Yesterday Laura and I competed in the Blackberry Curve Urban Challenge. It was awesome. I spotted it on Ed’s Blog and decided to give it a shot.

We got to the Guthrie at 8:45 and checked in. They gave us each a Schwag Bag with a t-shirt and hat, and also a Blackberry Curve to use a team. We also got a timing tag, which was attached to my shoe, and used to electronically verify our total time through the race. We waited around for a bit while the other teams arrived and registered, and by 10:00 the race was ready to begin. All 150 teams gathered in a large bunch at the starting line, and the race officials handed out the “passports” which contained our challenges.

There were 10 challenges listed in random order, they took us all around the city. First we went to Hard Rock Cafe and completed our first task, counting the number of Guitars with autographs on them: 13. We got the signature from the race official at that checkpoint and moved on to Gameworks. There we got a free game pass and had to rack up 20 prize tickets for use later in the race. A few rolls on Skeeball, and we were done.

For the next challenge, we had to use the Blackberry to take picture of one of us next to the Double Curve sculpture. It was time for the bus. The rules allowed for use of any public transit within the city. We waited about 5 minutes for the number 6, and headed for the Sculpture Garden. 10 Minutes later, we had found and photographed the sculpture, and we headed across the street to Loring Park. After seeing the people ahead of us get turned away for not yet having the sculpture photo, We completed a three-legged race through a spiderweb of ropes, then pulled ourselves up a small hill on a plank with PVC pipe rollers underneath. Slow and steady was the key here, along with starting with the rollers evenly spaced, and moving the rollers to the front as soon as they came out the back so that neither end of the board was ever without support. Four tasks done, we were feeling good.

After a short walk to Brit’s Pub, we headed upstairs for some lawn bowling. If one of us could get the ball on the target in one roll, we could skip the next task and move on. We both missed. The next task was untying three knots from a rope without either teammate ever letting go of their end of the rope. We figured out that the trick was for one teammate to stand still while the other crawls through the knots. We were done in about 1 minute, which the woman at the checkpoint said was fast. We had another checkpoint completed and were off to the next task.

Next we headed to the Verizon store in the US Bank Building. Here, we got a user name and password to use in the Blackberry Facebook App to find out who John Curve’s Facebook friend is. We showed the solution to the official and headed through the Skyway and Macy’s to the IDS building. Our next challenge was on the 50th floor. The elevators opened to a long line of teams waiting to try the next challenge. We waited for 10 minutes or so, wondering how many teams were passing us, but glad to at least get to rest for a bit. At the door of the banquet room there was a women who was marking off the numbers of teams who had been there and tried the challenge. I saw that less than half of the teams had been there, and we were past half done so I thought that was a good sign (but I really didn’t know. The random order of the challenges made it impossible to know where we stood). We entered the doors and were directed to a round table with piles of silverware, dishes and napkins on top. We got to look at a photo of the set table for 30 seconds and then had three minutes to set our table exactly the same. I asked if we could use our blackberry to take a picture of the photo, and the guy said “Sure, most people don’t figure that out the first time.” I felt smart. That didn’t last long. Laura started folding the napkins and I tried to look at my photo to set the table and it was totally blurry. After three minutes we had only about halfway set the table. We left the room to wait in line again and discuss strategy. This time, Laura was gonna do the setting and I was gonna do the napkins. She had actually looked at the photo for 30 seconds while I was fumbling with the Blackberry camera, and she knew exactly where everything needed to go. Second time was a charm and we finished with time to spare. We headed downstairs to get on the bus and head to our next checkpoint.

The next stop was Hennepin Island. There were no tasks at the next checkpoint, I guess the challenge was finding it. Our clue was something about a 12 Megawatt power plant built in 1882. Some quick Googling showed it was Hennepin Island Hydroelectric Plant. We jumped off the bus at St Anthony Main and ran to the Island Park, then we got our passport signed by the race official and ran back toward University Ave.

Our Next stop was Williams Arena, which was about a mile and a half away, we made it to a bus stop and saw that the bus was not coming for about ten minutes, so we started walking. The bus caught up to us on the other side of 35w and we hopped on for the last half mile or so. At the arena we had to find letters hidden on seats throughout the arena and then unscramble the letters to find our next clue. FIE SEOHLDU. We thought it was “Shoulder” something, until Laura realized there was no R and mentioned the word “House”. I instantly realized the place we were looking for was the field house.
We knew it was close to the arena but we didn’t know where exactly, so we ran across the street to the Recreation Center, where the receptionist pointed us down the street.

Inside the field house, we each completed a lap of the track on big wheel racers (something like this), and then I guided a blindfolded Laura through the construction of a jigsaw puzzle. It was approaching 2:00 and we had one task to go and it was back at the Guthrie, near the finish line. We knew that the first finishers were expected around 1:00, and the last around 4:00 so we thought we were at least in the top half.

We walked two blocks or so to Washington Ave to wait for the bus. We got on the bus along with two other teams. A racer near me was using his blackberry to call a friend who was back at the Guthrie, I overheard that the first team finished at 12:30, but only a dozen or so teams had finished so far. We hopped off the bus two blocks to the Guthrie, one team got off with us, another stayed on until the next stop, hoping it was closer. We jogged a bit, then Laura encouraged me to walk, we were going to have to climb 5 flights of stairs once we got inside. As we approached the front door, people were yelling and cheering, we jogged inside, then hopped on the escalator to the 4th floor. From there, we were directed to the emergency stairway which would take us to our final checkpoint, the Amber Box Lobby on the 9th floor. The stairs were painful. There were four flights between each floor. 5, 6, 7, 7b (You’ve got to be kidding me!), 8, and finally nine. Now just two more flights into the room itself. Here, we turned in the Gameworks tickets we had picked up in challenge 2, got our final passport signature, and headed back downstairs to the finish line.

After we crossed the finish line, we handed in our passport and timing tag and we were treated to lots of good refreshments, energy bars, fruit and water. Sitting down drinking water hadn’t felt so good in a while. We didn’t know how many people had finished. It was about 2:45. We sat around recuperating until 3:00, when they announced that the awards ceremony was about to begin. We headed over to the front of the building near the starting line to watch those uber-atheletes from the top 30 pick up their prizes, brand new Blackberry Curves for each teammate.

“In 30th place, Josh Somebody and So and So, from Plymouth… I’m sorry, we’ll get this straightened out. In 30th place, Gabe Morton-Cook and Laura Case, from St Paul.” We looked at each other for a second, because we couldn’t believe it. We headed up to the platform to receive our prizes and have our picture taken. That was fun. Here are the Final Results. We were just looking for a new phone for Laura but decided to hold off a bit. She’s already on Verizon, so this worked out perfectly.

UPDATE: Here’s a map of our route. The blue line is where we were walking and running, the red line is where we were riding the bus.

It was an awesome day. That night, we went to Cosmos for our three-year dating anniversary and had a stellar meal to close off a fantastic day. I’ll write about that in another post.