The Oyster Race

So, what is an Oyster Race you are probably wondering?  It is an urban adventure race.  You can see more about it here, http://oysterracingseries.com/.

This past Saturday, myself, my sister, her fiance, and our cousin competed in the full Oyster Race (you can do a half and a sprint too).  Originally it was supposed to be my boyfriend, but he couldn't get off work so our cousin stepped in.  My cousin is in awesome shape and we kept teasing him that he'd have to slow down for us!

The race has "Passports" that have our clues on it for what we need to do and where we need to go.  The race started with the annoucer saying that our first passport was on the other side of the parking lot and go!

The first passport stated that on foot we needed to get pictures in front of various items or collect various items.  We had to do 4 out the following 6:  

• a picture of your team on a bridge (Pittsburgh has 3 rivers so we have a lot of bridges, only outdone by Venice I believe)

• a picture of your team in front of a Primanti Bros restaurant (a Pittsburgh restaurant, there are a bunch in different parts of the city)

• Three coasters from three different bars (would have been a good one if the race didn't start at 8 am! none were open)
• Picture of 3 hands touching a baseball homeplate (thankfully there was a little league field next to the bridge we used, we were terrified they wouldn't take it because there wasn't an actual homeplate, but that did!)

• Picture of someone in a Red Sox Jersey (the Boston Red Sox were in town that weekend playing the Pirates, but again, the race started at 8am and nobody was out)
• $1 in Canadian money (Nobody had any, no bank was open yet)
• Picture of your team in front of a fire engine or fire station (the fireman said the picture didn't take, so I was walking up to help him with the phone we were using as camera, but it took!  We didn't need a good picture, just a picture!)



The first passport was really the only one we had pictures.  We had a bunch of biking passports where we had to go to places like the Incline (Pittsburgh landmark), the aviary, PNC Park (baseball stadium), kayaking place, University of Pittsburgh campus, etc.

I calculated everything out on Google Maps using one of their labs creations and we ended up biking 22 miles, and doing on foot a little over 6 miles.  We finished the race in 5 hrs and 23 minutes.

Here's all of our finished passports (final one in green):

For completing the race we all got cow bells and a free beer chip :-)  It says, "I cracked the Oyster!"

Overall, I had a blast.  I felt like I could have biked forever minus a sore butt, but the running killed me even though I'm a soccer player.  Pittsburgh has a lot of steep hills!!

I think I'm finally not sore anymore!  I love things like this far more than regular 5k/10k races.

Have you ever done any crazy races? mud runs?

Sam :-D