The Sunday Boston Glob
(Original article online)

Scavenger hunt no trivial pursuit

125 teams meet Urban Challenge

By Emily Ramshaw, Globe Correspondent

What do the Romeo and Juliet Salon in the North End and a copper lobster at Rowes Wharf have in common? Both were stops on yesterday's Urban Challenge, a high-intensity scavenger hunt combining local trivia with physical endurance.

Armed with running shoes, street maps, and cellphones, 125 teams of two traversed Boston by foot, bus, and train for hours yesterday morning, hoping to finish with a qualifying time for November's National Championships in Las Vegas.

Participants started the race with a list of clues leading them to 12 checkpoints around the city. At the checkpoints, the teams used digital cameras - and sometimes passing strangers - to snap a shot of themselves at the site, then rushed off to find the next.

Racers agreed the clues were very difficult: ''This establishment, near Harvard, shares its name but not its spelling, with the last name of the actor who portrayed the able Sergeant Kinchloe in this TV comedy.'' Answer: Dickson Bros. hardware store and ''Hogan's Heroes.''

Another reads: ''Find and photograph the posted speed limit for river traffic east of the Weeks Bridge.'' Answer: 6 miles per hour.

Most teams had at least one friend sitting at their home computers doing research for them.

Jack Walter, a North End resident, said that as soon as he and his teammate Mark Watkins received the clues, they ran into a copy shop to fax them back to their co-workers at Endeca Software, whom they had recruited to do research for them. Their strategy worked. After 31/2 hours, Walter and Watkins were the first sweat-drenched finishers to have all the correct photos.

''The clues were really hard, so we were lucky to have people back at the office helping us with Google searches,'' Walter said. ''They couldn't help us with the athletic side. If I did this again, I would want to be in much better shape.''

Some less competitive couples teamed up to trade clues. Mary Coulter-Bennett was part of a 12-person group nicknamed the ''Minutemen,'' who hurried around the city in matching T-shirts and colonial hats.

''We have a whole list of contacts to help us, and one of us is even a state trooper in case we need to stop traffic,'' Coulter-Bennett laughed, pulling out a list of phone numbers of close friends and tourism officials. ''Obviously, it hasn't helped us!''

Boston is the 11th of 20 cities where the game will stop this summer and has had the highest attendance since the Challenge began, said Kevin McCarthy, a Phoenix native who developed the race last year after creating a similar game for his daughter's 12th birthday party.

''My daughter and her friends had such a great time with it, that I got after creating this experience for the masses,'' McCarthy said. ''In these shows on TV, there are only a handful of people. Our races include [thousands of participants] so they can all get a taste.''

McCarthy held a practice race in February in Phoenix, where he owns a manufacturing and renovations company. He had great results, so he went ahead and planned this summer's races. Despite its $75-a-head entrance fee, McCarthy said, since May Urban Challenge has drawn 200-person crowds in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago. The crew is headed to New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Miami in upcoming weeks. The Top 10 finishers in each city race qualify for the Urban Challenge Championships in Las Vegas on Nov. 2, and first-place finishers have all their expenses paid. The grand prize in the national competition is $50,000.

''I didn't want it to be just any race - I wanted a race that was athletic but had a real intellectual component,'' McCarthy said. ''The neat thing about the Challenge is that it doesn't categorize people. Anyone has a shot at winning this.''

Though Urban Challenge was started as an everyday approach to a TV adventure series, McCarthy said he is now exploring marketing the game to corporate sponsors and network television.

''We want to establish Urban Challenge as the premier brain and brawn adventure race in America,'' he said.