up a power bar as we made our way to the next clue at the Camera Obscura in Santa Monica.

While I waited in the car, Beth and Stephanie took turns searching for the clue and trying to block the progress of other teams inside the Camera Obscura building. In the end, Beth located the clue underneath a table in the camera room, and – to her chagrin – her discovery tipped off the impossibly dreamy Chris Steins, and both teams were on their way!

From there, it was off to the pier, where a typically dense and obscure clue ended up directing us to look through a certain telescope on a certain bearing to locate another portion of the pier where the clue would be attached. At first, we picked the wrong telescope and ended up on a jaunt across the beach, but when we called in, Donnelly encouraged us to try some more scopes, and we finally tracked down the clue. Beth, showing the sort of leadership that has made her such a smashing success, suggested a coffee break; we regrouped at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf while attempting to pick apart the next set of bizarre rhyming couplets. They seemed to direct us to the footbridges of Venice, but also included a bunch of puzzling information about different types of bridge construction. We borrowed the Internet link at the coffee shop and searched Google for some information about the architecture of the Venice bridges, but nothing came through. Perhaps this was the point of the infuriatingly complex clues: throughout the day, we called Drew back at home base two or three more times to try to put Google to work for us, and always came up empty. Maybe Donnelly was trying to discourage Internet-based fact finding by making the damn clues so insanely obscure.

We eventually made our way to the canals of Venice, and spotted another contestant – Trey – as we were driving across. We turned in his direction, looking for a spot to turn around and park, and stumbled upon the clue just as he was finding it after an hour of searching all the bridges. I snapped a picture of the clue, and we hopped in the car and left him fuming. The next clue turned out to be another doozy, but eventually we made our way to Marina del Rey, where our next Roadblock awaited us at a sea kayak rental stand. Because I'd scaled the rock wall, it was up to Beth and Stephanie to row the kayak out into the marina and track down the slip number of a specific boat. They relayed that back to me via cell phone and I verified it by dialing a number to a recording with another long, psychotic clue. I probably called at least five times in order to transcribe the whole thing. I called Donnelly to check in – a must after completing each clue, since there may be changes in the race – and he informed us that we were in fifth place. From twelfth to fifth! I was elated! I immediately went into strategy overdrive and started hanging out in the wrong parts of the marina in order to throw other teams off the scent of the roadblock, while Beth and Steph rowed back to shore. Continuing to take things way too seriously, I whipped the car around to eliminate fifteen feet of walking when the ladies were finished changing out of their soaked clothes in the restroom by the marina. This ended up saving us no time, since we stayed in the car trying to decrypt our maddening clue for another few minutes anyway, but at least I felt like I was contributing something.

This clue really puzzled us – it seemed to direct us to Ballona Creek in Playa del Rey, but we couldn't find most of the elements to which the clue seemed to refer. (The most infuriating thing about these cryptic puzzles was that you could never tell what to parse literally and what was just part of the rhyme scheme.) Finally, we had to call in and get directions to the next clue. It cost us a 15-minute time penalty, but it was worth it since we'd already spent nearly an hour searching and had no hope of figuring this one out. We asked locals about things which seemed to be indicated on the clue, like footbridges and public murals, and Beth summarized their contributions nicely: "Everyone's an expert, but nobody knows anything." Once we arrived at the right location, we were stymied again – this time by the disappearance of the clue. It should have been in an envelope near the mural indicated by the previous clue, but by the time we arrived, all envelopes had disappeared. Donnelly once again read us the clue over the phone, and this time we were lucky that I was able to recognize the address of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. We raced through its beautifully appointed, severely underlit halls, tracking down numerical pieces of information from its many fascinating and offbeat exhibits. We entered these into a math formula specified by the clue, dialed the resulting phone number, and got: nothing. We tried some more: nothing. The clues just weren't adding up. Finally, I started selecting any number I could from one of the documents, and finally hit on the right answer – our ordeal was over! We were being sent to the finish line!

After all that, we had slipped back to ninth place, but we were very happy to have food and delighted in the knowledge that we'd managed to complete the whole race. Many thanks to Beth and Steph, the best racing companions a guy could want – sorry about the dizzying speeds and close calls, but it was all in the spirit of competition!

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