Urban Dare Adventure Race                                                                                                              

On June 11, 2006 my friend Hugh and I competed against 21 other teams in the Urban Dare.  Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm going to borrow a lot of the race description from the UD website and emails:

Urban Dare is the team race that’s part photo hunt, part trivia and part dares. Teams of 2 must solve clues to find checkpoints throughout the city. To move on they must take photos or perform dares to earn passport stamps. Each team must determine their own route to the checkpoints. The Urban Dare challenge is to be the first team to cross the finish line after successfully completing checkpoint dares and getting required photos.

Use of wireless devices (cell, texting, gps, blackberry) is highly encouraged. Teams may call friends for help solving clues (friends with access to the internet can be very useful). All teams should set off with mobile phone and digital camera capability.

Teams may run, walk, or use public transportation (subway or bus) to travel to checkpoints. No other forms of travel are allowed (no cars, taxis, bikes, etc).

Dares are mental or physical challenges such as climbing a wall, shooting a few baskets, solving a riddle, or eating something (no slimy bugs like on Fear Factor). You may choose not to accept a dare and take a penalty before continuing to the next checkpoint. Teams must get their passport stamped for successful completion of dares.  At the end of the race you must be able to show you took the required photos to complete your passport.

In short think DaVinci Code without the deep, dark secret or killer fanatics.  In fact, as we went around town and people asked us what this was for, we would give them a very short version of the info above and I'd add "think DaVinci Code" and their confused expression would immediately disappear. 

We signed up for this race some time ago, and didn't really hear anything until we got an email from the race organizer (a guy named Kevin) telling us "we will start at 11am near the fountain which has its on/off switch in Atlanta."  This is Buckingham Fountain, although I'm told that the on/off switch hasn't been in Atlanta for almost 10 years.  The fountain is controlled locally  -- probably by someone in Berwyn. 

While this was my first adventure race, Hugh has done several of these and had a much better idea of what to expect.  Hugh and I live in Albany Park so he came up with the name "Albany Park Refugees" as our team name.  Since Hugh's wife Pat was both driving us to the start location and being our phone contact/internet person, we got to the start with 30 minutes to spare.  Just like the races I'm use to, people were sizing each other up.  Unlike races I'm use to, no one was talking to anyone other than their teammate. 

When 11am came, Kevin announced that there were still 3-4 teams that hadn't arrived and we'd give them 10 minutes.  I was getting a bit restless because there just wasn't anything to do.  We found out that 25 teams signed up, though four turned out to be no-shows.  That surprises me since the entry fee was $90 per team. 

Finally, we got started.  I never found out if the missing teams showed up or time was simply.  The Urban Dare starts with Kevin asking multiple choice questions and the teams will move into A, B, C or D areas depending on your answer. Questions are based on Chicago trivia and you can't use your phones at this stage of the race, not that there would be time to if you could.  The idea is get teams off in staggered starts so that they don't crowd each other and are rewarded for their smarts. 

We got off in the 3rd wave and got our Clue Sheet.  There were six Dares and six Photo Checkpoints.  We were able to figure out about half of each on our own and called in the rest.  Hugh warned that the thing about the clues is that they could be tricky.  For example, one clue referred to an art display donated by a Catalan cubist.  The natural response is to think Picasso, and ultimately that is correct.  But you have to check to make sure that the Picasso was donated and not paid for, which Pat confirmed.

Between the Checkpoints we could figure out, we noticed that they were distributed between two areas, downtown* and not downtown.  The question was, how far would this race make us go?  Had we been a little more patient, we might have realized that the order of the clues were geographical and could have mapped our route more efficiently.  But we were anxious to get going so we started out while Pat worked on figured out the other clues.

One of the rules is that participants must wear their Urban Dare t-shirt throughout the race.  I suspect this is to prevent some type of cheating.  The shirts are cotton tees which every runner worth their salt knows is a no-no to run in but we didn't have much choice.  By the time we reached the first Dare, I was sweating more than I do at the end of the Shamrock Shuffle. 

One of the clues was "this hotel bar was the second place to serve a beer after prohibition ended."  Almost everyone in Chicago knows that the Bergoff was the first place, but who ever cares about second?  We thought perhaps the Palmer House so we ran there and asked the Concierge.  He actually knew that it was the Drake.  The look on his face seemed to be a combination of "I can't believe you came in here to ask me something about our competitor hotel" and "I have to do my job the best I can."

At that point Pat called and confirmed the Picasso in Daley Plaza was a donation, so we did a quick check and at this point figured out that half the targets were downtown and of the other half, the 3-4 we knew were in the Lincoln Park area.  We made the leap of logic that the other 2 were probably also somewhere in LP though there was one clue that seemed odd.  "The largest river in Ireland and this Chicago Hotel share the same name."  The only Irish river I know is the Shannon.  Pat confirmed it was the largest.  But there is no Hotel Shannon.  We'll come back to that one.

After snapping a photo at the Picasso, we mapped out the following: Clue #3 - Lucky Strike Lane where we had to bowl a strike to get our passport stamped and move on.  Clue #4 - Butch McGuire were we had to throw a bulls eye on the dart board.  There was no one there to verify the bulls-eye or stamp us, so we and another team took a photo as proof but then the official showed up and stamped us.

Clue #5 which was The Green Door.  We were supposed to perform a dare and get another passport stamp here, but we beat the race officials to the location again and didn't want to waste time waiting for someone.  At this point, Pat called and told us where Clue #1.  We had to double back a mile and a half to Madison and Dearborn for the Boxcar Mosaic at First National Plaza, which was less than a quarter mile from the Palmer House.

The race website says you can expect to cover 5 miles of territory.  By my conservative map tracking, I estimate we ran at least 6 miles downtown and another 3-4 in LP.  I'm putting 9 in the books toward my yearly tracking.

After we got that photo, we were done with downtown and got on the Red Line to hit Lincoln Park.  Before doing so, we called Pat.  We had figured out all but one place -- that Shannon Hotel.  I knew there was a bar called The River Shannon, located near the other LP clues.  We thought perhaps it had been a hotel at one point, maybe a flop house back in the days when LP was not nice, pretty and gentrified with Starbucks.  However Pat could not verify that or find anything about Shannon or a Chicago hotel sharing anything. 

We made an executive decision and decided to assume that it was the bar and not some hotel formerly known as Shannon.  At Clue #whatever (I don't have my clue sheet with me while I'm writing this) the Dare was to eat a hotdog at the Wiener's Circle, a semi-famous Chicago Hotdog stand.  Not much of a dare except when you think about running with a hotdog in your tummy.  I asked the Passport Stamping Volunteer about the Shannon Hotel clue.  I guess I made a good enough argument that she called Kevin and explained what I pointed out.  He said something to her and she said to me "it might be a bar." 

About 20 minutes later we got a call from Kevin confirming that the clue was The River Shannon bar.  Which means that he probably called everyone else too.  I didn't feel too bad because Hugh said the would have likely disqualified that clue if no one got it and everyone protested, so hopefully it was merely good karma for us. 

As it turns out, it was good karma because, much to our surprise, we ended up in First Place.  We won free round trip airfare and 2 nights hotel to compete in the Champions Race on December 9.  However, we won't know our destination until we arrive at the airport on December 8.

The finish was at the Raven, a bar in Lincoln Park I had been to two maybe three times in my life.  Which was 2-3 more times than Hugh.  I guess my contribution on this team was bar support because I knew where all the bars were located.  After the race was over, all the teams were much friendlier and wanted to talk to us.  We spent a lot of our recovery time talking to the team that came in third -- they would have been second were it not for the time bonuses that the 2nd place team used.  Kendra and Alex were novices turned runners turned adventure racers.  They even suggested that they might pay to participate in the Champions Race just to get another crack at us.

Stay tuned!
 

 HOME | Photo Album  |  UDPhotos -- these are various pictures of Hugh and me at the Checkpoints.  No need to really look at them except for the goofy expressions on my face.

* I'm lumping the Loop, the Magnificent Mile, the Gold Coast and the Tourist Trap areas near Hard Rock Cafe, Rain Forest Cafe and the like into one collective Downtown..