The Salad Spinners once again competed in the Great Urban Race: Madison this year.
Fun Fact: How did we get our name?
Funny story. The race used to take place in June. The first time we did it, we signed up 2 weeks before the race because of a Groupon. When you sign up, you need to come up with a team name. We didn't want something lame like "Buckingham Team" or "Mad about Madison" so we tried to think of something unique. Early June is characterized by a few things: Frequent lawn mowing, wedding invitations, and copious amounts of lettuce. We took our name from two of the above, want to guess which?
We were going through a wedding registry for one happy couple (we will call them the Lactucas), and laughing at some of the silly things they wanted. For some reason, we found it particularly funny that they had registered for a salad spinner. "Wow, they must really like their lettuce dry!" "What kind of people eat enough salad to warrant an entire tool for drying your lettuce?"*
That, and the fact that we had a bathtub's worth of lettuce in our fridge inspired our stellar team name: Salad Spinners! We got some green shirts and the rest was history.
Back to the present: this year was our fourth year doing the race. The start was at the Coliseum Sports Bar near the Alliant Energy Center. It's a big bar, with a parking lot, so that was good. However, it's also a full 2 miles from Capital Square with nothing of note in between. We were concerned that the course would be significantly longer than it has in the past. Compounding on our concerns was the fact that there is only one bus route that goes past the Coliseum on the weekends, and it doesn't even go downtown! We decided that we didn't care how we finished, it was more important to just have fun and not worry about running too much.
As we started solving clues, we were pleasantly surprised when we learned that the course had been designed such that all the locations were west of Capital square. In fact, all the locations, except one, were within a nice tidy circle near the bar. The one location was on Capitol Square, and would take us a couple of miles off course. Luckily, we could skip 1 location, so that made the choice easy.
We had to do a few interesting challenges along the way:
First, we stopped at a Kombucha making company. Kombucha is a somewhat sketchy fermented tea beverage. It's supposed to have health benefits, or maybe kill you. Jury is still out.
We had to "wash" our hands in a vat of yeast and bacteria used in making the drink.
After the Kombucha stop, we ran over to Vilas park. Adam had to ride a bike very slowly through an obstacle course. The only rule was that you had to take longer than 1 minute to complete the course. Adam's expert skills at riding a bike slowly paid off!
We then had our longest running leg of the day, half way around Lake Wingra to Wingra Park. There we hopped into a kayak. Sweet! we kayak all the time, no problem. Wait, what? We have to do it blindfolded? Oh...
Emily sat at the front and shouted commands to Adam in the back, paddling with a blindfold. We had to navigate a figure 8 course and return to the dock. We did it with minimal crashing!
From There, we had a couple of stops at locations along Monroe Street, including our favorite kitchen shop, Orange Tree Imports, and the delightful Maurie's Chocolates. We even got a sample Truffle!
Two more stops: Movin' Shoes for a shoe kicking challenge, and then Nutzy Mutz where we got to hold naked mole rats. Then it was just a short jog back to the finish.
Fun Fact: How did we get our name?
Funny story. The race used to take place in June. The first time we did it, we signed up 2 weeks before the race because of a Groupon. When you sign up, you need to come up with a team name. We didn't want something lame like "Buckingham Team" or "Mad about Madison" so we tried to think of something unique. Early June is characterized by a few things: Frequent lawn mowing, wedding invitations, and copious amounts of lettuce. We took our name from two of the above, want to guess which?
We were going through a wedding registry for one happy couple (we will call them the Lactucas), and laughing at some of the silly things they wanted. For some reason, we found it particularly funny that they had registered for a salad spinner. "Wow, they must really like their lettuce dry!" "What kind of people eat enough salad to warrant an entire tool for drying your lettuce?"*
That, and the fact that we had a bathtub's worth of lettuce in our fridge inspired our stellar team name: Salad Spinners! We got some green shirts and the rest was history.
Back to the present: this year was our fourth year doing the race. The start was at the Coliseum Sports Bar near the Alliant Energy Center. It's a big bar, with a parking lot, so that was good. However, it's also a full 2 miles from Capital Square with nothing of note in between. We were concerned that the course would be significantly longer than it has in the past. Compounding on our concerns was the fact that there is only one bus route that goes past the Coliseum on the weekends, and it doesn't even go downtown! We decided that we didn't care how we finished, it was more important to just have fun and not worry about running too much.
As we started solving clues, we were pleasantly surprised when we learned that the course had been designed such that all the locations were west of Capital square. In fact, all the locations, except one, were within a nice tidy circle near the bar. The one location was on Capitol Square, and would take us a couple of miles off course. Luckily, we could skip 1 location, so that made the choice easy.
We had to do a few interesting challenges along the way:
First, we stopped at a Kombucha making company. Kombucha is a somewhat sketchy fermented tea beverage. It's supposed to have health benefits, or maybe kill you. Jury is still out.
We had to "wash" our hands in a vat of yeast and bacteria used in making the drink.
After the Kombucha stop, we ran over to Vilas park. Adam had to ride a bike very slowly through an obstacle course. The only rule was that you had to take longer than 1 minute to complete the course. Adam's expert skills at riding a bike slowly paid off!
Emily sat at the front and shouted commands to Adam in the back, paddling with a blindfold. We had to navigate a figure 8 course and return to the dock. We did it with minimal crashing!
From There, we had a couple of stops at locations along Monroe Street, including our favorite kitchen shop, Orange Tree Imports, and the delightful Maurie's Chocolates. We even got a sample Truffle!
Also, as an added bonus, Adam got to push Emily around in a shopping Cart. Don't tell the fine folks at Trader Joes!
From there, we headed down to Regent Street to play Bacardi and Coke Plinko, and then to a yoga studio to mock up a fake person's yoga schedule. Since we skipped the Capital Square location, we turned back toward the finish.
Two more stops: Movin' Shoes for a shoe kicking challenge, and then Nutzy Mutz where we got to hold naked mole rats. Then it was just a short jog back to the finish.
We finished in 2 hours, 50 minutes, which was good enough for 8th place! Another top 10 finish for us. In total, we ran almost 8 miles over the course of the race. We didn't take any bus rides, because the course was easy enough to just run the whole thing. There weren't any places that a bus would have helped much.
We had a ton of fun again, and we look forward to doing it again next year!
*Apparently, the answer to this question is people like us. We now own a salad spinner.
*Apparently, the answer to this question is people like us. We now own a salad spinner.
