Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Olympics Continued and Dos Anos Aqui !


Here is Jeff's 2nd place rope climb - he was moving pretty fast! What you can't really tell is that the rope is on a pulley so as the human climbs they let out more rope and it doesn't look like the person is going anywhere! It is hard to view this way but I couldn't figure out how to rotate the video - sorry. He missed first place by 2 seconds! If he practiced just think what he could do - that's next year. The competition was 25 feet of rope as fast as you can go.

This was a lot of fun. When the rules and categories were announced it was all in Spanish so we missed it all. We could have helped our team (SEPRI) if we tried the rope walker category but we had never done it before. Now that we know the categories and how it all works we can learn some other systems and participate in them next year. By then hopefully we will have gone in more caves, rappelled/ascended more and will be better at it!

We did participate in the Obstacle Course which I couldn't get video of because we did it in the dark! It involved running and sliding/crawling under survey tape that make an L shape on sloped grass that was only a head high. After that you dive into the lake and swim/walk for a bit, then come out (extremely tired) and walk/run up a slope, run on the flat area behind the building and then climb a spider like netting up and over and then a run down a steep slope in grass onto pavement and to the finish line. Each part was timed separately and amazingly I tied for first with another gal with a time measured to a hundredth of a second! There was another woman who was going to do it in the morning who might beat us though since she'll have the daylight advantage... This was great fun and all the events, as short as they were, were amazingly tiring! How can a 35 second rope climb tucker you out? The obstacle course for me was 3 minutes 26 seconds or something - how could it be tiring? I tell you though, after the swim (in boots and helmets etc) I was really tired. The best time on the course was one of the guys from a different caving group who did it in 2 minutes something! Wow - I won't be able to do that I don't think ever! Neither will Jeff, who beat my time by 11 seconds or something (he was in the guy category).

All in all it was a really fun Saturday that ended with bad Chinese food (served with french fries of course). We met many nice people - some we know from caves and others who we met in Cueva Zumba but finally got to talk to. A lot of other folks are probably interesting but our Spanish isn't good enough to really join a conversation. Lo siento for us. We drove back down the mountain and went home on a flat tire that we didn't discover until morning. Sunday was our second anniversary in Puerto Rico and we opted to go windsurfing at a friends house rather than drive up to Adjuntas again. I caught a glimpse of a manatee and kayaked around to get closer and never saw it again. Jeff windsurfed until the wind died and then we had waffles and strawberries and whipped cream (and coffee and conversation) until almost dark. A lovely weekend!

1 comment:

Rosa said...

All I have to say is I am tired! Wow, so much physical work, it is really nice. I would of love going just to watch the action, and eat and drink!

Good job to both of you.