After completing the 5K, the ‘Challenge’ part of the Expedition Everest Challenge is to complete a scavenger hunt.   (I’m not sure why this is called a scavenger hunt, as there isn’t really any “find something” aspect to this at all — unless you didn’t pay attention on the race to where the clue stations were located).

As soon as I crossed the finish for the 5K, I headed to the first clue station to get my first question.   This was by far the most challenging clue of the night:

Clue 1:

Only time will tell if you make it to the summit of Mt. Everest.   If climbing for 24 hours straight, how many times will at least 3 digits in the row be the same on your analog watch?   This is not boot camp so don’t use military time.

Thinking I was clever and had seen through the misdirection, I immediately went to the volunteers handing out Clue 2 and said you would never get 3 of the same digits in a row on an analog watch.   But this wasn’t the answer they were looking for; the clue writer was the clueless one here on the difference between analog and digital watches.

I struggled with this one more than I should have, probably because I was overly concerned with my time to finish the challenge (not sure why at this point, as I certainly wasn’t going to be winning anything!)    I quickly came up with 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11, and 12:22, knew to double that for a 24-hour period, and wrote down the answer 14.   Nope, try again.   At this point I saw that others had written down ’34’ and were being given the second clue, so I decided not to spend any more time on this one, wrote down 34, got the second clue, and didn’t worry more about it until the next day.

(As an aside, the next day I realized 11:11 was just one part of the whole series of 11:10 through 11:19 that all have 3 1’s in a row; but that only got me up to 32.   The last piece to click into place was getting 10:00 with 3 0’s in a row, so adding 10:00 am and 10:00 pm gave me the final two to get to 34.)

Clue 2 was a bit easier, but still required a little time to work through.   There was a wheel with letters around it (think the Wheel of Fortune wheel with letters rather than dollar amounts), and you had to figure out the word spelled a series of spins of the wheel.   They gave the starting letter as ‘C’ and then several directions such as Left 2, Right 2, Left 3 — but the first ‘spin’ wasn’t given as a number, but a hint:

Start with C and turn from there the number of years Expedition Everest has been run‘.

Fortunately, they’d given us the answer to this while we were in the corrals waiting to start the run — they asked more than once for a show of hands, how many had run the event all 7 years it had been run?    So I wasn’t sure if they were looking for 7 (previous runs) or 8 (total including tonight’s run).    I tried 7 first and got C, A, R, A, B, I, N, E, R — yep, that looks good, off to get clue 3!

(The clue stations were all marked with large lit balloons like the ones that marked the corrals at the start of the race, and they were all stationed along the race course — so essentially the challenge gave us a second lap of the in-park portion of the course we’d run earlier in the night.  I think I recall the total mileage for the 5K + challenge as coming in at almost exactly 5 miles).

Clue 3 was simply to put into order the groups of letters ERS, INE, NTA, MOU — given the theme of the night I had MOUNTAINEERS as quickly as I could write it down, and was off for Clue 4.

Clue 4 gave the hint:

L + live + A + Sh + N

I was sure this needed to be sounded out to get the answer but I had to look at it several times before getting ‘elevation’.   But I definitely liked the trend of 3 and 4 being easier than 1 and 2 — only one more clue to go!

Clue 5 was not difficult, but it was time consuming.   There was a 13 x 13 grid of letters forming a word search.  The clue:

We have finally found the Yeti and you will too, but where?

Solve the word search and you will know where he is hiding.  Use this cipher and the previous four answers to help you in this quest.

Clue #1 x 3, Clue #2 x 4, Clue #3 x 2, Clue #4 x 3.

The leftover letters will tell you where the yeti is and what you need to do at the finish line.

So — Clue #1, the answer was 34, and I quickly saw that ‘THIRTYFOUR’ did appear in the word search grid.  So I needed to find it twice more, for a total of 3 times, and circle those letters.   Then I circled CARABINER four times, MOUNTAINEERS twice, and ELEVATION 3 times.   The remaining, uncircled letters told me what I needed to do next:

Go Find the hidden Yeti on a clue card and hold it up at the finish

Going back through the clue cards, each had a different bit of artwork on the front.   It took me a bit before I made out the Yeti face diagonally across the second clue card.   I reordered the cards to put #2 on top and then started for the finish line — the final clue station wasn’t all that close so there was still some distance to cover.   As I approached the finish I saw the volunteers checking runners as they came through, if you weren’t holding up Card #2 they’d tell you nope and divert you to the side.  I passed straight through, picked up my medal, and then stopped for pictures.

 

There was an after-party going on inside the park with several rides open, but having already done an AK day and ridden everything we were interested in, we decided to blow off the after-party and head for the room, to try to get some rest for a full day at Epcot the following day.    There were some nice photo ops in the park that might have been worth stopping in for, but I’m much more a morning person than a late nighter so I think for me, calling it a night at this point was the right call.

Overall, this was a really fun event, and the only 5K that is treated as an ‘event’ by runDisney — all the other 5Ks are kind of third-tier add-ons to the marathon and half-marathon races.   I think something like this is really a nice change of pace, and while I know this is the last EEC, I hope it’s not the last time there’s an event of this type.

 

I recently returned from my latest WDW trip and wanted to write up some memories of the trip while it was still fresh in my mind.

The main purpose of this trip was to run in the Expedition Everest Challenge (EEC).   I’ve always thought this looked like an interesting race but the timing has never worked out for me to run it.   When it was announced that 2015 would be final year for the EEC, I committed right away to attend.   Several of my friends were also planning to be there the same week — one for the EEC, another for her birthday — so I knew it would be a fun week to be there.   And the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival happening at the same time was another plus, although as it turned out we only spent one day at Epcot and didn’t see as much of that as we might have liked.

Registration and “Expo”

I knew from talking to friends who had run the EEC before that there wasn’t really a race expo — but I still wasn’t prepared for just how scaled down this event would be.   First of all, final race instructions didn’t even arrive until I was in Florida, so I wasn’t really even sure what was going to be happening when.   When I did receive the final race instructions email, I learned that the location for the registration was the Animal Kingdom parking lot.   When we arrived at the park, directions were non-existent — I never saw a single sign directing runners how to get to the registration location.    Since the registration didn’t open until noon our plan was to spend the morning in the Animal Kingdom then pick up my bib and other materials on the way out.   As we were trying to get into the park there was all “all stop” on the trams as a guest was walking down the tram-only roadway trying to find a way through the barriers and into the registration area.     Partly — OK, mostly —  his fault, but again the complete lack of directions on how to get to the tents didn’t help.   (When we exited the park and were ready to head over to registration, we had to ask a cast member the best way to get there as I never saw a directional sign.  It was definitely arranged in such a way that they clearly expected you to ride the tram to the front entrance and then walk back to the tents — but this was unclear from the parking lot and it looked like the trams would take you away from where you needed to be).

The registration area was just a big tent; you went into one side to turn in your waiver and get your race packet (bib, wristband for the after party) and then to the other side to get your race shirt and a plastic bag for the bag check.   It was by far the quickest registration I’ve ever been through for a runDisney event – I was probably out of there in under 10 minutes.    There was no official runDisney merchandise.   New Balance had a booth to sell this year’s monochrome shoes (so glad I got the 2014 version) and Fit2Run had a booth there as well.   (I think there was one other tent but can’t recall which company it was for).   That was the totality of the ‘expo’; I didn’t make any stops other than the registration tent and then we headed back to the car to spend the rest of the day in another park.

Pre-Race

On race night, I had dinner with friends at Jiko and then made the short drive over to the Animal Kingdom parking lot.    We arrived about 8:45 for a 10 p.m. start, and had a chance to do some visiting before time to head into the corrals.   I was in corral I  (J was the last, so I’m definitely a back-of-the-pack run/walker).   The first corral started at 10, and I believe it was about 10:40 when our corral was scheduled to start.   Unlike other runDisney starts there were no fireworks as each corral started — I’m guessing that this is out of consideration for the animals rather than due to the relatively small scale of the race.   From the corral I watched the other groups start one by one.  Because of the way the corrals were arranged we didn’t move from our assembly spot until we were the next corral to go.    Once we were up and in position, it was a pretty quick countdown to our start … and that’s where I’ll pick up the story in the next post.